Tone 9 of the Jianyang Dialect

Abstract

Tone 9 of the Jianyang dialect, for long a controversial topic, is studied across various subdialects of Jianyang in comparison with the Gospel of Matthew, Kien-yang Colloquial of 1900, the earliest extant material for this dialect. its distribution and relationship with initial consonants are carefully examined and its nature and functions described and clarified, leading to the conclusion that it is a morphologically conditioned bianyin that pertains to colloquial words and serves to convey the core meaning of "familiarity" and its derived meaning, reaffirming our assumption made in 1976. From a broad perspective, bianyin is in essence a kind of erhua 兒化 or more precisely, the last stage witnessed in the metamorphosis of a morphological device that occurs in colloquial speech with varied fonctions. It occurs infrequently with the Min dialects, but it seems to be an areal feature with dialects spoken to the west of Jianyang along the western border of Fujian and eastern Jiangxi, including some She $ dialects in this region.