I have just come across some mixed language abbreviations on Chinese social media. For example, 川A市 refers to Chengdu. 皖J市 is Huangshan in Anhui, and 皖A市 is Chaohu.
I am curious as to how the letters are assigned.
The incorporation of the Roman alphabet into the Chinese writing system is a topic that we have often addressed on Language Log, for which see the "Readings" (and the bibliographies they include) below.
For a natural demonstration of what diglossia is in the Chinese-speaking context, watch this 0:53 video. The speaker begins in local Xi'anese (also called Guānzhōng huà 关中话 / 關中話), but at 0:20, when he suddenly realizes that he is talking to a television reporter, after hilariously sprucing himself up a bit, he abruptly switches to Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM):
As I've mentioned before, Chinese feel that they have every right to experiment with English, make up their own English words, and compose their own locutions which have never before existed in the English-speaking world. In recent years, they have become ever more playful and emboldened to create new English terms that they gloss or define in Chinese. Here are ten such new English terms, or perhaps in some cases I should say modified English terms, together with their Chinese explanations:
I first heard about Beau Jessup (founder [2015] and CEO of Special Name) and her Chinese baby-naming business a couple of years ago. There was even a TEDx talk by her about it:
