The Hui'an dialect (), is a

variety of Chinese 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 mainl ...

mostly spoken in

Hui'an () is a county under the jurisdiction of the prefecture-level city of Quanzhou, Fujian, People's Republic of China. It is situated in the middle of the Fujian coast, between Quanzhou and Meizhou Bay. The county has a population of 921,794, as o ...

in South

Fujian Province Fujian (; alternately romanized as Fukien or Hokkien) is a province on the southeastern coast of China. Fujian is bordered by Zhejiang to the north, Jiangxi to the west, Guangdong to the south, and the Taiwan Strait to the east. Its cap ...

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...

. It belongs to the

Hokkien The Hokkien () variety of Chinese is a Southern Min language native to and originating from the Minnan region, where it is widely spoken in the south-eastern part of Fujian in southeastern mainland China. It is one of the national languages in ...

subgroup of

Southern Min Southern Min (), Minnan (Mandarin pronunciation: ) or Banlam (), is a group of linguistically similar and historically related Sinitic languages that form a branch of Min Chinese spoken in Fujian (especially the Minnan region), most of Taiwan ( ...

Phonology

The Hui'an dialect has 14 phonemic initials and over 80 finals.

Consonants

The three voiced phonemes , and are realized as the nasal stops , and , respectively, before nasalized finals. The phoneme may be treated as a plosive, i.e. . The alveolar phonemes , and are palatalized to , and , respectively, before .

Finals

Grammar

The demonstrative system has five pairs of pronouns with a two-way distinction:

Comparison with other varieties of Hokkien

Compared with the

Quanzhou dialect The Quanzhou dialects (), also rendered Chin-chew or Choanchew, are a collection of Hokkien dialects spoken in southern Fujian (in southeast China), in the area centered on the city of Quanzhou. Due to migration, various Quanzhou dialects are sp ...

(spoken in the central

urban area An urban area, built-up area or urban agglomeration is a human settlement with a high population density and infrastructure of built environment. Urban areas are created through urbanization and are categorized by urban morphology as cities, t ...

Quanzhou Quanzhou, postal map romanization, alternatively known as Chinchew, is a prefecture-level city, prefecture-level port city on the north bank of the Jin River, beside the Taiwan Strait in southern Fujian, China. It is Fujian's largest metrop ...

city), the greatest differences are present in the rimes:

Notes

References

* * * * Hokkien-language dialects Quanzhou {{st-lang-stub