I’ll try not to link too often to blogs you already read regularly, but this snippet of an excerpt from the book Diamond Hill by Feng Chi-shun is too characteristic not to comment on. From Danwei:

He ran an illegal gambling den, and sometimes took Umbrella and me on a tour of all the joints where he had “influence,” including a dance hall in Yau Ma Tei where he talked to the manager in a dialect I couldn’t understand even though it was Cantonese.

So if you can’t understand it, is it a language or a dialect?

In Mandarin, even the word fāngyán (方言 = something like “regional language” or, maybe, “dialect”) gets thrown around this way. To say that something is a fāngyán, at least the way I hear it used here in Beijing, sometimes means minor phonetic or lexical differences, and sometimes it’s an entirely different family of mutually unintelligible language such as Cantonese vs Mandarin. For example, yesterday I wrote about the word cèi. In discussing it with a friend, he used the term Beijing fāngyán to classify it.

I’m starting to give up on the battle to find a politically-neutral-yet-not-too-obscure word that describes mutually unintelligible speech communities in China. Ideas?

[Yes, I know I should summarize what DeFrancis said about this issue. Sometime soon, I promise.]