Language Log

一个叫KAHO的日本小姐姐模仿上海和潮汕口音，太好玩了。不但口音学得像，表情和面相都会跟着一起变😀 pic.twitter.com/Ye1IN9BVDK

— iPaul (@iPaulCanada) April 29, 2026

The speaker is a Japanese girl named Kaho.

Meet Habibi – the Chinese AI uniting 20 Arabic dialects in a Middle East first
Lead author says there are many differences between Arabic dialects and Modern Standard Arabic, which is used in official circumstances
Zhao Ziwen, SCMP, 28 Feb 2026

The paper that presents this new model is called “Habibi: Laying the Open-Source Foundation of Unified-Dialectal Arabic Speech Synthesis”. It was published last month on arXiv, an open-access repository that is not peer-reviewed.  I will be interested to hear what Language Log readers think of its prospects.

This article in the South China Morning Post twice mentions "laisee" without explanation:

China delivery firm offers kneeling service to send Lunar New Year greetings for customers
Paid for holiday festival package includes door cleaning, couplet hanging; critics say offer cheapens sanctity of filial piety, is disrespectful
Zoey Zhang, SCMP (2/12/26)

A Julesy bonus

Several of my PRC M.A. students have told me that the following tool for the computation of dialect closeness has become quite popular in China:

fāngyán yīnxì xiāngsì dù cèshì 方言音系相似度測試 ("Dialect phonological similarity test"),V3.2.358

(source)    

Following up on Diana Shuheng Zhang's notes on forty Northeasternisms (11/12/25), Yizhi Geng gives us another helping.  While Diana's collection is based mainly on Dalian city, Yizhi's comes from Changchun.

"mǎ húlu 马葫芦": "manhole" (lit., "horse gourd / calabash / cucurbit"), where "mǎ húlu gài 马葫芦盖" refers to "manhole-cover". According to older generations, this word came from Japanese, "manhōru マンホール", which was created during Japanese occupation. It seems to be interesting how this word came from English, to Japanese, and finally to Northeastern topolect dōngběi huà 东北话 we used in Changchun. 

"dà huí / xiǎo huí 大回 / 小回": "turn left / turn right" (lit., "big retreat / small retreat". It is said to also come from Japanese, but I cannot relate it to any Japanese expression I know. 

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.

Back in early April of this year, Kirinputra brought up this distinction at the end of a comment thread on Cantonese, but it came at the conclusion  of the thread, so — though it deserved discussion — there was no opportunity to hold one at that time.  Consequently, I reopen the deliberations now by quoting Kirinputra's final comment:

"Sinitic is like Romance" is not a working, truth-bearing analogy, esp. not for a layman audience. (Maybe some subset of Sinitic is like Romance, though.) "Sinitic" arguably harbors much more abstand diversity than Romance, for one thing. More importantly, Romance is by now evidence-based. Humans have a detailed understanding of the mechanics & timing of the divergence from a common ancestor. Sinitic is belief-based. The approach to the detailed reality is largely speculative & often circular.

From Peter Daniels:

Do the 7 or 8 (or whatever) “dialects” of Sinitic constitute what Hockett called an “L-complex,” like Romance, such that you could traverse the entire domain and never encounter neighboring villages that didn’t understand each other, with cultural centers where the language described in the regional grammar book and dictionary is spoken, or are they distinct languages as far back as one can look?

Julesy just keeps getting better and better:

"The endangered Tanka language in Hong Kong: phonological variations and lexical convergence with Cantonese", Cong Wang, Daxingwang Peng, Yanmei Dai & Chong Qi, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume 12, Article number: 1133 (July 19, 2025)

The first thing we need to take care of is to discuss their name:

According to official Liu Zongyuan (773–819) of the Tang dynasty, there were Boat Dweller people settled in the boats of today's Guangdong Province and Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.

The term "Tanka" (蜑家) may originate from tan (Cantonese: "egg") and ka (Cantonese: "family" or "people"), although another possible etymology is tank ("junk" or "large boat") rather than tan. "Tanka" is now considered derogatory and no longer in common usage. The Boat Dwellers are now referred to in China as "people on/above water" (Chinese: 水上人; pinyin: shuǐshàng rén; Cantonese Yale: Séuiseuhngyàn), or "people of the southern sea" (Chinese: 南海人; Cantonese Yale: Nàamhóiyàn). No standardised English translation of this term exists. "Boat People" is a commonly used translation, although it may be confused with the similar term for Vietnamese refugees in Hong Kong. "Boat Dwellers" was proposed by Dr. Lee Ho Yin of The University of Hong Kong in 1999, and it has been adopted by the Hong Kong Museum of History for its exhibition.

Both the Boat Dwellers and the Cantonese speak Cantonese. However, Boat Dwellers living in Fujian speak Min Chinese.

(Wikipedia)

The title of this song attracted my attention:  "Fāngyán de ànshāng 方言的黯伤" ("The sadness of topolect"). 

I listened to it here, but couldn't catch everything that the singer was saying.  I asked Zhaofei Chen what she heard, and here's what she gleaned from listening to the recording:

Even if you can't understand spoken Taiwanese, you can learn a lot from these two videos because of the excellent visuals, plus it is nice just to hear the clearly spoken Taigi and compare terms in Taigi with their parallels in Sino-Korean.

The first is a video from Taiwan's public TV (公視台語台) on the interesting distribution of the names of tea in the world: