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Linguistic Atlas Of Chinese Dialects
The ''Linguistic Atlas of Chinese Dialects'' ( zh, s=汉语方言地图集, p=Hànyǔ Fāngyán Dìtú Jí), edited by Cao Zhiyun and published in 2008 in three volumes, is a dialect atlas documenting the geography of varieties of Chinese. Unlike the ''Language Atlas of China'' (1987), which aims to map the boundaries of both minority languages and Chinese dialect groups, the new atlas is a collection of maps of various features of dialects, in the tradition of the '' Atlas linguistique de la France'' and its successors. Methods The project spanned 8 years, from 2001 to 2007. A year of preparatory work began in December 2001, including selecting survey sites, codifying fieldwork procedures and conducting trial surveys. The 930 sites throughout China and Taiwan were selected so that there was usually one site per county in southeast China and one site in every three or four counties in the Mandarin and Jin areas, preferably in non-contiguous counties. Thus, for example, ther ...
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Cao Zhiyun
Cao Zhiyun (), born in Jinhua, Zhejiang in 1961, is a Chinese linguist and dialectologist who is a professor at Beijing Language and Culture University. Career He is best known for his work as the primary editor of the groundbreaking 2008 '' Linguistic Atlas of Chinese Dialects'' but has made numerous other significant contributions to Chinese dialectology, with a focus on the Southern Wu varieties in and around his native Jinhua. Despite his focus, his works exhibit an all around thorough and in-depth understanding of all Chinese dialect families and contemporary linguistics and is widely regarded in the field as one of China's leading authorities on Chinese dialectology. See also * Wu Chinese * Dialectology Dialectology (from Ancient Greek, Greek , ''dialektos'', "talk, dialect"; and , ''-logy, -logia'') is the scientific study of dialects: subsets of languages. Though in the 19th century a branch of historical linguistics, dialectology is often now c ... References {{D ...
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Geographic Information System
A geographic information system (GIS) consists of integrated computer hardware and Geographic information system software, software that store, manage, Spatial analysis, analyze, edit, output, and Cartographic design, visualize Geographic data and information, geographic data. Much of this often happens within a spatial database; however, this is not essential to meet the definition of a GIS. In a broader sense, one may consider such a system also to include human users and support staff, procedures and workflows, the Geographic Information Science and Technology Body of Knowledge, body of knowledge of relevant concepts and methods, and institutional organizations. The uncounted plural, ''geographic information systems'', also abbreviated GIS, is the most common term for the industry and profession concerned with these systems. The academic discipline that studies these systems and their underlying geographic principles, may also be abbreviated as GIS, but the unambiguous GIScie ...
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Languages Of Macau
Macau is an autonomous territory within China. A Portuguese Empire, Portuguese colony until 1999, Macau has a diverse culture firmly rooted in Cantonese culture, with a mix of influences from East Asia and Western Europe. Macau is known for being the largest Gambling in Macau, gambling center in the world. People and languages The two official languages of Macau are Chinese language, Chinese and Portuguese language, Portuguese, although the latter is only spoken by a small minority. English language, English is also widely spoken. , 80.1% of the population speak Cantonese as their daily language. In 2018 Reuters stated "there are signs that Chinese is being prioritized in government." The Macanese language, generally known as ''Patuá'', is a distinctive Creole language, creole that is still spoken by several dozen members of the Macanese people, an ethnic group of mixed Asian people, Asian and Portuguese people, Portuguese ancestry that accounts for a small percentage of Macau ...
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Languages Of Hong Kong
During the British Hong Kong, British colonial era, English was the sole official language until 1978. Today, the Hong Kong Basic Law, Basic Law of Hong Kong states that English_language, English and Chinese_language, Chinese are the two official languages of Hong Kong. All roads and government signs are bilingual, and both languages are used in academia, business and the courts, as well as in most government materials today. Cantonese Chinese As the majority of the population in Hong Kong are descendants of migrants from China's Guangdong, Canton Province, the vast majority speak standard Cantonese or other Yue Chinese varieties as a first language, with smaller numbers of speakers of Hakka Language or the Teochew dialect of Southern Min. Multilingual Hong Kong In addition, immigrants and expatriates from the West and other Asian countries have contributed much to Hong Kong's linguistic and demographic diversity. The geographical element of this diversity can be seen in ...
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Demographics Of The People's Republic Of China
The People's Republic of China is the second most-populous country in the world with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, only surpassed by India. Historically, China has always been one of the nation-states with the most population. China has an enormous population with a relatively small youth component, partially a result of China's one-child policy that was implemented from 1979 until 2015, which limited urban families to one offspring and rural families to two. , Chinese state media reported the country's total fertility rate to be 1.09. China was the world's most populous country from at least 1950 until being surpassed by India in 2023. By one estimate, in 2024 China's population stood at about 1.408 billion, down from the 1.412 billion recorded in the 2020 census. According to the 2020 census, 91.11% of the population was Han Chinese, and 8.89% were minorities. China's population growth rate is -0.10%. China conducted its sixth national population census i ...
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Languages Of China
There are several hundred languages in the People's Republic of China. The predominant language is Standard Chinese, which is based on Beijing dialect, Beijingese, but there are hundreds of related Chinese languages, collectively known as ''Hanyu'' ( zh, s=汉语, t=漢語, p=Hànyǔ, 'Han language'), that are spoken by 92% of the population. The Chinese (or 'Sinitic') languages are typically divided into Varieties of Chinese, seven major language groups, and their study is a distinct academic discipline. They differ as much from each other Morphology (linguistics), morphologically and phonetically as do English, German and Danish, but meanwhile share the same writing system (Hanzi) and are mutually intelligible in written form. There are in addition approximately 300 Ethnic minorities in China, minority languages spoken by the remaining 8% of the population of China. The ones with greatest state support are Mongolian language, Mongolian, Standard Tibetan, Tibetan, Uyghur language ...
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Grammar
In linguistics, grammar is the set of rules for how a natural language is structured, as demonstrated by its speakers or writers. Grammar rules may concern the use of clauses, phrases, and words. The term may also refer to the study of such rules, a subject that includes phonology, morphology (linguistics), morphology, and syntax, together with phonetics, semantics, and pragmatics. There are, broadly speaking, two different ways to study grammar: traditional grammar and #Theoretical frameworks, theoretical grammar. Fluency in a particular language variety involves a speaker internalizing these rules, many or most of which are language acquisition, acquired by observing other speakers, as opposed to intentional study or language teaching, instruction. Much of this internalization occurs during early childhood; learning a language later in life usually involves more direct instruction. The term ''grammar'' can also describe the linguistic behaviour of groups of speakers and writer ...
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Chinese Characters
Chinese characters are logographs used Written Chinese, to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture. Of the four independently invented writing systems accepted by scholars, they represent the only one that has remained in continuous use. Over a documented history spanning more than three millennia, the function, style, and means of writing characters have changed greatly. Unlike letters in alphabets that reflect the sounds of speech, Chinese characters generally represent morphemes, the units of meaning in a language. Writing all of the frequently used vocabulary in a language requires roughly 2000–3000 characters; , nearly have been identified and included in ''The Unicode Standard''. Characters are created according to several principles, where aspects of shape and pronunciation may be used to indicate the character's meaning. The first attested characters are oracle bone inscriptions made during the 13th century&n ...
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Lexicon
A lexicon (plural: lexicons, rarely lexica) is the vocabulary of a language or branch of knowledge (such as nautical or medical). In linguistics, a lexicon is a language's inventory of lexemes. The word ''lexicon'' derives from Greek word (), neuter of () meaning 'of or for words'. Linguistic theories generally regard human languages as consisting of two parts: a lexicon, essentially a catalogue of a language's words (its wordstock); and a grammar, a system of rules which allow for the combination of those words into meaningful sentences. The lexicon is also thought to include bound morphemes, which cannot stand alone as words (such as most affixes). In some analyses, compound words and certain classes of idiomatic expressions, collocations and other phrasemes are also considered to be part of the lexicon. Dictionaries are lists of the lexicon, in alphabetical order, of a given language; usually, however, bound morphemes are not included. Size and organization Items ...
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Palatal Consonant
Palatals are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate (the middle part of the roof of the mouth). Consonants with the tip of the tongue curled back against the palate are called retroflex. Characteristics The most common type of palatal consonant is the extremely common approximant , which ranks among the ten most common sounds in the world's languages. The nasal is also common, occurring in around 35 percent of the world's languages, in most of which its equivalent obstruent is not the stop , but the affricate . Only a few languages in northern Eurasia, the Americas and central Africa contrast palatal stops with postalveolar affricates—as in Hungarian, Czech, Latvian, Macedonian, Slovak, Turkish and Albanian. Consonants with other primary articulations may be palatalized, that is, accompanied by the raising of the tongue surface towards the hard palate. For example, English (spelled ''sh'') has such a palatal componen ...
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Obstruent
An obstruent ( ) is a speech sound such as , , or that is formed by ''obstructing'' airflow. Obstruents contrast with sonorants, which have no such obstruction and so resonate. All obstruents are consonants, but sonorants include vowels as well as consonants. Subclasses Obstruents are subdivided into: * plosives (oral stops), such as , with complete occlusion of the vocal tract, often followed by a release burst; * fricatives, such as , with limited closure, not stopping airflow but making it turbulent; * affricates, which begin with complete occlusion but then release into a fricative-like release, such as . Voicing Obstruents are often prototypically voiceless In linguistics, voicelessness is the property of sounds being pronounced without the larynx vibrating. Phonologically, it is a type of phonation, which contrasts with other states of the larynx, but some object that the word phonation implies v ..., but voiced obstruents are common. This contrasts with sonorant ...
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Voice (phonetics)
Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds (usually consonants). Speech sounds can be described as either voiceless (otherwise known as ''unvoiced'') or voiced. The term, however, is used to refer to two separate concepts: *Voicing can refer to the ''articulatory process'' in which the vocal folds vibrate, its primary use in phonetics to describe phones, which are particular speech sounds. *It can also refer to a classification of speech sounds that tend to be associated with vocal cord vibration but may not actually be voiced at the articulatory level. That is the term's primary use in phonology: to describe phonemes; while in phonetics its primary use is to describe phones. For example, voicing accounts for the difference between the pair of sounds associated with the English letters ⟨s⟩ and ⟨z⟩. The two sounds are transcribed as and to distinguish them from the English letters, which have several possible pronunci ...
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