Quantifying Dialect Mutual Intelligibility

Language Maintenance or Language Shift? The Role of Religion in a Hakka Catholic Community in Malaysia

“…These questions are as follows: Mandarin. This layman's perception is actually supported by the research on similarity between Chinese dialects carried out by Cheng Chin Chuan (1994, 1996. His research …”

Cultural background influences the liminal perception of Chinese characters: An ERP study

“…In most cases, languages that differ significantly in their spoken forms also differ significantly in their corresponding written forms. However, the languages of the Sinitic (Chinese) family are unusual in that, although many of them are mutually unintelligible (Cheng, 1996;Tang & van Heuven, 2009), they share essentially the same written language (albeit with two character sets and some lexical differences). Written Chinese uses a logographic script that consists of thousands of characters, each comprising a hierarchical arrangement of strokes (Wang, 1973).…”

Ethnic and gender variation in the use of Colloquial Singapore English discourse particles

“…The term dialect to refer to different varieties of Chinese is problematic, as highlighted previously by many scholars such as DeFrancis (1998: 53-67),Ramsey (1989: 16-17, 28-9) andMair (1991), among others. Speakers of Chinese, in Singapore and elsewhere, frequently refer to them as dialects, even though they are often mutually unintelligible(Cheng 1996), and some (such as Cantonese) even have their own (more or less) standardised writing system. Our use of 'dialect' (in quotation marks) is an attempt to balance local non-specialist (and language policy) use and linguistic realities.4JAKOB LEIMGRUBER ET AL.https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.…”