此方言非彼方言：A Journey Through Chinese "Dialects"

In The Columbia History of Chinese Literature, there is a striking sentence that caught my attention:

“Even Italian and German were called fang-yen by early Chinese travelers to Europe… Consequently, some scientifically minded scholars have begun to translate fang-yen as ‘topolect’ to ensure that its original meaning is preserved in English and to dissociate it from the word ‘dialect’, which normally signifies mutual intelligibility when employed in linguistic parlance.”

This passage lingers in my mind because it touches on something deeper: the way we name and frame languages reflects how we understand the world. The word 方言 (fang-yen) is often mistranslated as “dialect,” yet it encompasses an incredible range of regional speech forms—some mutually unintelligible—that carry history, identity, and culture.

As someone learning Classical Chinese (文言文), I’ve found that reading it through the lens of a language closer to Middle Chinese (中古漢語) sometimes makes meanings click in unexpected ways. Well that’s a topic for another time.

Today, I want to share something a little playful yet revealing. Inspired by a video I came across recently, I asked myself: what happens when we translate a simple sentence—”There are many fish, and even crocodiles, in the river outside my house”—into different Chinese fang-yen or topolects?

Here’s what I found:

繁體字

我家外面的河裏有很多魚還有鰐魚

粵語 (google translate)

我屋企出面嘅河

有好多魚

仲有鰐魚

ngo5 uk1kei2 ceot1min2 ge3 ho4

jau5 hou2do1 jyu2

zung6 jau5ngok6jyu4

閩南 - 福建/潮州 (教育部臺灣台語常用詞辭典)

*鰐魚 kho̍k-hî

*的 ê

*有 ū

漢羅文（漢文字加羅馬文字）

阮ê厝 外口ê河

有真濟魚

閣有buaya

guán ê tshù guā-kháu ê hô

ū tsin tsē hî/hû

koh ū ‘buaya’

新马式拼音

gua e chu wa kau e her

u chin che hi

koh u ‘buaya’

客家 (國立聯合大學 客語 )

吾屋下外背个河

有蓋多魚

還有鱷魚

ngaˊ vugˋ kaˊ ngoi boi ge hoˇ

iuˊ goi doˊ ngˇ

hanˇ iuˊ ngog ngˇ

閩東 - 福州話 (榕典)

我厝门外许条河

有真奢魚

故有鱷魚

ngo cuo muong hi tiu o

ou zing xia ngy

gu ou ngo ngy

(目前沒有海南話)

My personal touch

Interestingly, I found that Hokkien is the topolect that has assimilated the most into daily life in Malaysia. Perhaps it’s because Hokkien speakers have been in the region since the Ming dynasty—though that’s just a big guess on my part (I don’t have a citation for it… yet).