Haikou dialect is a topolect of Chinese and a subvariety of Hainanese which is spoken in Haikou, the capital of the Hainan province and island of China.
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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.
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The official languages are Portuguese and Cantonese Chinese. The residents commonly (85.7%) speak Cantonese, Mandarin is spoken by 3.2% at home, about 40% are able to communicate in standard Mandarin. English and Portuguese are spoken as a first language by 1.5% and 0.6% respectively, while English is widely thought as a second language. The other popular topolect is Hokkien (Min Nan), spoken by a small percentage of the population.
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All these terms have customarily been translated into English as dialect, a practice that has been criticized as confusing. The neologisms regionalect and topolect have been proposed as alternative renderings of fāngyán. The only varieties usually recognized as languages in their own right are Dungan and Taz. This is mostly due to political reasons as they are spoken in the former Soviet Union and are usually not written in Han characters but in Cyrillic.
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In recent years, however, there has been an increasing awareness of topolect preservation, due to the great decline in the use of other Chinese varieties in Singapore. Most young Chinese Singaporeans were unable to speak these languages effectively and were thus unable to communicate with their grandparents, who are more fluent in them. This has caused a language barrier between generations. As such, there is a minority of Singaporeans working to help preserve or spread these forgotten languages in Singapore.
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While it is treated as stylish to write in Biscayan and the dialect is still spoken generally in about half of Biscay and some other municipalities, it suffers from the double pressure of Unified Basque and Spanish. Relief from 1603 in Plentzia old town, with an epigraph in the topolect of the time. "Muxica areriocaz agica Butroe celangoa da Oroc daquie garaianago eria gordeago." Biscayan was used by Sabino Arana and his early Basque nationalist followers as one of the signs of Basqueness.
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Because of the difficulties involved in determining the difference between language and dialect, other terms have been proposed. These include vernacular, lect,, cited in regionalect, topolect, and variety. Most Chinese people consider the spoken varieties as one single language because speakers share a common culture and history, as well as a shared national identity and a common written form. To Chinese nationalists, the idea of Chinese as a language family may suggest that the Chinese identity is much more fragmented and disunified than their belief and as such is often looked upon as culturally and politically provocative.
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In the Hokkien topolect () , which is widely used in Fujian, Taiwan, and in the Chinese diaspora, it is debated that whether Taiwanese dialect () should be separated from the Hokkien language as the Taiwanese language (), although people from Fujian and Taiwan can communicate with each other despite some differences in vocabulary. Such debates may be associated with politics of Taiwan. In Taiwan, there is a common perception that Hokkien preserves more archaic features from Classical Chinese than Mandarin, thus allowing poetry from the Tang dynasty to rhyme better. Amongst Hokkien nationalists in Taiwan, this perception is sometimes elevated into stronger claims about the identity of Hokkien and Mandarin.
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Mandarin (the standard language of China based on northern dialects) has been used as a lingua franca in Singapore alongside Hokkien (a south-eastern Chinese topolect) since the end of the Second World War. Before the standardisation of Singaporean Mandarin in the year 1979, Mandarin was largely used in a colloquial form based on the speech of Beijing, with infusions from various southern non-Mandarin Chinese varieties such as Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, Hainanese and Hakka. This colloquial form of Mandarin served as a bridge between speakers of various mutually unintelligible southern varieties. Mandarin was also the language of instruction in the now defunct Chinese-medium schools and education system.
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The romanisation of the Chinese language in Singapore is not dictated by a single policy, nor is its policy implementation consistent, as the local Chinese community is composed of a myriad of topolect groups. Although Hanyu Pinyin is adopted as the preferred romanisation system for Mandarin and the standard of Chinese education, the general lack of a romanisation standard for other Chinese varieties results in some level of inconsistency. This may be illustrated by the many variants for the same Chinese characters often found in surnames such as Low, Loh, Lo; Tay, Teh; Teo, Teoh; Yong, Yeong. The surname Zheng () alone has several variations including Teh, Tay, Tee, Chang, Chung, Cheng, and Zeng.
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Whereas its precursor nanxi predominantly used southern Chinese tunes, which were pentatonic, melismatic, slow and soft, chuanqi widely incorporated northern tunes which were heptatonic, syllabic, fast and forceful. This process had begun in the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), which reunified northern China (the former Jin dynasty (1115–1234)) and southern China (the former Song dynasty (960–1279)), as nanxi increasingly absorbed the northern tunes of zaju, a northern Chinese opera form. After chuanqi came into being in the middle of the Ming dynasty, its popularity spread throughout the various areas of China, each with its distinct traditional musical style and topolect. Over time, four major sub-genres (or "singing styles" 唱腔) were recognized: haiyanqiang ("Haiyan style"), yuyaoqiang ("Yuyao style"), yiyangqiang ("Yiyang style"), and kunshanqiang ("Kunshan style", later known as kunqu).
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Lu believed that his romanization method was easy to learn and claimed that a student could pick it up in a few weeks. However, when he tried teaching it to his family members, few could master the complex spelling rules, principles, and exceptions. The historical linguist Luo Changpei found Lu's scheme cumbersome and esoteric, "neither Chinese nor Western" (Tsu and Elman 2014: 132-134). After two decades of work on developing his New Phonetic Alphabet, Lu's innovative Yimu liaoran chujie: Zhongguo qie yin xin zi Xia qiang (一目了然初階: 中国切音新字廈腔 "First Steps in Being Able to Understand at a Glance: Chinese new phonetic script in the Amoy topolect]") was published in 1892. Victor H. Mair, a sinologist and professor of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania, calls it "the first book written by a Chinese which presented a potentially workable system of spelling for a Sinitic language" and says Lu is now viewed as the "father of script reform" (2002).
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