Shaxian dialect (
Central Min: 沙縣事,
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 ...
: 沙縣話) is a dialect of
Central Min Chinese spoken in
Sha County,
Sanming in Western
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 ...
of
China.
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 rimes;
#, , only connected with
nasal vowel 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
Fuzhou (; , Fuzhounese: Hokchew, ''Hók-ciŭ''), alternately romanized as Foochow, is the capital and one of the largest cities in Fujian province, China. Along with the many counties of Ningde, those of Fuzhou are considered to constitute ...
,
Eastern Min
Eastern Min or Min Dong (, Foochow Romanized: Mìng-dĕ̤ng-ngṳ̄), is a branch of the Min group of Sinitic languages of China. The prestige form and most-cited representative form is the Fuzhou dialect, the speech of the capital of Fujian.
G ...
.
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 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 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'').
References
*
{{Min Chinese
Central Min