Sanxiang (in
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 ...
''Samheung'', in the language itself ''Sahiu'') is a
Min variety of
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 ...
Chinese mostly spoken in
Sanxiang 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 ...
, China.
Despite its close proximity, Sanxiang is not very closely related to the surrounding dialects in the region, which belong to the
Yue group, and thus forms a "dialect island" of Min speakers. It is one of three enclaves of
Min in Zhongshan, the others being
Longdu and
Nanlang.
Notes
References
Guangdong
Southern Min
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