Bobai is a
Yue Chinese
Yue () is a group of similar Sinitic languages spoken in Southern China, particularly in Liangguang (the Guangdong and Guangxi provinces).
The name Cantonese is often used for the whole group, but linguists prefer to reserve that name for ...
dialect spoken in
Bobai County
Bobai (; Zhuang: ') is a county of Guangxi, China. It is under the administration of Yulin city.
Bobai was the home town of the linguist Wang Li, who described the Bobai dialect with its unusually large number of tones.
Transportation
The c ...
,
Guangxi. It was documented by the Chinese linguist
Wang Li, a native speaker, and is well known for its tone system.
Tone
Bobai dialect is widely cited as having the most tones of any variety of Chinese, though in fact it only has six, the same as most Yue dialects. The reason for the claim is that Bobai makes a four-way tonal distinction in checked syllables, whereas most other Yue dialects have three: In Bobai, both the lower and upper entering tone is split (8a and 8b as well as 7a and 7b), whereas in Cantonese only 7 is split; other dialects with an 8 split are neighboring
Yangjiang
Yangjiang (, ), alternately romanized as Yeungkong, is a prefecture-level city in southwestern Guangdong Province in the People's Republic of China. It borders Maoming to the west, Yunfu to the north, Jiangmen to the east, and looks out to the S ...
and
Pinghua
Pinghua (; Yale: ''Pìhng Wá''; sometimes disambiguated as /) is a pair of Sinitic languages spoken mainly in parts of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, with some speakers in Hunan province. Pinghua is a trade language in some areas of Gu ...
, though in the latter at least 7 is not split, and 8 split along different lines.
Tones 7b and 8a occur with long vowels, 7a and 8b elsewhere.
References
Yue Chinese
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