Language Log

All places in China have topolect terms, some more than others, and some are more influential outside of their own region than others.  One regional variety whose speakers create numerous memorable expressions they are proud of is Dōngběihuà 東北話 ("Northeastern topolect").  I was inspired to make this post after reading a collection of twenty Northeasternisms.

I showed the collection to Diana Shuheng Zhang, who is an authentic Northeasterner.  Diana not only translated and explained the entire collection, she added twenty more, for a total of forty, commenting, "Can't stop laughing. Hope everybody enjoys our native expressions. :)" 

Please note that I (VHM) have added all the pinyin romanizations and a few literal translations).  Because some of the characters are unusual and I'm not a Northeastern speaker, I cannot guarantee the accuracy, especially down to the tones (and their sandhi), of all the transcriptions I have supplied.  Pay attention to Diana's valuable phonological notes.

The "what we do" page for the  CANTWINVICTORYFUND starts by explaining that they "Run Cant-idates to lose spectacularly in gerrymandered districts".

The first part of this debate, "Abstand und ausbau" (10/28/25), was so spirited and prolonged, and has recently moved on to significant new ground, that I've decided to launch this part 2.

Before commenting here, please go back and review what was said in the previous o.p. and the subsequent comments thereto, some of which are quite substantial.  Here I copy one of the recent observations in the first thread that has not yet been adequately responded to there:

Frazz for 11/06/2025:

And for 11/07/2025:

“Something which has never occurred since time immemorial: A young woman did not fart in her husband’s embrace.”

As quoted in Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History (W.W. Norton, 2025), by Moudhy Al-Rashid.  This is an excellent introduction to how much we can learn about ancient Mesopotamia from the thousands of cuneiform stamped tablets often just tossed away as building fill.

FAKE ACCENTS | Stand-up Comedy by Niv Prakasam

Best 16:34 introduction to the Korean alphabet you'll ever encounter — by Julesy, of course:

An email recently informed me that the American Psychological Association has created an online version of the APA Style Guide (technically the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, Seventh Edition, and that Penn's library has licensed it. A quick skim turned up a prescriptive rule that's new to me, forbidding the use of commas to separate conjoined that-clauses unless there are at least three of them:

We have mentioned the Dungan people and their unique language many times on Language Log.  How did it happen that we at Penn have a connection with the Dungans, a small group (less than a hundred thousand) of Sinitic speakers who have lived in the center of Asia (Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan) since the latter part of the 19th century?  They fled there from northwest China, many of them dying along the way, after revolting against the Manchu Qing government.

Listening to the news on the radio during my drive into the city this morning, I heard the weather reporter say this, "Looking out the window, I saw my neighbor sweeping rakes".

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/nSvb-4i8Vzw

This is a follow-up to "How to pronounce the name of the ruler of the PRC" (10/26/25).  Surprised by the amount of dissension over how to pronounce his name and how to represent the pronunciation in romanization, I decided to try another approach.  I asked all of the students (undergrads and grads) in my Fiction and Drama and in my Language, Script, and Society in China classes to write down the best way that could think of to transcribe Xi Jinping's in roman or Cyrillic letters — other than the official Hanyu Pinyin version, Xi Jinping.

Only two of the students were linguistics majors, about a dozen were East Asian Languages and Civilizations majors.  The remainder were drawn from a wide variety of disciplines and fields (humanities, sciences, and social sciences) across the university.  About 90% had a Chinese background (ranging in ability from minimal acquaintance to full fluency).  There were a couple of students from Taiwan, a few from Cantonese and other topolect areas, one had a Korean background, and two or three had no prior exposure to any East Asian languages.