| Right, okay. You need to make very, very clear that you're doing that in the directions, because on a lot of other tests (e.g. the published "most spoken languages") the Chinese topolects ARE treated as separate language (Wu and Mandarin are the only ones to make the list there). You can read more about the topolects here—http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp029_chinese_dialect.pdf—Mair is a generally well-respected linguist working on Chinese, and his divisions are probably a good place to start (his Southern and Northern Min = Ethnologue's Min Nan and Min Bei).
His analogy may also make it a little clearer why "it was easier to make the quiz this way" isn't maybe the most compelling argument here—sure, it'd be easier to lump together German, Danish, Dutch, and English speakers. But you wouldn't, because they are actually different languages, even if knowing German and English helps me read Dutch and Danish. Ethnologue's "macrolanguage" category has a lot to do with the political reality on the ground, and that has to do with China's political and cultural interest in the idea that these different but closely related languages are only "dialects," which happen to share a unitary writing standard (which as it happens captures no spoken dialect perfectly—a little bit like speaking French or Italian, but writing Latin, if slightly less extreme.) |
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