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A comment on Beijing says 400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin. Parent comment

Re:Beijing says 400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin by dragonwriter on Friday September 06, 2013 @02:42PM (#6341966)
Linguists tend toward using mutual intelligibility as the difference between a language and a dialect, but it's fuzzy. Beijing and Shanghai dialect are almost totally mutually unintelligible, but if you walked from Beijing down to Shanghai, each village, town, or city you pass will speak a dialect that's still mutually intelligible with the immediately neighboring village/town/city's.

So, its a "ring language" (by analogy to a "ring species" [1] in biology.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species

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Re:Beijing says 400 million Chinese cannot speak Mandarin by abayer on Friday September 06, 2013 @03:13PM (#6342105)
The equivalent term in linguistics is "dialect continuum" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_continuum
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