Shaxian dialect (
Central Min: 沙縣事,
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 ...
: 沙縣話) is a dialect of
Central Min Chinese spoken in
Sha County
Shaxian District (), formerly Sha County, is a District (China), District of Sanming, Fujian, Fujian Province, China, People's Republic of China. Shaxian District is the hometown of Shaxian delicacies, which are considered part of the food heritag ...
,
Sanming in Western
Fujian Province of
China
China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...
.
Phonology
Shaxian dialect has 17 initials, 36 rimes and 6 tones.
Initials
Notes:
#, , only connected with
round mouth rimes ();
#, , cannot be connected with
nasal vowel
A nasal vowel is a vowel that is produced with a lowering of the soft palate (or velum) so that the air flow escapes through the nose and the mouth simultaneously, as in the French vowel /ɑ̃/ () or Amoy []. By contrast, oral vowels are p ...
rimes;
#, , only connected with
nasal vowel
A nasal vowel is a vowel that is produced with a lowering of the soft palate (or velum) so that the air flow escapes through the nose and the mouth simultaneously, as in the French vowel /ɑ̃/ () or Amoy []. By contrast, oral vowels are p ...
rimes.
Rimes
Some rimes come in pairs in the above table, and they are closely related with the tones: the one to the left only exist in dark level (), light level (), light rising () and departing (); while the other only exist in dark rising () and entering (). It can be compared with
close and open rimes of
Fuzhou dialect
The Fuzhou language ( zh, t=福州話, s=福州话, p=Fúzhōuhuà; FR: ), also Foochow, Hokchew, Hok-chiu, or Fuzhounese, is the prestige variety of the Eastern Min branch of Min Chinese spoken mainly in the Mindong region of Eastern Fujian ...
,
Eastern Min
Eastern Min or Min Dong (, Foochow Romanized: ) is a branch of the Min group of the Chinese languages of China. The prestige form and most commonly cited representative form is the Fuzhou dialect, the speech of the capital of Fujian.
Geogra ...
.
Tones
The entering tones in Sanming dialect don't have any entering tone coda () such as , , and . It's quite different from many other Chinese dialects.
Tone sandhi
Shaxian dialect has extremely extensive
tone sandhi
Tone sandhi is a phonological change that occurs in tonal languages. It involves changes to the tones assigned to individual words or morphemes, based on the pronunciation of adjacent words or morphemes. This change typically simplifies a bidirec ...
rules: in an utterance, only the last syllable pronounced is not affected by the rules.
The two-syllable tonal sandhi rules are shown in the table below (the rows give the first syllable's original citation tone, while the columns give the citation tone of the second syllable):
Some rimes may change their pronunciation because they are closely related with the tones (
''see above'').
Notes
References
*
{{Min Chinese
Central Min