The Longdu dialect is a variety of the
Eastern Min branch of
Chinese originating from the towns of
Dachong and
Shaxi in
Zhongshan
Zhongshan ( zh, c=中山 ), alternately romanized via Cantonese as Chungshan, is a prefecture-level city in the south of the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong province, China. As of the 2020 census, the whole city with 4,418,060 inhabitants is n ...
in the
Pearl River Delta
The Pearl River Delta Metropolitan Region is the low-lying area surrounding the Pearl River estuary, where the Pearl River flows into the South China Sea. Referred to as the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area in official documents, ...
of
Guangdong
) means "wide" or "vast", and has been associated with the region since the creation of Guang Prefecture in AD 226. The name "''Guang''" ultimately came from Guangxin ( zh, labels=no, first=t, t= , s=广信), an outpost established in Han dynasty ...
. The two regions Shaxi and Dachong are together informally known as the Longdu region to locals and those overseas. There are more than 40 villages in the region and they are held together by their shared dialect, which may be classified as endangered due to its deterioration in status and rapidly decreasing popularity even within the Longdu region. Despite its proximity, the Longdu dialect is not very closely related to the surrounding dialects in the region, which belong to the
Yue group. As such, Longdu forms a "dialect island" of Min speakers. It is one of three enclaves of
Min in Zhongshan, the others being
Sanxiang and
Nanlang.
Vocabulary
According to Søren Egerod, who published an extensive study of the dialect based on fieldwork conducted in 1949, the vocabulary consists of three layers:
* a pre-
Tang colloquial layer, which seems to be related to the
Fuzhou dialect,
* a Tang-period colloquial layer, which seems to be related to various
Southern Min
Southern Min (), Minnan ( Mandarin pronunciation: ) or Banlam (), is a group of linguistically similar and historically related Chinese languages that form a branch of Min Chinese spoken in Fujian (especially the Minnan region), most of Taiwa ...
varieties, and
* a layer of literary readings based on the
Shiqi dialect, the local Yue variety.
Distribution
The Longdu dialect is the mother tongue of many overseas Chinese. Its native speakers generally understand
Cantonese
Cantonese is the traditional prestige variety of Yue Chinese, a Sinitic language belonging to the Sino-Tibetan language family. It originated in the city of Guangzhou (formerly known as Canton) and its surrounding Pearl River Delta. While th ...
, but not vice versa. According to the Language Documentation Training Center at the
University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa: "A lot of children do not speak the language in their daily lives. The population of speakers is diminishing."
This is generally ascribed to the emigration of speakers from the Longdu region to other countries, and due to the lack of inter-generational transmission. Only
Mandarin is taught to children at school, due to its status as the official national language. In contrast, in the home, parents and grandparents teach the children only Cantonese,
given that the Longdu region is within Zhongshan, Guangdong, and that Cantonese is generally viewed as the
lingua franca
A lingua franca (; ; for plurals see ), also known as a bridge language, common language, trade language, auxiliary language, link language or language of wider communication (LWC), is a Natural language, language systematically used to make co ...
of Guangdong.
See also
*
List of Chinese dialects
Notes
References
{{reflist
External links
Phonology at Glossika
Zhongshan
Eastern Min