The Zhenjiang dialect is a form of
Eastern Mandarin spoken in the town of
Zhenjiang in
Jiangsu Province,
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 ...
. Zhenjiang is situated on the south bank of the
Yangtze river between
Nanjing and
Changzhou. It is thus at the intersection of China's Mandarin and
Wu speaking regions. About 2.7 million Chinese live in the area where the Zhenjiang dialect is predominant.
[Da Yuan-yi,]
A Review on the Dialect in the Transitional Belt in Zhenjiang
" ''Journal of Jiangsu University'', July 2003.
In ancient times, Zhenjiang spoke Wu.
Today, Wu is the language of nearby
Changzhou, as well as
Shanghai and
Zhejiang Province. Mandarin speakers from the north have been immigrating to Zhenjiang since the fourth century, gradually changing the character of the local dialect.
In modern times, the city speaks a dialect that is transitional between the Eastern Mandarin of Nanjing, located just west of the city, and the
Taihu dialect of Wu spoken in Changzhou, which is just east of the city.
The Zhenjiang dialect is comprehensible to Nanjing residents, but not to Changzhou residents.
The issue of tones in the Zhenjiang dialect has been a topic of scholarly study. Nanjing residents use the
four tones of Mandarin, while Changzhou residents use seven or eight tones. According to a study by Qiu Chunan, the Zhenjiang dialect has five citation tones: Tone 1 (42) (a sharp fall from pitch 4 to pitch 2, or ''yinping''), Tone 2 (35) (a rising tone or ''yangping''), Tone 3 (32) (slight falling tone or ''shang''), Tone 4 (55) (high even or ''qu''), and Tone 5 (5) (
checked tone or ''ru'').
[Qiu, Chunan.]
Sandhi Patterns of Zhenjiang Dialect
, ''Speech Prosody'', 2012. Qiu's study used residents who had grown up in the Daxi Road area, where the standard form of the dialect is said to be spoken.
The checked tone was a feature of
Chinese spoken in the Middle Ages, but it is not part of Mandarin. Applying the theory of
government phonology
Government Phonology (GP) is a theoretical framework of linguistics, and more specifically of phonology. The framework aims to provide a non-arbitrary account for phonological phenomena by replacing the rule component of SPE-type phonology with wel ...
to the issue, Bao Zhiming noted that non-even tones become even when they appear before the high even, or 55, tone.
[Bao, Zhiming, ]
On the nature of tone
, Unpublished Ph. D. Thesis, MIT, Cambridge, 96-104, 1990. See also
by He Junjie (''Dialect'', 2011-01).
References
{{Reflist, 1
Mandarin Chinese
Zhenjiang