The Huizhou dialect () is a
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 ...
dialect spoken in and around
Huicheng District
Huicheng District () is a district of Huizhou City, Guangdong Province, China. Huicheng is the northern urban center of Huizhou along with Huiyang as the southern urban center.
Administrative divisions
Huicheng is responsible for the administrat ...
, the traditional urban centre of
Huizhou
Huizhou ( zh, c= ) is a city in central-east Guangdong Province, China, forty-three miles north of Hong Kong. Huizhou borders the provincial capital of Guangzhou to the west, Shenzhen and Dongguan to the southwest, Shaoguan to the north, Heyua ...
,
Guangdong
Guangdong (, ), alternatively romanized as Canton or Kwangtung, is a coastal province in South China on the north shore of the South China Sea. The capital of the province is Guangzhou. With a population of 126.01 million (as of 2020) ...
. The locals also call the dialect ''Bendihua'' () and distinguish it from the dialect spoken in
Meixian and
Danshui, Huiyang, which they call
Hakka
The Hakka (), sometimes also referred to as Hakka Han, or Hakka Chinese, or Hakkas are a Han Chinese subgroup whose ancestral homes are chiefly in the Hakka-speaking provincial areas of Guangdong, Fujian, Jiangxi, Guangxi, Sichuan, Hunan, Zhej ...
().
Classification
The classification of the Huizhou dialect is disputed because it shows characteristics of both
Yue and
Hakka
The Hakka (), sometimes also referred to as Hakka Han, or Hakka Chinese, or Hakkas are a Han Chinese subgroup whose ancestral homes are chiefly in the Hakka-speaking provincial areas of Guangdong, Fujian, Jiangxi, Guangxi, Sichuan, Hunan, Zhej ...
. Most scholars classify the Huizhou dialect as a dialect of Hakka, but some scholars, most notably Liu Shuxin, consider it to be a dialect of Yue.
The first edition of the ''
Language Atlas of China
The ''Language Atlas of China'' (), published in two parts in 1987 and 1989, maps the distribution of both the varieties of Chinese and minority languages of China.
It was a collaborative effort by the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the ...
'' puts it into its own subgroup under Hakka known as the Huizhou subgroup (). In the second edition, it is still classified as a dialect of Hakka, but it is placed under the Mei–Hui cluster () of the Yue–Tai subgroup ().
Liu Shuxin groups it together with other similar dialects spoken around the middle and upper reaches of the
Dong River, including the
Heyuan dialect, into the Hui–He branch () of Yue. Chang Song-hing and Zhuang Chusheng propose a similar grouping called the Hui–He subgroup (), but they classify the group as Hakka.
Phonology
Tones
The Huizhou dialect has seven tones:
Other than these seven tones, (55) appears in some grammatical particles.
Grammar
Verbal aspect
The Huizhou dialect has several
aspectual markers that attach to the
verb
A verb () is a word (part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual descri ...
as
suffix
In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns, adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can carry ...
es:
Pronouns
The Huizhou dialect has the following personal pronouns. The plural is formed by a tone change.
Vocabulary
The Huizhou dialect has many cognates with
Yue and/or
Hakka
The Hakka (), sometimes also referred to as Hakka Han, or Hakka Chinese, or Hakkas are a Han Chinese subgroup whose ancestral homes are chiefly in the Hakka-speaking provincial areas of Guangdong, Fujian, Jiangxi, Guangxi, Sichuan, Hunan, Zhej ...
(cognates with Huizhou are shaded in blue):
Notes
References
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{{Chinese language
Hakka Chinese
Yue Chinese
Huizhou