The Yong'an dialect (
Central Min: 永安事,
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 ...
: 永安話) is a
Central Min dialect spoken in
Yong'an,
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 ...
,
China.
Phonology
The Yong'an dialect has 17 initials, 41 rimes and 6 tones.
Initials
The initials of the Yong'an dialect are:
* The initials and occur in free variation.
* can also be heard as voiced plosives in free variation.
* Palato-alveolar sounds can also be heard as alveolo-palatal sounds in free variation among speakers.
Rimes
The Yong'an dialect has a rich set of oral and nasal vowels, but allows only -m and -ŋ as a final consonant.
Tones
The tones are:
Tone sandhi
The Yong'an 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:
References
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{{Min Chinese
Central Min