met with, who having travelled into other provinces, or been employed about Government offices, will perhaps be able to converse a little in the Court dialect; but, in most cases, the people are totally unacquainted with it, and never think of studying it till, having succeeded at the literary examinations, and got a prospect of preferment or employment, they go to a regular school for the study of the Mandarin, and acquire it almost as they would a new language. Indeed, instances have been known of literary graduates of considerable standing giving up the prospect of Government situations, rather than take the trouble of studying the Court dialect.
Not only does the Mandarin tongue differ from the vulgar idioms, but these provincial dialects differ considerably from each other, so that an inhabitant of Hok-këèn will not be able to understand a native of Canton, and the author has frequently had occasion to interpret for two Chinese from adjoining provinces, who could not understand each other. Even in the same province, the difference of dialect is sometimes so great, that people divided by a mountain, a river, or twenty miles of country, are by no means intelligible to each other. In the ten counties of Hok-këèn, there are certainly as many different dialects, and if the same obtains throughout every one of the eighteen provinces of China, the different dialects in that Empire will be nearly two hundred.
A person who contemplates learning the Chinese language, without much prospect of verbal intercourse with the people, or who will be generally conversant with the higher classes and Government officers, throughout all the Provinces, would certainly do well to study the Mandarin dialect;—but he whose intercourse will probably be confined to one district, and who will have to do with the great mass of the people residing in it, would do better to study the vulgar dialect of that particular place.
The author, on commencing the study of Chinese, attended solely to the Mandarin, but, finding that it was not understood by the mass of emigrants in the Malayan archipelago, he turned his attention, in the year 1818, to the Hok-këèn dialect. In 1820, a small Vocabulary was drawn up, and a few sheets of it printed at Malacca; in 1823, this work was enlarged, and sent to Singapore, to be printed under the patronage of the Singapore Institution, the Committee of which offered to publish it at their own expence. The affairs of that Institution, however, not having prospered, the Manuscript lay untouched for several years, was since sent to Malacca and Penang, and, in the year 1829, came back untouched into the author's hands. Considerable advancement having in the mean time been made in the knowledge of the language, and the Select
