Heavily accented Mandarin

In "Voice-activated lights" (9/20/23), we saw how difficult it is even for native speakers of Modern Standard Mandarin to understand other varieties, and can be thankful to Zeyao Wu, who comes from the area where the topolect in the film is spoken, for kindly identifying and transcribing it for all of us.

rit malors writes:

You may also want to try how many native speakers of Sinitic languages can identify or understand this speech from the late Head of Macau, Fernando Chui Sai On (Cant. Ceoi1 Sai3 On1; 2009-2019):

I think Chui / Ceoi1 is trying very hard to speak proper Mandarin and does pretty well with the tones, but not so well with consonants and vowels.

Here's a sample of Chiang Kai-shek's (1887-1975) victory speech in 1945 with heavy Wu topolect accent:

And here is Mao Zedong (1893-1976) with his Hunan accent

As we have noted before, Xi Jinping is the first president of modern China to speak standard Mandarin (never mind the quality of his rhetoric and content):

When students in the 50s and 60s were studying at National Taiwan University, they could barely understand what their professors, who hailed from all over China, were saying in the classroom.  I often heard my wife and her friends joke about how they would doodle or doze during lectures because they didn't understand what they were all about.

Selected readings

• "Xi Jinping's faux classicism" (7/2/23)
• "Chairman Xi the orator. Not" (10/22/22)
• "The ethnopolitics of National Language in China" (7/2/18)
• "Comrades, 'hike up your skirts for a hard shag'" (7/23/17)
• "The linguistics of a political slogan" (8/17/17)
• "'Hurt(s) the feelings of the Chinese people'" (9/12/11)
• "Mixed literary and vernacular grammar" (9/3/16)
• "Annals of literary vs. vernacular, part 2" (9/4/16)
• "Latin Caesar –> Tibetan Gesar –> Xi Jinpingian Sager" (3/20/18)
• "Pinyin for the Prez" (10/25/18)
• "Peking University president misreads an unobscure character: monumental implications" (5/5/18)
• "Xi Jinping's reading errors multiply" (12/28/18)
• "More literary troubles for Xi Jinping" (1/3/19)
• "More misreadings by Xi Jinping" (5/2/19)
• "The face of censorship" (1/11/19)
• "Latin Caesar –> Tibetan Gesar –> Xi Jinpingian Sager" (3/20/18)
• "The political dangers of mispronunciation" (4/5/17)
• "Yet another literary misreading by Xi Jinping" (7/5/21) — discusses the language of the video at the end of this post
• "Xi Jinping thought: watch for the possessive suffix" (9/2/17)