The Jinhui dialect ( zh, s=金汇方言, p=Jīnhuì fāngyán), also known as Dônđäc ( zh, c=偒傣, p=Dàngdǎi), is a dialect of

Wu Chinese , region = Shanghai, Zhejiang, southern Jiangsu, parts of Anhui and Jiangxi provinces; overseas and migrant communities , ethnicity = Wu , speakers = million , date = 2021 , ref = e27 , fa ...

spoken in the town of ,

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...

Shanghai Shanghai, Shanghainese: , Standard Chinese pronunciation: is a direct-administered municipality and the most populous urban area in China. The city is located on the Chinese shoreline on the southern estuary of the Yangtze River, with the ...

's suburban

Fengxian District Fengxian District, is a suburban district in the south of Shanghai with a land area of , a registered population (as of 2020) of 1,140,872, and 1.5 to 2 times more migrants. It is known for its relative rusticity, as well as its beaches and oc ...

. It has about 100,000 native speakers. Jinhui is located near the border of the ancient states of Wu and Yue during the

Spring and Autumn period The Spring and Autumn period () was a period in History of China, Chinese history corresponding roughly to the first half of the Eastern Zhou (256 BCE), characterized by the gradual erosion of royal power as local lords nominally subject t ...

. Like other Wu dialects, Dônđäc has preserved many special features of the

Old Yue language The Old Yue language (, Vietnamese: Tiếng Việt cổ) is an unclassified language, or group(s) of various languages, spoken in ancient southern China, and northern Vietnam circa 700 BCE or later. It can refer to Yue, which was spoken in the re ...

. Dônđäc has 20 oral vowel qualities, plus many nasal and rhotic ones. According to a

Fudan University Fudan University (FDU) is a public university, national public university in Yangpu, Shanghai, Yangpu, Shanghai, China. It is affiliated with the Ministry of Education (China), Ministry of Education and is co-funded with the Shanghai Municipal ...

study that was published in the journal ''

Science Science is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and predictions about the universe. Modern science is typically divided into twoor threemajor branches: the natural sciences, which stu ...

'', Dônđäc has the largest oral vowel quality inventory in the world (phonemically speaking), and ranks highest in overall phonemic diversity among all languages studied in the research. According to linguist Qian Nairong, who spent eight years teaching in Fengxian and studying its dialects, the reason Dônđäc has so many vowels is because Jinhui is the place where five

isogloss An isogloss, also called a heterogloss, is the geographic boundary of a certain linguistics, linguistic feature, such as the pronunciation of a vowel, the meaning of a word, or the use of some morphological or syntactic feature. Isoglosses are a ...

es intersect.

Phonology

Jinhui has 20 oral vowel phonemes, much more than

Standard Mandarin Standard Chinese ( zh, s=现代标准汉语, t=現代標準漢語, p=Xiàndài biāozhǔn hànyǔ, l=modern standard Han speech) is a modern Standard language, standard form of Mandarin Chinese that was first codified during the Republic of ...

which can theoretically be analysed as having as few as 2 vowels. Pairs of checked and non-checked finals have different vowels. These differences are meaningful in distinguishing phonemes, and therefore they are considered different vowels. Whole-syllable rimes: 鱼 �̍ � 亩 ̩ There is also a rhotic vowel which also occurs in restricted environments and is not argued to be a separate vowel, as well as syllabic nasals . There are no

diphthong A diphthong ( ), also known as a gliding vowel or a vowel glide, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of ...

s in Jinhui; all vowels are

monophthong A monophthong ( ) is a pure vowel sound, or one whose articulation at beginning and end is relatively fixed, with the tongue moving neither up nor down and neither forward nor backward towards a new position of articulation. A monophthong can be ...

s. Jinhui also has a large number of consonants, including glottalized stops and a palatalized series: The glottalized consonants are unique to the Jinhui dialect and neighboring areas. Most distinctive is , found for example in 金 . There are other glottalized consonants, such as , etc., but these are predictable by the tone and are therefore

allophone In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is one of multiple possible spoken soundsor '' phones''used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, the voiceless plos ...

s. are phonetically unusual for a Chinese variety; these and the palatalized series correspond to the Mandarin medial vowels ''-u-'' and ''-i-''. It is not clear how many phonemic tones Jinhui has. Of the eight traditional tones, one pair is found in checked syllables, and so not phonemically distinctive. All four pairs may depend on the voicing of the initial, as in other varieties of Wu, but the existence of suggests either that they are distinctive after sonorants, or that the consonant inventory is larger. There is also a 'light' (unstressed) tone, 2.

Education

In an effort to preserve its unique dialect, Jinhui began teaching it in school in 2012, with a textbook written by Fudan University professor Li Hui, a Jinhui native, and Hong Yulong, the principal of Jinhui School.

References

{{reflist Culture in Shanghai Wu Chinese