L-complex

From Peter Daniels:

Do the 7 or 8 (or whatever) “dialects” of Sinitic constitute what Hockett called an “L-complex,” like Romance, such that you could traverse the entire domain and never encounter neighboring villages that didn’t understand each other, with cultural centers where the language described in the regional grammar book and dictionary is spoken, or are they distinct languages as far back as one can look?

I enquire because in her new edition, Amalia Gnanadesikan inserts a description of the Rhenish Fan into her Chinese chapter as if using Dutch vs. German as a standard language / orthography is relevant to using Mandarin as the written language throughout China.

"L-complex" is a synonym for a dialect continuum.  It also refers to the study of how intricate a language's structure is.

 

Selected readings

• "Mutual intelligibility" (5/28/14)
• "Mutual Intelligibility of Sinitic Languages" (3/6/09)
• "Intelligibility and the language / dialect problem" (10/11/14)
• "Language, topolect, dialect, idiolect" (10/3/23)
• "English is a Dialect of Germanic; or, The Traitors to Our Common Heritage" (9/4/13)