It&#x27;s funny, weren&#x27;t Chinese languages rather fragmented not so long ago[1]? So it would seem that uniting on a single language was rather useful to them.<p>I know people that work in some indigenous areas in an other country and sometimes from one village to the next, they&#x27;ll have trouble understanding. There is no benefit to them, just loss. Same reason when intl orgs come in and push teaching children in their indigenous language (for e.g. math), some push back because they know there&#x27;s little value in using a language no one else does.<p>1: Wiki says: Some 54% of speakers of Mandarin dialects could understand the standard language in the early 1950s, rising to 91% in 1984. Nationally, the proportion understanding the standard rose from 41% to 90% over the same period.