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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.

That reminds me of my former colleague Harold Schiffman's description of Ausbau and Abstand languages, following Heinz Kloss's 1952 criteria:

• Ausbau languages are languages because they have been developed or `built-up'; they contain all the useful vocabulary they need and are recognized for all domains and registers of a language—technical, religious, etc. But they may be very close to some other, even mutually intelligible lect: The Scandinavian "languages", Czech and Slovak, Lao and Thai, etc. But they may depend on different classical (or other) languages as a source of learned vocabulary …
• Abstand languages are definitely languages by `distance', i.e. there is no close relative with which they can be confused, or are mutually intelligible with: Japanese, Korean, Icelandic, etc. No chain of mutually intelligible lects merging with some other `language'. Thus many African languages, Amerindian languages, Malayo- Polynesian languages, Australian languages are so by Abstand, but not by Ausbau.
• Many languages are languages by both criteria of Ausbau and Abstand, e.g. Japanese, English, French, etc. but some are languages by only one criterion, though some are attempting to become useful for all registers by developing their own Ausbau procedures;
• Some languages that are so by Ausbau but not by Abstand might try to increase the distance by resorting to purism or some other distancing mechanism (borrowing from some other source). Maithili is thought of as a dialect of Hindi within Nepal, but within India, Maithili speakers wish to claim language status.

According to Wikipedia,

This framework addresses situations in which multiple varieties from a dialect continuum have been standardized, so that they are commonly considered distinct languages even though they may be mutually intelligible. The continental Scandinavian languages offer a commonly cited example of this situation. One of the applications of this theoretical framework is language standardization (examples since the 1960s including Basque and Romansh).

How does this scheme work for Sinitic?  Lord knows we need some sort of mechanism for dealing with the hundreds of Sinitic topolects that range in mutual intelligibility from near zero to almost complete.

Selected readings

• "Languageness" (5/1/23)
• "Language, topolect, dialect, idiolect" (10/3/23)
• "Intelligibility and the language / dialect problem" (10/11/14)
• "Mutual intelligibility" (5/28/14)
• "Mutual unintelligibility among Sinitic lects" (10/5/14)
• "Sinitic is a group of languages, not a single language" (10/12/17)
• "Cantonese and Mandarin are two different languages" (9/25/15)
• "'Chinese' well beyond Mandarin" (5/10/13)
• "L-complex" (10/19/25)
• "Mixed script writing in Taiwan, part 2" (5/29/24)
• "Language that exercises the brain; poetry and gradations of understanding" (1/7/24)
• "Bahasa and the concept of 'National Language'" (3/14/13)
• "Arabic as a macrolanguage" (10/21/18)
• "Arabic and the vernaculars, part 6" (5/12/24) — First comment by Peter B. Golden:

When I was still teaching (until 2012), I had students from the Maghreb (Morocco, N. African Arabic) whose spoken language was completely unintelligible to Arab students from the Levant…or so they told me. Egyptian Arabic retains some old/archaic pronunciations, e.g. the letter "jim" ( ج) is pronounced "g"/, not "j," "ž" etc. as in the Levant. Because of its population size and developed motion picture and music industries, Egyptian (Cairene) Arabic is widely understood. In addition to numerous local dialects, there were also religion-specific dialects, e.g. Judeo-Arabic written in Hebrew letters, and Christian Arabic written in a Syriac-based alphabet, Karshuni.

• Hammarström, Harald. 2008. “Counting Languages in Dialect Continua Using the Criterion of Mutual Intelligibility.” Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 15(1). 36-45.
• Kloss, Heinz. 1967. “‘Abstand languages’ and ‘ausbau languages’”. Anthropological linguistics 9(7). 29-41.
• Tamburelli, Marco & Brasca, Lissander. 2017. “Revisiting the classification of Gallo-Italic: a dialectometric approach.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 33(2). 442-455
• Tang, Chaoju & van Heuven, Vincent J. 2009. “Mutual Intelligibility of Chinese Dialects Experimentally Tested.” Lingua 119(5). 709-732.

October 28, 2025 @ 4:03 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Dialects, Intelligibility, Topolects

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