Shaxian dialect (

Central Min Central Min, or Min Zhong (), is a part of the Min group of varieties of Chinese. It is spoken in the valley of the Sha River in Sanming prefecture in the central mountain areas of Fujian, consisting of Yong'an, the urban area of Sanming ( Sany ...

: 沙縣事,

Mandarin Chinese Mandarin (; ) is a group of Chinese (Sinitic) dialects that are natively spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of the phonology of Standard Chinese, the official language of ...

: 沙縣話) is a dialect of

Chinese Chinese can refer to: * Something related to China * Chinese people, people of Chinese nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity **''Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic concept of the Chinese nation ** List of ethnic groups in China, people of va ...

spoken in

Sha County Shaxian District (), formerly Sha County, is a District of Sanming, Fujian Province, People's Republic of China. Shaxian District is the hometown of Shaxian delicacies, which are considered part of the food heritage of China. Transportation Shax ...

Sanming Sanming (, Foochow Romanized: Săng-mìng), also known as Minzhong (), is a prefecture-level city in western Fujian province, China. It borders Nanping City to the north, Fuzhou City to the east, Quanzhou City to the southeast, Longyan City to th ...

in Western

Fujian Province Fujian (; alternately romanized as Fukien or Hokkien) is a province on the southeastern coast of China. Fujian is bordered by Zhejiang to the north, Jiangxi to the west, Guangdong to the south, and the Taiwan Strait to the east. Its cap ...

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...

Phonology

Shaxian dialect has 17 initials, 36 rimes and 6 tones.

Initials

Notes: #, , only connected with round mouth rimes (); #, , cannot be connected with

nasal vowel A nasal vowel is a vowel that is produced with a lowering of the soft palate (or velum) so that the air flow escapes through the nose and the mouth simultaneously, as in the French vowel or Amoy []. By contrast, oral vowels are produced wit ...

rimes; #, , only connected with

rimes.

Rimes

Some rimes come in pairs in the above table, and they are closely related with the tones: the one to the left only exist in dark level (), light level (), light rising () and departing (); while the other only exist in dark rising () and entering (). It can be compared with close and open rimes of

Fuzhou dialect Fuzhou (; , Fuzhounese: Hokchew, ''Hók-ciŭ''), alternately romanized as Foochow, is the capital and one of the largest cities in Fujian province, China. Along with the many counties of Ningde, those of Fuzhou are considered to constitute t ...

Eastern Min Eastern Min or Min Dong (, Foochow Romanized: Mìng-dĕ̤ng-ngṳ̄), is a branch of the Min group of Sinitic languages of China. The prestige form and most-cited representative form is the Fuzhou dialect, the speech of the capital of Fujian. ...

Tones

The entering tones in Sanming dialect don't have any entering tone coda () such as , , and . It's quite different from many other Chinese dialects.

Tone sandhi

Shaxian dialect has extremely extensive

tone sandhi Tone sandhi is a phonological change occurring in tonal languages, in which the tones assigned to individual words or morphemes change based on the pronunciation of adjacent words or morphemes. It usually simplifies a bidirectional tone into a ...

rules: in an utterance, only the last syllable pronounced is not affected by the rules. The two-syllable tonal sandhi rules are shown in the table below (the rows give the first syllable's original citation tone, while the columns give the citation tone of the second syllable): Some rimes may change their pronunciation because they are closely related with the tones ( ''see above'').

References

* {{Min Chinese Central Min