Comment by kungming2 on 12/03/2025 at 19:55 UTC

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View submission: Cantonese vs Mandarin

Modern Standard Chinese ("written language/Chinese" in your post) is largely based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin, and that's pretty much what is written throughout the Sinosphere for people of all sorts of Sinitic language backgrounds. In that sense, if you're reading a bog-standard Chinese text, there's no inherent way of telling what Sinitic background the person is. People who have Hokkien, Hakka, Cantonese, Sichuanese, Beijing, Northeast backgrounds etc. will be writing very similarly and thus it wouldn't be readily distinguishable, especially in formal writing where adherence to the standard is more pronounced.

Where you *can* tell someone's language background is a specific area is by the choice of words they use in writing. E.g. if someone in writing uses 塞�� it's fairly clear they have a Southern background (Standard Chinese is 堵車), or if someone wrote 整乾淨了 maybe they have a Northeastern background.

Note that this is separate from Written Cantonese[1], which is a written form of vernacular Cantonese, or any other form of writing other Sinitic languages.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Cantonese

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