The Wenchang dialect ( zh, s=文昌话, t=文昌話, p=Wénchānghuà) is a dialect of

Hainanese Hainanese ( Hainan Romanised: ''Hái-nâm-oe'', Hainanese Pinyin: ''Hhai3 nam2 ue1'', ), also known as Qiongwen (), Qiongyu () or Hainan Min () is a group of Min Chinese varieties spoken in the far southern Chinese island province of Hain ...

spoken in Wenchang, a

county-level city A county-level city () is a County-level divisions of China, county-level administrative division of the China, People's Republic of China. County-level cities have judiciary, judicial but no legislature, legislative rights over their own local or ...

in the northeast of

Hainan Hainan is an island provinces of China, province and the southernmost province of China. It consists of the eponymous Hainan Island and various smaller islands in the South China Sea under the province's administration. The name literally mean ...

, an island province in southern

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 ...

. It is considered the prestige form of Hainanese, and is used by the provincial broadcasting media.

Phonology

The initials of the Wenchang dialect are as follows: The semivowels and are in

complementary distribution In linguistics, complementary distribution (as distinct from contrastive distribution and free variation) is the relationship between two different elements of the same kind in which one element is found in one set of environments and the other ele ...

with , and may be treated as

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 of the same phoneme. The voiced stops and occur with only about ten words each. There are five vowels, , , , and . The high vowels and may also occur as medials. The possible finals are: The Wenchang dialect has six tones on isolated syllabes:

Notes

References

Sources

* * Hainan Min {{st-lang-stub