Not that I can point to. It was an old Anthropology professor back in my undergrad days. I’ll have to faff around on the Internet and see if I can come up with something.
As for Chinese, would what makes them dialects be the writing system? They all read the same characters, just pronounce them using different spoken words.
There’s more to it than “just using different spoken words” in the various Chinese dialects. For one thing, those are actually different languages. It’s more of a socio-political thing, as in the Philippines, to call them dialects.
No, Siam Sam, the grammars of the various Chinese languages are often quite different. Furthermore, it’s not a matter of them always using the same word for each character and having a slight different pronunciation and sometimes have characters that are only used in one of the languages but not the others. They often have completely different unrelated pronunciations for each character. The Chinese languages are related but different on the same level as, say, the Germanic languages like English, Dutch, German, and Swedish. A speaker might sometimes vaguely recognize words in one of the other languages as being similar to their language’s words pronounced in an odd way, but two of the Chinese languages will not be mutually intelligible.
I screwed up two sentences in my post above thoroughly. They should have been:
> Furthermore, it’s not a matter of them always using the same word for each
> character and having a slight different pronunciation. They often have
> completely different unrelated pronunciations for each character and sometimes
> have characters that are only used in one of the languages but not the others.
