The Harbin dialect () is a variety of

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 ...

spoken in and around the city of

Harbin Harbin (; mnc, , v=Halbin; ) is a sub-provincial city and the provincial capital and the largest city of Heilongjiang province, People's Republic of China, as well as the second largest city by urban population after Shenyang and largest c ...

, the capital of

Heilongjiang Heilongjiang () Postal romanization, formerly romanized as Heilungkiang, is a Provinces of China, province in northeast China. The standard one-character abbreviation for the province is (). It was formerly romanized as "Heilungkiang". It is th ...

province.

Characteristics

Harbin dialect is phonologically close to the

Standard Mandarin Standard Chinese ()—in linguistics Standard Northern Mandarin or Standard Beijing Mandarin, in common speech simply Mandarin, better qualified as Standard Mandarin, Modern Standard Mandarin or Standard Mandarin Chinese—is a modern standa ...

language, but the dialect itself carries with it strong cultural and regional connotations. However, the Harbin dialect is still widely considered to have the most accurate pronunciation when compared with the

language.

Vocabulary

The vocabulary of Harbin dialect is different from Standard Mandarin for two reasons. One of the sources of the distinct lexical features of the Harbin dialect is the area's colonial

Russia Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. It is the largest country in the world, with its internationally recognised territory covering , and encompassing one-ei ...

n influence. The Russian colonial period started in the 1900s, which marked the start of the influx of large amounts of Russian vocabulary, especially neologisms created in Europe and Russia that had never existed in Mandarin. The second source of lexical difference is the influence of

language contact Language contact occurs when speakers of two or more languages or varieties interact and influence each other. The study of language contact is called contact linguistics. When speakers of different languages interact closely, it is typical for th ...

between the local Mandarin language and the

Manchu language Manchu (Manchu:, ) is a critically endangered East Asian Tungusic language native to the historical region of Manchuria in Northeast China. As the traditional native language of the Manchus, it was one of the official languages of the Qi ...

References

External links

* * Mandarin Chinese {{China-stub