The Ningde dialect (

Eastern Min Eastern Min or Min Dong (, Foochow Romanized: ) is a branch of the Min group of the Chinese languages of China. The prestige form and most commonly cited representative form is the Fuzhou dialect, the speech of the capital of Fujian. Geogra ...

: ) is a dialect of

Chinese spoken in urban areas of

Ningde Ningde,; Foochow Romanized: Nìng-dáik; also known as ''Mindong''; zh, s=闽东, p=Mǐndōng, links=no; Foochow Romanized: Mìng-dĕ̤ng; lit. East of Fujian previously Chinese postal romanization, romanized as Ningteh and Ning-Taik, is a prefe ...

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 ...

, which is a

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

in the northeastern coast of

Fujian Fujian is a provinces of China, province in East China, southeastern 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 capital is Fuzhou and its largest prefe ...

province.

Phonology

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

Initials

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

Rimes

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: , , , , , , , , 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 rules are shown in the table below:

Tone sandhi

The Ningde dialect has extremely extensive

tone sandhi Tone sandhi is a phonological change that occurs in tonal languages. It involves changes to the tones assigned to individual words or morphemes, based on the pronunciation of adjacent words or morphemes. This change typically simplifies a bidirec ...

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):

Notes

References

* {{Min Chinese Eastern Min