Sinitic

Some of my neighbours are illiterate in their native Sinitic topolect, as the writing is not alphabetic. It is Cantonese.

My ancestral Sinitic topolect has a long history of being written in the Latin alphabet. This writing is quite phonemic. It is the Hokkien language.

Read the dissertation "Writing Taiwanese: The Pe̍h-ōe-jī Romanization and Identity Construction in Taiwan," about the Hokkien Sinitic topolect.

Read the article "The History of Peh-oe-ji," by Henning Klöter, about the history of the writing system of the Hokkien Sinitic topolect.

"Peh-oe-ji, Childish Writing?" by Wi-vun Taiffalo Chiung is an article about the orthography of the Hokkien Sinitic topolect.

As English's Germanic substratum of short words is ameliorated with long Mediterranean loanwords, the Thai language with its short words is ameliorated with long Indic borrowings. Languages often have such vocabulary dichotomies. Japanese native words are longer than the Sinitic borrowings. Borrowed words in these languages often indicate a higher register.

Burma, Siam, Indochina and Indonesia are divided between at least two linguistic families: Sinitic and Malayo-Polynesian.