Tianjin topolect: linguistic diversity in China (and India)
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In our perennial discussions on the supposed mutual intelligibility of the countless, so-called "Chinese dialects" of the allegedly monolithic / monolingual Hànyǔ 漢語 ("Sinitic"; my colleague IA calls it "Hannic"), we seldom take into account the actuality of what these innumerable lects sound like on the ground / street. Let's take a listen to this 4-year-old kid from Tianjin, which is close (70 miles) to Beijing, singing in the local Muttersprache, here.
Violet Zhu notes:
The boy is singing the song called Tianjin Dialect (《天津话》), originally from the album called Big Pancake Rolls Everything（《大饼卷一切》）of the singer Liangjie Li （李亮节）.
It's interesting that Baidu says Liangjie Li is the founder of Tianjin Folk Musical Rock 天津曲艺摇滚. He is not famous but I think he is well known in Tianjin.
Here are the lyrics of the song. The part the boy sings is in red.
天津话
李亮节 2015
咱们是天津人说的是天津话
天津卫的方言土语那真是哏极了
没嘛愁事天巴天的乐乐呵呵
心里别扭一说一笑的吧的吧
天津人管睡觉叫迷瞪迷瞪
天津人管吃饭就叫垫吧垫吧
天津人说日子好那叫迂踢
天津人说说道道奏是大拿
天津人管开玩笑那就叫逗楞
逗楞急了我说您了可别翻次
天津人说干嘛那是口头语
哥俩关系莫尼可说话奏像打架
我说你干嘛你惦着奏嘛
嘛我干嘛我嘛也不嘛
那你是嘛玩意介都嘛跟嘛
嘛嘛嘛嘛嘛嘛嘛嘛嘛
嘛嘛嘛嘛嘛
你别看天津卫那地介不算大
说话那调还真是有变化
西边杨柳青 东边军粮城
津南跟北辰是一地一个样
有事没事你给我打电话
二哥二哥你给我吆菜瓜
大清早起来你也不学好
喝个大雪碧唉 那俩眼瞎撒嘛
现在的年轻人是各个有文化
天普加英文那不叫拧麻花
天津普通话奏简称天普
那是煎饼果子翻了车 一套一套的
建设新天津我心是红色的
好好的学习奏在今后晌
熬鱼炖肉做碗火柿汤
我哪嗨儿也不去我外瑞故大
虾仁翘南荠 红烧比目鱼
干饭拌茄泥 嘛话也别提
虾仁翘南荠 红烧比目鱼
干饭拌茄泥 嘛话也别提
虾仁翘南荠 红烧比目鱼
干饭拌茄泥 嘛话也别提
虾仁翘南荠 红烧比目鱼
干饭拌茄泥 嘛话也别提
虾仁翘南荠 红烧比目鱼
干饭拌茄泥 嘛话也别提
虾仁翘南荠 红烧比目鱼
干饭拌茄泥 嘛话也别提
As regular readers of Language Log are well aware, I have inveighed against the mistranslation of fāngyán 方言 as "dialect" for decades, and have suggested instead that — in order to avoid misunderstanding and misclassification — we render it as "topolect" (see "Selected readings" below).
If we can't call all those multitudinous strains of language in China "dialects", what would be a good alternative? I propose "lect" (see especially the last sentence in the passage below).
In sociolinguistics, a variety, also known as a lect or an isolect, is a specific form of a language or language cluster. This may include languages, dialects, registers, styles, or other forms of language, as well as a standard variety. The use of the word variety to refer to the different forms avoids the use of the term language, which many people associate only with the standard language, and the term dialect, which is often associated with non-standard language forms thought of as less prestigious or "proper" than the standard. Linguists speak of both standard and non-standard (vernacular) varieties as equally complex, valid, and full-fledged forms of language. Lect avoids the problem in ambiguous cases of deciding whether two varieties are distinct languages or dialects of a single language.
"Variety" is viable for informal purposes, but for linguistic taxonomy, "topolect" is preferable since it fits into language classification schemes much better.
This has nothing to do with armies and navies, a topic we've fruitlessly discussed ad nauseam on Language Log countless times in the past.
How many languages does India have? Just one? Indic? No, it has 22 official languages, not to mention many other unofficial languages.
- Assamese
- Bengali
- Bodo
- Dogri
- English
- Gujarati
- Hindi
- Kannada
- Kashmiri
- Konkani
- Maithili
- Malayalam
- Marathi
- Meitei
- Nepali
- Odia
- Punjabi
- Sanskrit
- Santali
- Sindhi
- Tamil
- Telugu
- Urdu
I'm proud to say that many of these languages are taught at Penn.
How many languages does China have? Just one? Sinitic / Hannic? Mandarin? No, China has at least as much language diversity as India. The only reasons that people pretend China has a single language are sociopolitical, not linguistic. (The great American Sinologist / linguist, Jerry Norman, was very clear about that, and had good lingual reasons for believing so.)
BTW, Europe has 27 (or so) different countries, most with their own languages.
Selected readings
- "Crosstalk about topolects" (12/16/19)
- "Concentric circles of language in Beijing, part 2" (6/13/20)
- "Dialectometry" (4/26/24)
- "Topolect writing" (11/23/14)
- "The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th edition" (11/14/12) — q.v. "topolect"
- "Mutual intelligibility" (5/28/14) — see the long list of posts linked at the bottom)
- "What Is a Chinese “Dialect/Topolect”? Reflections on Some Key Sino-English Linguistic Terms," Sino-Platonic Papers, 29 (1991).
Also here and, for an archive of my LL posts dealing with topolects, see here.
See, as well, The Classification of Sinitic Languages: What is “Chinese”, which is a chapter from this book: Breaking Down the Barriers: Interdisciplinary Studies in Chinese Linguistics and Beyond
Some additional posts on "topolect", mostly after 11/23/14:
- "The future Sinitic languages of East Asia" (4/21/24)
- "Language, topolect, dialect, idiolect" (10/3/23) — with extensive bibliography (during the last two decades, the Language Log posts on the classification of Sinitic and its lects, large and small, are countless)
- "How Many Languages Are There in China?" (11/17/22)
- "Multilingual China" (2/28/19)
- "Language Diversity in the Sinophone World" (10/26/20)
- "Global imaginary Chinese" (10/10/15)
- "'Chinese' well beyond Mandarin" (5/10/13)
- "Fangyán = topolect in DC" (6/20/23)
- "'Topolect' is in China!" (4/14/18)
- "Topolects and texts" (6/20/23)
- "Dialect or Topolect?" (7/1/10)
- "Sinitic topolects" (9/2/20)
- "Topolect was specifically invented in 1991 by Victor Mair as a translation of 方言 (fangyan) to get around the whole language/dialect bombshell when it comes to Chinese", Hacker News (7/4/21) — with minimal, yet essential, bibliography
The above entries represent but a sampling of discussions on "dialect", "topolect", "mutual (un)intelligibility", etc. that have been carried out on Language Log.
Ian Joo said,
April 29, 2024 @ 8:22 am
> The use of the term "dialect" in these publications starts with the (translations of the) Chinese sources. But the term is problematic, because it describes a collection of ways of talking that are at least as diverse (and mutually (un)intelligible) as the Romance "dialects" like French and Italian and Spanish, or the Germanic "dialects" like German and Dutch and English.
Don’t you see how Eurocentric this is?
If dialecthood is sociocultural in nature (and not language-internal) and different cultures classify their linguistic varieties differently, why should the European classification serve as the standard against Chinese or other non-European classifications, i.e. European lects X and Y are classified as different languages so any two lects more distant than X and Y must be languages, and never the other way around?
One could equally argue that Swedish and Norwegian are closer to each other than two varieties of Hakka are and therefore they must be classified as a single language, any objection to it being politically motivated.
Cervantes said,
April 29, 2024 @ 9:48 am
I think the effort to "count" languages or lects or whatever level of classification is a bit misguided. Mutual intelligibility is a matter of degree, not kind, up to the point where there is essentially no lexical understanding (though people can still understand each other to a limited extent through other channels). Then we can say definitely that we have two different languages. But Spanish and Portuguese speakers, for example, can achieve some limited mutual understanding, with effort. The Jamaican movie "The Harder They Come" is shown in the U.S. with English subtitles, although the language of the movie is considered to be English. I think there is an inescapable subjective component to this and it often is indeed political, viz. Hindi and Urdu.
Jarek Weckwerth said,
April 29, 2024 @ 3:54 pm
@ Ian Joo, Cervantes: For two pairs of varieties with the same linguistic distance, you could have one pair to be "languages", and the other — "dialects". The decision is usually sociopolitical. And mutual intelligibility is gradient, yes.
My first recommendation for this is Chapter 1 (Dialect and language) from Chambers and Trudgill's Dialectology: https://tinyurl.com/2m9yvtx2
Chester Draws said,
April 29, 2024 @ 6:48 pm
Because if we have it your way Ian, the words themselves need to take on entirely different meanings. You can't say various Sinitic lects are the same language without redefining the word "language". It's not Eurocentric, it's what the word means.
I learned Swedish to moderate fluency. I found Norwegian incredibly hard to follow and Danish more so. Sure, with practice I could follow them, but at that point I was beginning to learn them. They simply are not the same language, as that word is understood.
What the Chinese do, in English, is use the word language incorrectly. And deliberately so.
Chas Belov said,
April 29, 2024 @ 7:54 pm
So ¿is the original Tianjin Lect song by Liangjie Li in Tianjin lect or not? I don't understand Mandarin, and when I listened, it sounded like Mandarin to me, only thick.
I presume the big pancake refers to jiangbing, ¿no? A former coworker of mine who came from Tianjin told me jiangbing comes from there.
Ian Joo said,
April 29, 2024 @ 8:11 pm
@Chester If the words “language” or “dialect” mean anything other than social convention then they mean pretty much nothing, since the distinction is not even consistent *within Europe* and historically arose via modern European ethnonationalism and not by any objective linguistic standards.
I speak some Swedish too and have little problem understanding Norwegian despite never having learned it. The distance between the Swedish and Norwegian is shorter than Brazilian-European Portuguese, European-Quebec French, and even between different Norwegian dialects.
Chris Button said,
April 29, 2024 @ 10:18 pm
I still marvel to this day at the linguistic diversity I encountered in Burma. Granted, I was only aware of it because I was paying attention to it, but it must still be fairly high up there in the ranks of linguistic diversity (however that might be measured).
@ Cervantes
Would you also agree that the direction of intelligibility matters too? The Portuguese speaker having to work less hard than the Spanish speaker to understand the other?
Peter Grubtal said,
April 30, 2024 @ 12:13 am
The language/dialect discussion reminds me of the quip of an English judge, faced with a similar dilemma in another domain: "I know what is night and what is day, but where one ends and the other begins, I cannot say".
Victor Mair said,
April 30, 2024 @ 6:04 am
I'm glad that we're having this discussion on language / dialect / topolect while remaining civil.
Jarek Weckwerth said,
April 30, 2024 @ 7:39 am
@ Ian Joo mean anything other than social convention
Word senses are social conventions. I recommend starting from the first paragraph of the entry for "polysemy" on Wikipedia. It's reasonable enough. A robin is a different bird in America and England, and a large portion of the lexicon of any language displays polysemy of some sort.
not by any objective linguistic standards
Since intelligibility is gradient, and so are e.g. distances between cognates, etc., you would have to make arbitrary decisions for any cut-off points (e.g. a different "language" begins below an intelligibility score of 75%). Is that an objective standard?
KIRINPUTRA said,
April 30, 2024 @ 11:11 am
Well put by @Chester Draws:
«You can't say various Sinitic lects are the same language without redefining the word "language". It's not Eurocentric, it's what the word means.»
«What the Chinese do, in English, is use the word language incorrectly. And deliberately so.»
KIRINPUTRA said,
April 30, 2024 @ 11:43 am
In the spirit of using the word “language” to “mean what it means”, it seems (and I fought this for a long time) that mutual intelligibility is of limited relevance to the language vs dialect debate when there is sociolinguistic consensus. (And sociolinguistic consensus often converges toward lines drawn by armies & navies.)
That said, it doesn’t seem to be the case that [a subset of] the Chinese consider the various Chinese lects to be one language. Rather, they consider the various non-national Chinese lects to be below consideration. Nor do they have a coherent alternate definition of what a language is (i.e. one that could be applied universally).
In terms of linguistic science, every “Sinitic” language besides Mandarin is systematically understudied, and the Chinese powers-that-be would have it no other way. It would be one thing if the modern Chinese had rigorously studied Hoisan — at least to the extent that Bulgarian or even Hiligaynon have been studied — only to declare it something other than A Language. Rather, the claim that Hoisan is not A Language is made while the Chinese power structure quietly snuffs out the endeavor of studying it as an end in itself.
The idea that Hoisan is not worthy of serious consideration on any level is not a nationalistic invention; it’s inherited from pre-modern attitudes, under which Be (臨高語) was just as (or even more) unworthy. The claim that Hoisan is not A Language “because it’s too similar to Mandarin” is not only false, but in bad faith; in real terms, Hoisan is Not A Language b/c of its diglossic relationship with Mandarin — and, before that, with the sacred book language. Be & even Mien were traditionally Not Languages (& poss. even more so) for the same basic reason, even though the official pretense today is that they are qualitatively & historically in a different class from Hoisan, Hakka, etc. So Hoisan is Not A Language b/c of that diglossic relationship for the most part, not b/c of (shared) sociolinguistic identity along the lines of what exists between, say, Medan Hokkien (northern Sumatra) & “metropolitan” Hokkien.
Chris Button said,
April 30, 2024 @ 5:02 pm
And then of course there are languages whose speakers avoid a lingustic connection by defining themselves as being from a different lingustic group for political reasons.
KIRINPUTRA said,
April 30, 2024 @ 9:54 pm
Like Indonesian? (Just trying to understand…. If so, I wouldn't call that "avoiding a linguistic connection". Imagine if one of the officially Malay-speaking countries renamed their official Malay to "Bahasa Indonesia". I doubt Indonesian speakers would rename Indonesian to "avoid a linguistic connection".)
Chris Button said,
May 1, 2024 @ 7:12 am
@ Kirinputra
The topic just came up again here:
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=63791#comment-1616512
Jarek Weckwerth said,
May 1, 2024 @ 7:39 am
@KIRINPUTRA: I would imagine that (depending on the political relations between the countries involved) Indonesia could object. Like Greece objected when Macedonia chose to call itself Macedonia…
I think what Chris Button has in mind is situations such as the former Yugoslavia, where Croatians and Serbians prefer to refer to their lects as Croatian and Serbian even though many would argue it's one language ;) I'm not familiar enough with the Hindi-Urdu situation to use it confidently as an example, but they do tend to be cited side by side.
KIRINPUTRA said,
May 2, 2024 @ 11:11 pm
@ Chris Button
Even if the concept of languages-as-defined-strictly-in-terms-of-mutual-intelligibility can be shown to be non-arbitrarily & generally applicable — not the case so far — the existing, customary usage of the count noun "language" does greatly take into account factors other than intelligibility.
@ Jarek Weckwerth
True. Indonesia's hypothetical non-objection is circumstantial: They have no fear of being eclipsed by their Malay-speaking neighbors, and then there's the transparent history of the name "Indonesia".
(Not sure about Serbo-Croatian, but there's more abstand distance between Hindi & Urdu than between the standard versions of Malay & Indonesian.)
Jarek Weckwerth said,
May 3, 2024 @ 7:45 am
@ KIRINPUTRA
Even if the concept of languages-as-defined-strictly-in-terms-of-mutual-intelligibility can be shown to be non-arbitrarily & generally applicable — not the case so far — the existing, customary usage of the count noun "language" does greatly take into account factors other than intelligibility.
This is the best wording so far in all these discussions, and a perfect interpretation of the adage that must not be mentioned. Kudos!
And on Serbo-Croatian: My L1 is Slavic, so it all feels like a slightly funny, slightly puzzling but basically comprehensible (at least in writing) cousin-lect ;) especially when you got your head round the lexis. The grammar is a piece of cake!
In my secondary school days, when I contracted the language virus, I owned a coursebook titled Govorite li srpskohrvatski which summarized the differences on a few pages at the start, and then just proceeded to teach the thing to you.
Chris Button said,
May 3, 2024 @ 4:05 pm
@ Kirinputra
I was actually just trying to make a point about people identifying their language with other languages for non lingustic reasons whatsoever. I didn't mean to endorse the quote I was quoting, although I appreciate it did appear that way!