Amoy dialect (Amoy was the name given by Westerners to Xiamen). A version of this dialect is also spoken by some people in nearby Taiwan. Fortunately, most Chinese people of my generation and younger from Xiamen speak Mandarin Chinese or Pǔtōnghuà 普通话 (which I'm trying to learn) rather than any of the local dialects. Even more fortunately for me, most of the younger generation of Chinese have also grown up learning English in school and, although often shy about using it, can speak at least a bit.
However, many older Xiamen residents only speak Mǐnnánhuà which is basically incomprehensible to Mandarin speakers (not to mention English speakers like myself). Last week, an elderly lady approached me while I was waiting for a bus and seemed very curious about me. She tried to talk to me in Mǐnnánhuà so I politely responded in Mandarin that I couldn't understand, but she couldn't understand that I was trying to tell her I couldn't understand. She then started talking to a Chinese student nearby that I had been talking with, hoping a Chinese person could translate for us. However, the Chinese girl couldn't understand Mǐnnánhuà much better than I could so the nice, inquisitive old lady's questions for me unfortunately had to go unanswered.
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