Abstract
Zhushan Mandarin () is a dialect of Mandarin Chinese (ISO 639-3; code: cmn) spoken in the Zhushan county (), which belongs to the city of Shiyan () in Hubei Province (), the People’s Republic of China. As shown in Figure 1, the county borders the city of Chongqing () to the south and Shaanxi Province () to the north. It has an area of 3,586 km² and a population of about 4.7 million residents (Hubei Province Annals Committee 2017). The general consensus is that it is a Mandarin dialect (LAC 2012). However, there have been debates on the proper classification of this dialect as belonging to the Jianghuai Mandarin group () (e.g. Coblin 2005, X. B. Liu 2007) or to the Southwestern Mandarin group () (e.g. Ting 1996, X. C. Liu 2005, L. Li 2009).
Highlights
Despite the different proposals on the dialectal classification of Zhushan Mandarin, researchers do agree that Zhushan Mandarin possesses a mixture of phonetic/phonological features known to Jianghuai and Southwestern Mandarin at both the segmental and tonal levels
In addition to the main variety spoken in the county of Zhushan, there are three locally well-known varieties, according to the Zhushan County Annals Committee (2002)
The current description of the sound system of Zhushan Mandarin aimed at filling in the gap, with data based on the speech of two male speakers recorded by the second author
Summary
A third one, spoken in northern Zhushan (e.g. in Canglang Township ⋗⎚ґ, Loutai Township ᾬਠґ, and Shenhe Township ␡⋣ґ), differs from the other two varieties with rich r-suffixation These sub-regional varieties provide further evidence that Zhushan Mandarin is spoken in a transitional zone where several dialects are present in the surrounding areas. We will show that Zhushan Mandarin differs significantly from the best known Mandarin variety (i.e. Standard Chinese) in its lexical tonal system and contextual tonal variation and in several segmental properties This description provides further evidence for the diversity of Mandarin dialects, a family of dialects consisting of no less than seven distinct groups with salient phonological, lexical, and grammatical differences These segmental and tonal features conjointly provide further insights for those who are interested in diachronic sound changes and synchronic typological tendencies of the sound systems of Sinitic languages
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