Contents

Fangyan originally contained some 9,000 characters in 15 chapters (卷), but two chapters were subsequently lost.

Definitions typically list regional synonyms. For instance, chapter 8, which catalogs animal names, gives regional words for hu (虎 'tiger') in Han times.

Tiger: in the regions of Chen-Wei Song-Chu China, some call it lifu; in the regions of Jiang-Huai Nan-Chu China, they call it li'er, and some call it wutu. From the Pass, east- and west-ward and Western China, some call it also bodu.

Comparative linguists have used dialect data from the Fangyan in reconstructing the pronunciation of Eastern Han Chinese (1st century CE), which is an important diachronic stage between Old Chinese and Middle Chinese. In the above example, Paul Serruys reconstructs "tiger" as Old Chinese *blxâg.

Serruys also applied the techniques of modern dialectology to the distribution of regional words, identifying dialect areas and their relationships.

Terminology

Victor Mair proposed that fāngyán be translated as topolect, while dialect should be translated into Chinese as 通言 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 Chinese (or 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".