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' ( ) 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.

The ''Fangyan'' originally contained some 9,000 characters in 15 chapters, but two chapters have since been lost. Definitions typically list regional synonyms. For example, the entry for ''hu'' ( 'tiger') is as follows:

Tiger: in the regions of Chen- Wei
Song A song is a musical composition performed by the human voice. The voice often carries the melody (a series of distinct and fixed pitches) using patterns of sound and silence. Songs have a structure, such as the common ABA form, and are usu ...
- Chu entral China some call it ''lifu''; in the regions of Jiang- Huai Nan-Chu outhern China they call it ''li'er'', and some call it ''wutu''. From the Pass, east- and west-ward astern 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 Old Chinese, also called Archaic Chinese in older works, is the oldest attested stage of Chinese language, Chinese, and the ancestor of all modern varieties of Chinese. The earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones ...

and Middle Chinese. In the above example, Paul Serruys reconstructs 'tiger' as Old Chinese . Serruys also applied the techniques of modern

dialectology Dialectology (from Ancient Greek, Greek , ''dialektos'', "talk, dialect"; and , ''-logy, -logia'') is the scientific study of dialects: subsets of languages. Though in the 19th century a branch of historical linguistics, dialectology is often now c ...

to the distribution of regional words, identifying dialect areas and their relationships.

Terminology

Victor Mair proposed that be translated as ''topolect'', while ''dialect'' should be translated into Chinese as . 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 Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...

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".

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