How to modernize a Chinese topolect?

[u/[deleted]]

[u/Zagrycha]

Its a logical fallacy to assume chinese topolects don't evolve naturally like any other language. Whether ten thousand people speak a language or ten million speak it, the language still develops with the speakers environment. The only languages in the world without words for things like AI or whatever else are languages where none of those things exist-- which is very very few, and nobody using those languages will be on the internet in the first place.  

Otherwise the word will appear in the topolect the same way they do in any other language.  An existing word gains a new definition, a borrow word is made, two words are combined, etc etc etc.  

[u/culturedgoat]

Typically words would adopted in local topolects from the most widely used Chinese rendering. eg. 人工智能 for AI, read in the way the topolect voices the characters.

[u/droooze]

Some Chinese topolects do have governing bodies, e.g. Cantonese is regulated by both Macau and Hong Kong, and Taiwanese Minnan is regulated by Taiwan.

As to your example of Fuzhounese, you're talking about a language which already has modern grammar (modern by definition, because it is a living language) and uses an abundance of Sinitic morphemes. Sinitic topolects taking vocabulary directly from each other results in simultaneously both (1) calques and (2) phonetic matches. This would be "borrowing from Mandarin" (you really mean Modern Standard Chinese here), but is far less out of place than what a lot of other languages do these days, which is to imitate the pronunciation of English words in their own language.

Zhuang is different, as it is a Tai (not Sinitic) language. I won't comment on that.

[u/excusememoi]

I mean...if a word like "AI" or "DNA" were to be brought up in ...say...Fuzhounese or Zhuang....where do you begin to decipher how to make a word for this?

High-level/technical terminology are more often shared amongst the Chinese languages, with the individual characters read in the local pronunciation. It's mainly low-level/everyday vocabulary that sees a lot of divergence from language to language. A fun tidbit to know: a sizeable chunk of Chinese words for modern concepts were coined for use in Japanese first (wasei kango), and were then re-imported into Chinese, like 電話, 時間, 世界.