The obvious counterexample is Arabic. Multiple, mutually-unintelligible dialects across national borders, but a single Modern Standard Arabic used in writing and international communication. I expect that as China develops, virtually all Chinese speakers will learn Standard Mandarin in addition to their local dialect, allowing pinyin to become a perfectly serviceable written language.

Most European languages had a diversity of mutually-unintelligible dialects, including English. What did for those dialects was national media and compulsory schooling; I can't imagine China developing any differently, but I don't know enough about China to say with any degree of confidence. I'd be interested to hear if there are any compelling reasons why this wouldn't happen.

Standardized written dialects in Europe were often established by written literature, generally a translation of the Bible. That's why standard German, for instance, is so heavily influenced by Luther's Saxon dialect--Luther wrote the most influential early German Bible, which was then used in schools.

Mandarin is standard in china. Not only does almost everyone know it, schools everywhere, with the exception of hong kong, are required to teach in it.

"so few Chinese are immersed in technology to the point they forget how to write, in fact the majority of Chinese are peasants and don't even have an email."

Yes, but the ones forgetting are the elites and the trendsetters. If enough of them decide to start using the phonetic alphabets, the rest of the country will follow. Even a country farmer can't sell his produce to a city dweller who can no longer produce the word "rice", except phonetically.

This doesn't even have to be centralized, in fact it almost can't be. It'll be something that just happens or doesn't, and from the sounds of it, the initial phases are indeed already happening. It strikes me as far more likely that the encroachment of phonetic alphabets previously discussed on HN is the vanguard of major change than a short-term anomaly; the trends and forces are clear and strong. Human brains are extraordinarily good at optimizing away useless data and skills, it has (for the most part) a brutally rational approach to the question of "what is useful" based on a simple metric of "is this ever used?", and while it is possible to appeal the decision it takes a lot of effort for an individual to do so.

10 years ago I would have put a lot of money on the farmers having difficulty selling to city dwellers because low literacy left them with no way to sell things except phonetically.

If the elites are hitting the literacy level of the lowest and least educated, it could be setting up a new par that more people can match. Why give a job to an elite when you can give it to some farm boy desperate for cash if they're both dependent solely on phonetic language.

Well, since no English speakers use an ideographic language for English and we're all spelling... sort of... phonetically, there is clearly no reason to prefer a college-educated journalism major to write or edit for the NYT, we can just grab any ol' dirt farmer, right?

There's more to "literacy" than having muscle memory for writing an enormous swathe of characters of dubious usefulness, something most languages manage to do entirely without.

By the amount of spelling errors I've seen in NYT articles, I think hiring a dozen high school-only farm boys would garner better results than paying the university schlubs they've already got doing their proof-reading.

Print Journalism courses have been increasingly irrelevant since Gonzo became increasingly mainstream. Music, sports, etc. all rely more on personal opinion than they ever did. Journalism courses don't teach personal opinion, it's innate.

Major editors in the UK have openly expressed that they aren't interested in journalism graduates, they care more about personal experiences handed to them with an example of good writing with personal experience. Pick up a british tabloid, it isn't Journalism courses teaching writing completely biased completely unobjective articles. I have friends in journalism, I know they're not, and I know they're going to struggle like all hell to get a job.

>so few Chinese are immersed in technology to the point they forget how to write, in fact the majority of Chinese are peasants and don't even have an email.

They do, however, have mobile phones, and use texting. And most of them use the "pinyin input method" to input the characters as spoken sounds, not the "wubi method" to input them as strokes. (I know this from casual inquiries.)

I've really got to look into learning Korean some time. It seems like a near-ideal written language (albeit at a potential loss to historical documents, because it mirrors the spoken language. But that's what linguists and historians are for, and are needed in every language).

> It seems like a near-ideal written language (albeit at a potential loss to historical documents, because it mirrors the spoken language.

Actually, it's not ideal anymore. Hangul perfectly mirrored the spoken Korean language when it was originally created in 1440s by King Sejong's Hall of Worthies (a group of scholars). But like any other phonetic writing system, it stayed constant as the spoken language changed (a problem we have much experience with in English). This is obvious in something as basic as the word "Korea" in Korean. It is romanized as "Hanguk", but written in Hangul as "한국". As you can tell, the 4th and 6th letters are the same (a "ㄱ") even though they are pronounced differently in modern Korean.

However, it is indeed probably the closest one can get to perfection with a phonetic writing system.

The fact that Hangul closely mirrors spoken Korean is also probably due to the fact that Hangul is a relatively new invention as writing systems go. Chinese characters and the Roman alphabet have been around for millennia. By contrast, Hangul is only 570 years old, and less than 100 years since it actually became popular. It hasn't had much time to diverge from the spoken language, yet. Judging from the intermittent stream of Korean "experts" complaining about how laypeople are bastardizing their spelling, the gap between proper writing and everyday pronunciation seems to be growing.

Having said that, Korean is probably one of the easiest languages to type into a computer or a mobile phone apart from the Roman alphabet and its relatives. It uses only 24 symbols which can be combined in various ways. Fits perfectly onto a keyboard/touchscreen. No stupid menus asking you to clarify what you're typing.

I've occasionally wished that we could all just write in IPA.

Then I come to my senses and realize that it's overly complicated, and would simply push the troubles of a spoken language into the written language verbatim, and that may not be what a writing system needs.

I've been learning Korean myself. Hangul is actually pretty cool and logical! I particularly like the regular way it has of denoting a 'y' version of a vowel - just adding a little perpendicular stroke to all the vowels. ㅏ (a) and ㅑ (ya), ㅜ (oo) and ㅠ (yoo), etc.

I should mention that one thing I don't like is how some of the jamo are multiple independent lines, which interacts badly with the 'squish the jamo together into a single block' - eg. ㅍ, ㅊ, ㅎ or ㅔ (the last 2 being particularly egregious).

I'm intrigued by the trichotomy of the Korean language's complete deprecation of its use of Chinese characters for a phonetic alphabet, Chinese continuing not to use phonetics outside loan words, and then Japanese having evolved to use both. I imagine it's complicated.