Deerawn asked, in the “learning Chinese” article linked to yesterday:

Why does it seem to be completely taboo to teach a language like Wu, Hakka, Min?

Maybe it was rhetorical. But Kellen takes it beyond rhetoric in Annals of Wu :

I was poking around my long-dormant CouchSurfing profile last week when I realised Wu isn’t an option for languages on one’s profile, though Cantonese is and of course Mandarin as well. So I sent them an email. They asked for the ISO code (”wuu” in this case), a link to the Wikipedia article on the missing language and maybe an explanation beyond that. So I sent it all in, and sure enough a few days later, Wu is now available.

There you have it. Spread the word, drop-down box by drop-down box.

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? Continue…