The Ningde dialect ( Eastern Min: ) is a dialect of Eastern Min Chinese spoken in urban areas of

Ningde Ningde (; Foochow Romanized: Nìng-dáik), also known as Mindong (; Foochow Romanized: Mìng-dĕ̤ng; lit. East of Fujian), is a prefecture-level city located along the northeastern coast of Fujian province, People's Republic of China. It borders ...

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by population, most populous country, with a Population of China, population exceeding 1.4 billion, slig ...

, which is a

prefecture-level city A prefecture-level city () or prefectural city is an administrative division of the People's Republic of China (PRC), ranking below a province and above a county in China's administrative structure. During the Republican era, many of Chi ...

in the northeastern coast of

Fujian 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 ...

province.

Phonology

The Ningde dialect has 15 initials, 78 rimes and 7 tones.

Initials

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Rimes

monophthong A monophthong ( ; , ) is a pure vowel sound, one whose articulation at both beginning and end is relatively fixed, and which does not glide up or down towards a new position of articulation. The monophthongs can be contrasted with diphthongs, wh ...

s: , , , , , , , , 18 compound vowels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 15 nasal rimes: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 26 checked rimes: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , These 6 nasal rimes tend to merge into nasal rimes ending with coda , and will disappear in future: , , , , , These 5 checked rimes tend to merge into nasal rimes ending with coda , and will disappear in future: , , , ,

Tones

Initial assimilation

The two-syllable initial

assimilation Assimilation may refer to: Culture * Cultural assimilation, the process whereby a minority group gradually adapts to the customs and attitudes of the prevailing culture and customs ** Language shift, also known as language assimilation, the prog ...

rules are shown in the table below:

Tone sandhi

The Ningde dialect has extremely extensive

tone sandhi Tone sandhi is a phonological change occurring in tonal languages, in which the tones assigned to individual words or morphemes change based on the pronunciation of adjacent words or morphemes. It usually simplifies a bidirectional tone into a ...

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 columns give the first syllable's original citation tone, while the rows give the citation tone of the second syllable):

References

* {{Min Chinese Eastern Min