Topolect

Frank was a close Chinese friend from an obscure topolect. We went together to Mexico. He was a coworker at a big North American software firm. He was an avid ice hockey player, as was my university friend Steve, who was also Chinese.

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.

We can then establish and name further categories by means of the word "group" and the prefix "sub-", thus obtaining SUBDIALECT ("Untermundart") between topolect and dialect, DIALECT GROUP ("Mundartengruppe") between dialect and language, SUBFAMILY ("Unterfamilie") between language and family,

The degree to which Yahudic lects differ from coterritorial non-Jewish lects varies spatially, chronologically, stylistically, and idiolectically (for this reason it is important to study each Yahudic topolect together with its coterritorial Arabic topolect if it has one).

Imminent Chinese linguist Zhou Youguang has said that everyone’s mother tongue is a topolect, whereas China’s standard spoken language has long been the “teacher tongue.”