Wenzhounese ( zh, t=溫州話, s=温州话, p= Wēnzhōuhuà, Wenzhounese: ), also known as Oujiang ( zh, t=甌江話, s=瓯江话, p=Ōujiānghuà, labels=no), Tong Au ( zh, t=東甌片, s=东瓯片, p=Dōng'ōupiàn, labels=no) or Au Nyü ( zh, t=甌語, s=瓯语, p=Ōuyǔ, labels=no), is the language spoken in
Wenzhou
Wenzhou; Chinese postal romanization, historically known as Wenchow is a prefecture-level city in China's Zhejiang province. Wenzhou is located at the extreme southeast of Zhejiang, bordering Lishui, Zhejiang, Lishui to the west, Taizhou, Zheji ...
, the southern prefecture of
Zhejiang
)
, translit_lang1_type2 =
, translit_lang1_info2 = ( Hangzhounese) ( Ningbonese) (Wenzhounese)
, image_skyline = 玉甑峰全貌 - panoramio.jpg
, image_caption = View of the Yandang Mountains
, image_map = Zhejiang i ...
, China. It is the most divergent division 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 ...
, with little to no
mutual intelligibility
In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between different but related language varieties in which speakers of the different varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. Mutual intelli ...
with other Wu dialects or any other
variety of Chinese
There are hundreds of local Chinese language varieties forming a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family, many of which are not mutually intelligible. Variation is particularly strong in the more mountainous southeast part of mainland Chi ...
. It features noticeable elements in common with
Min Chinese
Min ( zh, t=, s=闽语, p=Mǐnyǔ, poj=Bân-gú / Bân-gír / Bân-gí; Bàng-uâ-cê, BUC: ''Mìng-ngṳ̄'') is a broad group of Sinitic languages with about 75 million native speakers. These languages are spoken in Fujian province and Chaoshan ...
, which is spoken to the south in
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 ...
. ''Oujiang'' is sometimes used as the broader term, and ''Wenzhou'' for Wenzhounese proper in a narrow sense.
Given its long history and the isolation of the region in which it is spoken, Wenzhounese is so unusual in its
phonology
Phonology (formerly also phonemics or phonematics: "phonemics ''n.'' 'obsolescent''1. Any procedure for identifying the phonemes of a language from a corpus of data. 2. (formerly also phonematics) A former synonym for phonology, often pre ...
that it has the reputation of being the least comprehensible dialect for an average
Mandarin
Mandarin or The Mandarin may refer to:
Language
* Mandarin Chinese, branch of Chinese originally spoken in northern parts of the country
** Standard Chinese or Modern Standard Mandarin, the official language of China
** Taiwanese Mandarin, Stand ...
speaker. It preserves a large amount of vocabulary of
classical Chinese
Classical Chinese is the language in which the classics of Chinese literature were written, from . For millennia thereafter, the written Chinese used in these works was imitated and iterated upon by scholars in a form now called Literary ...
lost elsewhere, earning itself the nickname "the
living fossil
A living fossil is a Deprecation, deprecated term for an extant taxon that phenotypically resembles related species known only from the fossil record. To be considered a living fossil, the fossil species must be old relative to the time of or ...
", and has distinct grammatical differences from Mandarin.
Wenzhounese is one of five
varieties of Chinese
There are hundreds of local Chinese language varieties forming a branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages, Sino-Tibetan language family, many of which are not Mutual intelligibility, mutually intelligible. Variation is particularly strong in the m ...
other than Standard Mandarin used for broadcasting by
China Radio International
China Radio International (CRI) is the state-owned international radio broadcaster of China. It is currently headquartered in Babaoshan, Shijingshan, Beijing. It was founded on December 3, 1941, as Radio Peking. It later adopted the pinyin fo ...
, alongside
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 ...
,
Hokkien
Hokkien ( , ) is a Varieties of Chinese, variety of the Southern Min group of Chinese language, Chinese languages. Native to and originating from the Minnan region in the southeastern part of Fujian in southeastern China, it is also referred ...
,
Teochew, and
Hakka
The Hakka (), sometimes also referred to as Hakka-speaking Chinese, or Hakka Chinese, or Hakkas, are a southern Han Chinese subgroup whose principal settlements and ancestral homes are dispersed widely across the provinces of southern China ...
.
Classification
Wenzhounese is part of the
Wu group of Chinese dialects, sharing many linguistic features with them. These are spoken over the Zhejiang and south
Jiangsu
Jiangsu is a coastal Provinces of the People's Republic of China, province in East China. It is one of the leading provinces in finance, education, technology, and tourism, with its capital in Nanjing. Jiangsu is the List of Chinese administra ...
provinces. Wenzhounese is seen as a typical representative of southern Wu.
Geographic distribution
Wenzhounese is spoken primarily in Wenzhou and the surrounding southern portion of
Zhejiang
)
, translit_lang1_type2 =
, translit_lang1_info2 = ( Hangzhounese) ( Ningbonese) (Wenzhounese)
, image_skyline = 玉甑峰全貌 - panoramio.jpg
, image_caption = View of the Yandang Mountains
, image_map = Zhejiang i ...
, China. To a lesser extent, it is also spoken in scattered pockets 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 ...
in southeastern China. Overseas, it is spoken in increasingly larger communities in the United States in
Flushing Chinatown in the Queens borough of New York City, and the
Chinatowns in Brooklyn in
New York City
New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...
. Wenzhounese is also spoken by some
Overseas Chinese
Overseas Chinese people are Chinese people, people of Chinese origin who reside outside Greater China (mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan). As of 2011, there were over 40.3 million overseas Chinese. As of 2023, there were 10.5 milli ...
communities in Europe, in particular Italy, France, and Spain. It is used more widely among the
Chinese people in Italy
The community of Chinese people in Italy has grown rapidly in the past ten years. Official statistics indicate there are at least 308,984 Chinese citizens in Italy, although these figures do not account for former Chinese citizens who have acquir ...
than Mandarin. Over 80% of the Chinese diaspora that are resident in the city of
Prato
Prato ( ; ) is a city and municipality (''comune'') in Tuscany, Italy, and is the capital of the province of Prato. The city lies in the northeast of Tuscany, at an elevation of , at the foot of Monte Retaia (the last peak in the Calvana ch ...
, Tuscany, were born in Zhejiang Province.
Dialects
Wenzhounese can be generally divided into the following three dialects:
* Northern Dialect, including dialects spoken in Wenzhou, Ouhai, Yongqiong, Yongjia.
* Southern Dialect, including
Rui'an dialect
The Ruian dialect (; pronounced in the Rui'an dialect; standard ) is a dialect of Wu Chinese spoken in Ruian. It belongs to the Oujiang sub-group of Wu Chinese dialects. It is closely related to the Pingyang dialect and Lucheng dialect, general ...
,
Wencheng dialect, Longgang dialect, Pingyang dialect, etc.
* Northeastern Dialect, which is spoken in the city of Yueqing.
The most important difference between eastern Wenzhounese dialects such as Wencheng and Wenzhou proper are tonal differences (Wencheng has no falling tones) and the retention of before :
The tones of all other Oujiang dialects are similar to Wenzhounese. (Wenzhounese ''puu'' transcribes the lengthened
entering tone
A checked tone, commonly known by the Chinese calque entering tone, is one of the four syllable types in the phonology of Middle Chinese. Although usually translated as "tone", a checked tone is not a tone in the western phonetic sense but rather ...
.)
Phonology
Consonants
is lateral, and is
palatal
The palate () is the roof of the mouth in humans and other mammals. It separates the oral cavity from the nasal cavity.
A similar structure is found in crocodilians, but in most other tetrapods, the oral and nasal cavities are not truly sepa ...
.
Vowels
The only
coda is the
velar nasal
The voiced velar nasal, also known as eng, engma, or agma (from Greek 'fragment'), is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. It is the sound of ''ng'' in English ''sing'' as well as ''n'' before velar consonants as in ''E ...
, in and
syllabic .
Tone
Citation tones
Wenzhou has three
phonemic tone
Tone is the use of pitch (music), pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or to inflection, inflect words. All oral languages use pitch to express emotional and other para-linguistic informat ...
s. While it has eight phonetic tones, most of these are predictable: The
''yīn–yáng'' tone split dating from Middle Chinese still corresponds to the voicing of the initial consonant in Wenzhou, and the ''shǎng'' tones are abrupt and end in
glottal stop
The glottal stop or glottal plosive is a type of consonantal sound used in many Speech communication, spoken languages, produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract or, more precisely, the glottis. The symbol in the International Phonetic ...
(this has been used as evidence for a
similar situation independently posited for
Old Chinese
Old Chinese, also called Archaic Chinese in older works, is the oldest attested stage of Chinese language, Chinese, and the ancestor of all modern varieties of Chinese. The earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones ...
). The ''rù'' tones, however, are unusual in being distinct despite having lost their final stops; in addition, the
vowel has lengthened, and the tone has become more complex than the other tones (though some speakers may simplify them to low falling or rising tones).
The ''shǎng'' and ''rù'' tones are barely distinguishable apart from the voicing of the initial consonant, and so are phonetically closer to two tones than four. Chen (2000) summarizes the tones as M & ML (''ping''), MH (''shǎng''), HM & L (''qu''), and dipping (MLM, ''rù''); not only are the ''píng'' and ''qù'' pairs obviously distinct phonetically, but they behave as four different tones in the ways they undergo
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 ...
.
As in
Shanghainese
The Shanghainese language, also known as the Shanghai dialect, or Hu language, is a variety of Wu Chinese spoken in the central districts of the city of Shanghai and its surrounding areas. It is classified as part of the Sino-Tibetan langua ...
, in Wenzhounese only some of the syllables of a phonological word carry tone. In Wenzhounese there may be three such syllables, with the tone of any subsequent (post-tonic) syllables determined by the last of these. In addition, there may be pre-tonic syllables (
clitic
In morphology and syntax, a clitic ( , backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a ...
s), which take a low tone. However, in Wenzhounese only one tonic word may exist in a
prosodic unit
In linguistics, a prosodic unit is a segment of speech that occurs with specific prosodic properties. These properties can be those of stress, intonation (a single pitch and rhythm contour), or tonal patterns.
Prosodic units occur at a hie ...
; all other words are reduced to low tone.
Tone sandhi
Up to three tonic syllables may occur together, but the number of resulting tones is reduced by
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 ...
. Of the six phonetic tones, there are only fourteen lexical patterns created by two tonic syllables. With one exception, the ''shǎng'' and ''qù'' tones reduce to HM (''yīn qù'') before any other tone, and again with one exception, the ''rù'' tone does not interact with a following tone. The ''shǎng'' and ''rù'' tones change a preceding non-''rù'' tone to HM, and are themselves never affected.
(Sandhi that are exceptions to the generalizations above are in bold.)
With a compound word of three syllables, the patterns above apply to the last two. The antepenultimate tonic syllable takes only two possible tones, by
dissimilation
In phonology, particularly within historical linguistics, dissimilation is a phenomenon whereby similar consonants or vowels in a word become less similar or elided. In English, dissimilation is particularly common with liquid consonants such ...
: low if the following syllable (in sandhi form) starts high (HM), high otherwise. So, for example, the unusually long compound noun "daily necessities" (lit., 'firewood-rice-oil-salt-sauce-vinegar-tea') has the underlying tones
:, ML.MH.ML.ML.HM.HM.ML,
Per sandhi, the last two syllables become L.L. The antepenult then dissimilates to H, and all pre-tonic syllables become L, for:
:/L.L.L.L.H.L.L/
At a phrasal level, these tones may separate, with a HM tone, for example, shifting to the beginning of a phrase. In the lexicalized phrase "radio receiver" ('wireless telephone tube'), the underlying tones are
:, ML.HM.L.L.ML,
Per sandhi, the last two become HM.ML. There is no dissimilation, explained by this being grammatically a lexicalized phrase rather than a compound. The HM shifts forward, with intermediate syllables becoming M (the tone the HM leaves off at):
:/HM.M.M.M.ML/
Although checked (MLM) syllables rarely change in compound words, they can change in phrases: "tall steel case" is underlyingly M.MLM.HM. The middle syllable shifts to HM, and sandhi operates on this *HM.HM sequence to produce HM.ML. The HM then shifts back, yielding /HM.M.ML/.
Such behaviour has been used to support arguments that contour tones in languages like Chinese are single units and they are independent of vowels or other segments.
Grammar
Morphology
Wenzhou has a tonal
deictic
In linguistics, deixis () is the use of words or phrases to refer to a particular time (e.g. ''then''), place (e.g. ''here''), or person (e.g. ''you'') relative to the context of the utterance. Deixis exists in all known natural languagesLyons, J ...
morpheme. To convey the sense of "this", the
classifier changes its tone to ''rù'' (dipping), and a voiced initial consonant is devoiced. For example, from 'group' there is 'this group', and from 'some (people)' there is 'these (people)'.
Romanization
Reputation for eccentricity
Wenzhounese is reputed to have been used during the
Second Sino-Japanese War
The Second Sino-Japanese War was fought between the Republic of China (1912–1949), Republic of China and the Empire of Japan between 1937 and 1945, following a period of war localized to Manchuria that started in 1931. It is considered part ...
during wartime communication via
code talker
A code talker was a person employed by the military during wartime to use a little-known language as a means of secret communication. The term is most often used for United States service members during the World Wars who used their knowledge ...
s and in the
Sino-Vietnamese War
The Sino-Vietnamese War (also known by other names) was a brief conflict that occurred in early 1979 between China and Vietnam. China launched an offensive ostensibly in response to Vietnam's invasion and occupation of Cambodia in 1978, whi ...
for programming military
code
In communications and information processing, code is a system of rules to convert information—such as a letter, word, sound, image, or gesture—into another form, sometimes shortened or secret, for communication through a communicati ...
. There is a common rhymed saying in China that reflects this comprehension difficulty: "Fear not the Heavens, fear not the Earth, but fear the Wenzhou man speaking Wenzhounese" ().
Examples
There are several sub-branches of Oujiang dialects, and some are not mutually intelligible with the Wenzhou city dialect and the Wencheng dialect, but neighboring dialects are often mutually intelligible. For example, there are 2 dialects spoken in Li'ao Village in the
Ouhai District of Wenzhou: one spoken in Baimen (), where the local people have as their surname, and one spoken in Wangzhai (), where local people have normally or as their surname. Their dialects are almost fully mutually intelligible, except for a few vocabulary items. An example would be the word for "garbage" (), which is in the Baimen dialect and in the Wangzhai dialect.
Numbers in Oujiang Dialects
(The long vowels transcribe the lengthened ''ru'' tone.)
Literature in Wenzhounese
A translation of part of the
New Testament
The New Testament (NT) is the second division of the Christian biblical canon. It discusses the teachings and person of Jesus in Christianity, Jesus, as well as events relating to Christianity in the 1st century, first-century Christianit ...
, specifically the
four gospels
Gospel originally meant the Christian message ("the gospel"), but in the second century AD the term (, from which the English word originated as a calque) came to be used also for the books in which the message was reported. In this sense ...
and the book of
Acts, was published in 1894 under the title "''Chaò-Chḯ Yi-sû Chī-tuh Sang Iah Sing Shī: Sz̀ fuh-iang tà sź-du 'ae-djüe fa üe-tsiu t'û¹-'ò''", with the entire book in Romanized Wenzhou dialect.
[ (in Wenzhounese).]
See also
*
List of varieties of Chinese
The following is a list of Sinitic languages and their dialects. For a traditional dialectological overview, see also varieties of Chinese.
Classification
"Chinese" is a blanket term covering many different varieties spoken across China. Ma ...
*
Wenzhounese romanisation
*
Suzhou dialect
Suzhounese (Suzhounese: ; ), also known as the Suzhou Language, is the language belonging to the Sinitic Language Family traditionally spoken in the city of Suzhou in Jiangsu, China. Suzhounese is a dialect of Wu Chinese, and was tradition ...
*
Shanghainese
The Shanghainese language, also known as the Shanghai dialect, or Hu language, is a variety of Wu Chinese spoken in the central districts of the city of Shanghai and its surrounding areas. It is classified as part of the Sino-Tibetan langua ...
*
Hangzhou dialect
References
Citations
General sources
*
Qian Nairong (1992). ''Dāngdài Wúyǔ yánjiū''. (Contemporary Wu linguistics studies). Shanghai: Shanghai jiaoyu chubanshe. (錢乃榮. 1992. 當代吳語研究. 上海敎育出版社)
* Shen, Kecheng (2009). ''Wēnzhōuhuà cíyǔ kǎoshì''. Ningbo: Ningbo chubanshe. (宁波 : 宁波出版社, 2009.)
*
{{Zhejiang topics
Languages of China
Languages of France
Languages of Italy
Languages of Spain
Wenzhou
Wu Chinese