Jizhao () is an unclassified Kra-Dai language spoken in Jizhao Village 吉兆村, Tanba Town 覃巴镇,

Wuchuan, Guangdong Wuchuan is a county-level city in the southwest of Guangdong province, China. It is the easternmost county-level division of the prefecture-level city of Zhanjiang. The total area of Wuchuan is , with an estimated population of in 2013. History ...

. It may be most closely related to Be. In Wuchuan, Jizhao is locally referred to as Haihua 海话, which is the term used elsewhere in

Leizhou Leizhou () is a county-level city in Guangdong Province, China. It is under the jurisdiction of the prefecture-level city of Zhanjiang. The city was formerly known as Haikang County ( postal: Hoihong); it was upgraded into a city in 1994. G ...

雷州, Xuwen 徐闻, and

Maoming Maoming, alternately romanized as Mowming, is a prefecture-level city located in southwestern Guangdong province, China. Facing the South China Sea to the city's south, Maoming city borders Zhanjiang to the west, Yangjiang to the east, and Yunf ...

茂名 to refer to the local Minnan Chinese dialect of Leizhou.Shao Lanzhu ��兰珠 Meng Yuanyao ��元耀 2016. "Loanwords of Min dialect in Jizhao dialect in Guangdong" ��东吉兆话中的闽方言借词 In ''Journal of Guangdong University of Petrochemical Technology'' ��东石油化工学院学报 Vol. 26, No. 2, April 2016. The speakers are being subsumed under "Han Chinese" nationality in census.

Demographics

Jizhao is a highly endangered language that only has speakers above the age of 60 (Shao 2016:70). Within Jizhao Administrative Village 吉兆行政村, it is spoken in the hamlets (natural villages) of Jizhao 吉兆, Meilou 梅楼, and Hong 洪村 villages (Shao 2016:9). All of Jizhao speakers are being counted as part of

Han Han may refer to: Ethnic groups * Han Chinese, or Han People (): the name for the largest ethnic group in China, which also constitutes the world's largest ethnic group. ** Han Taiwanese (): the name for the ethnic group of the Taiwanese p ...

nationality. As of 2017, there are fewer than 100 speakers of Jizhao, most of whom are above the age of 70.Li Jinfang ��锦芳 Wu Yan ��艳 2017.
Guangdong Wuchuan Jizhaohua gaikuang
��东吴川吉兆话概况 In ''Minzu Yuwen'' ��族语文2017:4.

Classification

Shao & Meng (2016) observe some similarities with the

Be language Be (), also known as Ong Be, Bê, or ''Vo Limgao'' (Mandarin 臨高 ''Lín'gāo''), is a pair of languages spoken by 600,000 people, 100,000 of them monolingual, on the north-central coast of Hainan Island, including the suburbs of the provincial ...

of northern

Hainan Hainan (, ; ) is the smallest and southernmost province of the People's Republic of China (PRC), consisting of various islands in the South China Sea. , the largest and most populous island in China,The island of Taiwan, which is slightly l ...

, but provisionally consider Jizhao to be unclassified within the Kam-Tai (壮侗) branch. Jizhao has many loanwords from

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 t ...

and Minnan Chinese. Weera Ostapirat (1998),Ostapirat, W. (1998)
A Mainland Bê Language? / 大陆的Bê语言？
''Journal of Chinese Linguistics'', 26(2), 338-344 analyzing data from Zhang (1992),Zhang Zhenxing ��振兴 1992. "Guangdongsheng Wuchuan fangyan jilve" ��东省吴川方言记略 In ''Fangyan'' ��言1992(3). notes that Be and Jizhao share many lexical similarities and sound correspondences, and that Jizhao may be a remnant Be-related language on the Chinese mainland. In a 100-item

Swadesh list The Swadesh list ("Swadesh" is pronounced ) is a classic compilation of tentatively universal concepts for the purposes of lexicostatistics. Translations of the Swadesh list into a set of languages allow researchers to quantify the interrelatedness ...

, Shao (2016) found lexical matches between Jizhao and the following languages. * Ong Be: 56 words * Zhuang: 6 words *

: 7 words *

Min Chinese Min (; BUC: ''Mìng-ngṳ̄'') is a broad group of Sinitic languages spoken by about 30 million people in Fujian province as well as by the descendants of Min speaking colonists on Leizhou peninsula and Hainan, or assimilated natives of Chaoshan ...

: 1 word *No parallels: 30 words

Phonology

Jizhao has 6 tones (Shao 2016:15). # 21 # 31 # 32 # 33 # 55 # 45 Jizhao, like Hlai, also has the

implosive consonant Implosive consonants are a group of stop consonants (and possibly also some affricates) with a mixed glottalic ingressive and pulmonic egressive airstream mechanism.''Phonetics for communication disorders.'' Martin J. Ball and Nicole Müller. R ...

s / ɓ/ and / ɗ/ (Li & Wu 2017).

References

Sources

*Li, Jian ��健 2011
Guangdong Wuchuan Jizhao Haihua de si zhong yuyan chengfen 广东吴川吉兆海话的四种语音成分
/ Four Speech Sounds in the Jizhao Hai Dialect of Guangdong's Wuchuan. In ''Journal of Zhanjiang Normal College'' ��江师范学院学报2011(4). *Li, Jinfang ��锦芳 Wu Yan ��艳 2017.
Guangdong Wuchuan Jizhaohua gaikuang
��东吴川吉兆话概况 In
Minzu Yuwen
' ��族语文2017:4. *Shao, Lanzhu ��兰珠 2016. ''Guangdong Jizhaohua yanjiu'' ��东吉兆话研究 M.A. dissertation: Guangxi University for Nationalities ��西民族大学 *Shao, Lanzhu ��兰珠 Meng Yuanyao ��元耀 2016. "Loanwords of Min dialect in Jizhao dialect in Guangdong" ��东吉兆话中的闽方言借词 In ''Journal of Guangdong University of Petrochemical Technology'' ��东石油化工学院学报 Vol. 26, No. 2, April 2016. *Zhang, Zhenxing ��振兴 1992. "Guangdongsheng Wuchuan fangyan jilve" ��东省吴川方言记略 In ''Fangyan'' ��言1992(3).

External links