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

Mandarin Chinese Mandarin (; ) is a group of Chinese (Sinitic) dialects that are natively spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of the phonology of Standard Chinese, the official language ...

that has been strongly influenced by Monguor (Mongol) and

Amdo Amdo ( �am˥˥.to˥˥ ) is one of the three traditional Tibetan regions, the others being U-Tsang in the west and Kham in the east. Ngari (including former Guge kingdom) in the north-west was incorporated into Ü-Tsang. Amdo is also the bi ...

(Tibetan). It is representative of

Chinese varieties Chinese, also known as Sinitic, is a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family consisting of hundreds of local varieties, many of which are not mutually intelligible. Variation is particularly strong in the more mountainous southeast of main ...

spoken in rural

Qinghai Qinghai (; alternately romanized as Tsinghai, Ch'inghai), also known as Kokonor, is a landlocked province in the northwest of the People's Republic of China. It is the fourth largest province of China by area and has the third smallest po ...

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 and direct objects marked by a

postposition Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions (or broadly, in traditional grammar, simply prepositions), are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in'', ''under'', ''towards'', ''before'') or mark various ...

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

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 ...

, 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 ( zh, t=廣東話, s=广东话, first=t, cy=Gwóngdūng wá) is a language within the Chinese (Sinitic) branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages originating from the city of Guangzhou (historically known as Canton) and its surrounding a ...

''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