Test for dialect relatedness: especially for Northeast topolect groupies
« previous post |
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)
It became popular and widely spread in Chinese social media recently, as a simple tool/quiz that helps you to locate and clarify your local dialects/accents.
Just select pairs of characters that share the same initials, finals, and tones, respectively.
And the website will give you a result with related probability:
I did not find which person or group created this website or what academic source it was based on, but it seems to work pretty well.
[Thanks to Yizhi Geng, Diana Shuheng Zhang, and Xinyi Ye]
wgj said,
December 20, 2025 @ 7:54 am
I'm surprised that PRC users have no problem using the test, given that it's in traditional Chinese. I'm also suspicious whether the creator has reliable sampling data, if they are from outside Mainland China.
Jerry Packard said,
December 20, 2025 @ 9:22 am
I hope the output graph has better resolution than the one here, which is virtually unreadable. I can’t really tell what the result output is giving us. It seems to be a dialect identifier rather than a dialect relatedness estimate.
Philip Taylor said,
December 20, 2025 @ 9:54 am
Is this any better, Jerry ?
Jonathan Smith said,
December 20, 2025 @ 10:21 am
Typical wrong thinking: "fangyan" simply consist of variant "readings" of a single set of "characters" bestowed upon "the Chinese" by "Huangdi". Why should these characters point unambiguously to a particular word, or to any word at all, of a given Chinese language?