Gangou ( zh, s=甘沟话, p=Gāngōuhuà) is a variety of

Mandarin Chinese Mandarin ( ; zh, s=, t=, p=Guānhuà, l=Mandarin (bureaucrat), officials' speech) is the largest branch of the Sinitic languages. Mandarin varieties are spoken by 70 percent of all Chinese speakers over a large geographical area that stretch ...

that has been strongly influenced by Monguor (Mongol) and

Amdo Amdo ( �am˥˥.to˥˥ zh , c = 安多 , p = Ānduō ), also known as Domey (), is one of the three traditional Tibetan regions. It encompasses a large area from the Machu (Yellow River) to the Drichu (Yangtze). Amdo is mostly coterminous wi ...

(Tibetan). It is representative of

Chinese varieties There are hundreds of local Chinese language varieties forming a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family, many of which are not mutually intelligible. Variation is particularly strong in the more mountainous southeast part of mainland China ...

spoken in rural

Qinghai Qinghai is an inland Provinces of China, province in Northwestern China. It is the largest provinces of China, province of China (excluding autonomous regions) by area and has the third smallest population. Its capital and largest city is Xin ...

that have been influenced by neighboring minority languages.Feng Lide and Kevin Stuart, "Interethnic cultural contact on the Inner Asian frontier: The Gangou people of Minhe County, Qinghai." ''Sino-Platonic Papers'' 33 (1992), pp 4–

/ref> Gangou Mandarin is spoken in Minhe Hui and Tu Autonomous County, at the very eastern tip of Qinghai, an area of the Gansu–Qinghai Sprachbund with a large minority population, and where even today Han Chinese were a minority in close contact with their neighbors. Many of the local Han may actually have little Chinese ancestry. The dialect has a number of common words borrowed from Monguor, as well as kinship terms from Monguor and Tibetan. Some syntactic structures, such as an

SOV word order SOV may refer to: * SOV, a former ticker symbol for Sovereign Bank * SOV, a legal cryptocurrency created by the Sovereign Currency Act of 2018 of the Republic of the Marshall Islands * SOV, the National Rail station code for Southend Victoria rail ...

and direct objects marked by a

postposition Adpositions are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in, under, towards, behind, ago'', etc.) or mark various semantic roles (''of, for''). The most common adpositions are prepositions (which precede their complemen ...

, have parallels in Monguor and to a lesser extent Tibetan. There are also phonological differences from

Standard Mandarin Standard Chinese ( zh, s=现代标准汉语, t=現代標準漢語, p=Xiàndài biāozhǔn hànyǔ, l=modern standard Han speech) is a modern Standard language, standard form of Mandarin Chinese that was first codified during the Republic of ...

, though it is not clear whether these are shared by local Mandarin dialects not so strongly influenced by minority languages. For example, Standard ''y'' and ''w'' are pronounced and , so ''yi'' 'one' is while ''wu'' 'five' and ''wang'' 'king' are and . There is no distinction between final ''-n'' and ''-ng'': both are replaced by a nasal vowel. The consonants represented by ''j, q, x'' in pinyin do not exist; they are replaced by ''z, c, s'' before ''i'' and by ''g, k, h'' elsewhere, at least in some cases reflecting their historical origin. Thus 解 ''jiě'' 'untie' is pronounced ''gai'', like

Cantonese Cantonese is the traditional prestige variety of Yue Chinese, a Sinitic language belonging to the Sino-Tibetan language family. It originated in the city of Guangzhou (formerly known as Canton) and its surrounding Pearl River Delta. While th ...

''gaai²'', and 鞋 ''xié'' 'shoe' is pronounced ''hai'', like Cantonese ''haai⁴''.Although all the examples before other vowels correspond to historical forms, not all examples before ''i'' do. For example, 鷄 ''jī'' 'chicken' is ''gai¹'' in Cantonese, but ''zi'' in Gangou dialect. Thus it may be that Feng and Stuart should be taken at face value when they imply that historical *g *k *h and historical *z *c *s both become ''z c s'' before ''i'' and both become ''g k h'' elsewhere.

References

{{Chinese language Mandarin Chinese