Fangyan (book)

Han dynasty dictionary of regional terms
the general sense of a regional Chinese dialect

The Fangyan is a Chinese dictionary compiled in the early 1st century CE by the poet and philosopher Yang Xiong (53 BCE18 CE). It was the first Chinese dictionary to include significant regional vocabulary, and is considered the "most significant lexicographic work" of its era. His dictionary's preface explains how he spent 27 years amassing and collating the dictionary. Yang collected regionalisms from many sources, particularly the 'light carriage' (輶軒 ) surveys made during the Zhou and Qin dynasties, where imperial emissaries were sent into the countryside annually to record folk songs and idioms from across China, reaching as far north as Korea.

Victor Mair proposed that be translated as topolect, while dialect should be translated into Chinese as c=通言 p=tōngyán. Based on this, topolect has been used to characterize other speech varieties where an identification as either language or dialect would be controversial. Examples include Scots and the various regional varieties of Arabic and Romani. In all of these situations, an identification of distinct languages by the straightforward criterion of mutual intelligibility may not be politically or socially acceptable to a significant number of scholars. For example, several varieties of Southwestern Mandarin are not mutually intelligible, and they would be classified as distinct languages within the Mandarin branch of the Sinitic language family, if it weren't for the dominant social, historical, and political concept of Chinese as a unitary language. Mandarin, Southwestern Mandarin, the mutually unintelligible varieties of Southwestern Mandarin, and indeed the mutually intelligible dialects within those varieties are all termed "topolects".