Abstract
As students of language we were often asked: ‘How different are Chinese dialects?’ In the past, our standard answer to questions of this sort was to give a classification of the dialects. For example, we would say that Beijing belongs to Mandarin and Xiamen belongs to Southern Min. To a layman, that answer did not make much sense. So the follow-up question was usually the following: ‘Are they mutually intelligible?’ At that point, we were as lost as the layman. How could we talk about dialect similarity and mutual intelligibility?
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Cheng, CC. (1996). Quantifying Dialect Mutual Intelligibility. In: Huang, CT.J., Li, Yh.A. (eds) New Horizons in Chinese Linguistics. Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, vol 36. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1608-1_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1608-1_9
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