The Yong'an dialect (
Central Min: 永安事,
Mandarin Chinese
Mandarin ( ; zh, s=, t=, p=Guānhuà, l=Mandarin (bureaucrat), officials' speech) is the largest branch of the Sinitic languages. Mandarin varieties are spoken by 70 percent of all Chinese speakers over a large geographical area that stretch ...
: 永安話) is a
Central Min dialect spoken in
Yong'an,
Sanming
Sanming ( zh, s=, p=Sānmíng, Foochow Romanized: Săng-mìng), also known as Minzhong ( zh, s=闽中 , t=閩中 , 中=Mǐnzhōng , links=no), is a prefecture-level city in western Fujian province, China. It borders Nanping City to the north, Fuz ...
in Western
Fujian Province
Fujian is a province in 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 prefecture city by population is Qua ...
,
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 ...
.
Phonology
The Yong'an dialect has 17 initials, 41 rimes and 6 tones.
Initials
The initials of the Yong'an dialect are:
* The initials and occur in free variation.
* can also be heard as voiced plosives in free variation.
* Palato-alveolar sounds can also be heard as alveolo-palatal sounds in free variation among speakers.
Rimes
The Yong'an dialect has a rich set of oral and nasal vowels, but allows only -m and -ŋ as a final consonant.
Tones
The tones are:
Tone sandhi
The Yong'an 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:
Notes
References
Sources
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*
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{{Min Chinese
Central Min