The Jinhui dialect (), also known as Dônđäc (), is a dialect of

Wu Chinese The Wu languages (; Wu romanization and IPA: ''wu6 gniu6'' [] ( Shanghainese), ''ng2 gniu6'' [] (Suzhounese), Mandarin pinyin and IPA: ''Wúyǔ'' []) is a major group of Sinitic languages spoken primarily in Shanghai, Zhejiang, Zhejiang Provin ...

spoken in the town of ,

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by population, most populous country, with a Population of China, population exceeding 1.4 billion, slig ...

Shanghai Shanghai (; , , Standard Chinese, Standard Mandarin pronunciation: ) is one of the four Direct-administered municipalities of China, direct-administered municipalities of the China, People's Republic of China (PRC). The city is located on the ...

's suburban

Fengxian District Fengxian District, is a suburban district in the south of Shanghai with a land area of , a registered population (as of 2010) of 1,083,400, and 1.5 to 2 times more migrants. It is known for its relative rusticity, as well as its beaches and oc ...

. It has about 100,000 native speakers. Jinhui is located near the border of the ancient states of Wu and Yue during the

Spring and Autumn period The Spring and Autumn period was a period in Chinese history from approximately 770 to 476 BC (or according to some authorities until 403 BC) which corresponds roughly to the first half of the Eastern Zhou period. The period's name derives fr ...

. Like other Wu dialects, Dônđäc has preserved many special features of the

Old Yue language The Old Yue language ( zh, c=古越語, p=''Gu Yueyu'') is an unknown unclassified language (or many different languages). It can refer to Yue, which was spoken in the realm of Yue during the Spring and Autumn period. It can also refer to the v ...

. Dônđäc has 20 oral vowel qualities, plus many nasal and rhotic ones. According to a

Fudan University Fudan University () is a national public research university in Shanghai, China. Fudan is a member of the C9 League, Project 985, Project 211, and the Double First Class University identified by the Ministry of Education of China. It is als ...

study that was published in the journal ''

Science Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence ...

'', Dônđäc has the largest oral vowel quality inventory in the world (phonemically speaking), and ranks highest in overall phonemic diversity among all languages studied in the research. According to linguist

Qian Nairong Qian Nairong (Shanghainese: ; born 1945 in Shanghai) is a Chinese linguist. He received a master's degree in Chinese from Fudan University in 1981. He is a professor and the head of the Chinese Department at Shanghai University. He is a research ...

, who spent eight years teaching in Fengxian and studying its dialects, the reason Dônđäc has so many vowels is because Jinhui is the place where five

isogloss An isogloss, also called a heterogloss (see Etymology below), is the geographic boundary of a certain linguistic feature, such as the pronunciation of a vowel, the meaning of a word, or the use of some morphological or syntactic feature. Major ...

es intersect.

Phonology

Jinhui has 20 oral vowel phonemes, compared with 2 in

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 ...

. Pairs of checked and non-checked finals have different vowels. These differences are meaningful in distinguishing phonemes, therefore they are considered different vowels. There is also a rhotic vowel which also occurs in restricted environments and is not argued to be a separate vowel, as well as syllabic nasals . There are no

diphthong A diphthong ( ; , ), also known as a gliding vowel, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of the speech ...

s in Jinhui; all vowels are

monophthong A monophthong ( ; , ) is a pure vowel sound, one whose articulation at both beginning and end is relatively fixed, and which does not glide up or down towards a new position of articulation. The monophthongs can be contrasted with diphthongs, wh ...

s. Jinhui also has a large number of consonants, including glottalized stops and a palatalized series: The glottalized consonants are unique to the Jinhui dialect and neighboring areas. Most distinctive is , found for example in 金 . There are other glottalized consonants, such as , etc., but these are predictable by the tone and so are not distinctive. are phonetically unusual for a Chinese variety; these and the palatalized series correspond to the Mandarin medial vowels ''-u-'' and ''-i-''. It is not clear how many phonemic tones Jinhui has. Of the eight traditional tones, one pair is found in checked syllables, and so not phonemically distinctive. All four pairs may depend on the voicing of the initial, as in other varieties of Wu, but the existence of suggests either that they are distinctive after sonorants, or that the consonant inventory is larger. There is also a 'light' (unstressed) tone, 2.

Education

In an effort to preserve its unique dialect, Jinhui began teaching it in school in 2012, with a textbook written by Fudan University professor Li Hui, a Jinhui native, and Hong Yulong, the principal of Jinhui School.

References

{{reflist Culture in Shanghai Wu Chinese