The Zhenjiang dialect is a form of Eastern Mandarin spoken in the town of

Zhenjiang Zhenjiang, alternately romanized as Chinkiang, is a prefecture-level city in Jiangsu Province, China. It lies on the southern bank of the Yangtze River near its intersection with the Grand Canal. It is opposite Yangzhou (to its north) and ...

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 ...

Province,

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 ...

. Zhenjiang is situated on the south bank of the

Yangtze river The Yangtze or Yangzi ( or ) is the longest river in Eurasia and the third-longest in the world. It rises at Jari Hill in the Tanggula Mountains of the Tibetan Plateau and flows including Dam Qu River the longest source of the Yangtze, i ...

between

Nanjing Nanjing or Nanking is the capital of Jiangsu, a province in East China. The city, which is located in the southwestern corner of the province, has 11 districts, an administrative area of , and a population of 9,423,400. Situated in the Yang ...

and

Changzhou Changzhou is a prefecture-level city in southern Jiangsu, China. It was previously known as Yanling, Lanling, and Jinling. Located on the southern bank of the Yangtze River, Changzhou borders the provincial capital of Nanjing to the west, Zhen ...

. It is thus at the intersection of China's Mandarin and Wu speaking regions. About 2.7 million Chinese live in the area where the Zhenjiang dialect is predominant.Da Yuan-yi,
A Review on the Dialect in the Transitional Belt in Zhenjiang
" ''Journal of Jiangsu University'', July 2003. In ancient times, Zhenjiang spoke Wu. Today, Wu is the language of nearby

, as well as

Shanghai Shanghai, Shanghainese: , Standard Chinese pronunciation: is a direct-administered municipality and the most populous urban area in China. The city is located on the Chinese shoreline on the southern estuary of the Yangtze River, with the ...

and

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 ...

Province. Mandarin speakers from the north have been immigrating to Zhenjiang since the fourth century, gradually changing the character of the local dialect. In modern times, the city speaks a dialect that is transitional between the Eastern Mandarin of Nanjing, located just west of the city, and the Taihu dialect of Wu spoken in Changzhou, which is just east of the city. The Zhenjiang dialect is comprehensible to Nanjing residents, but not to Changzhou residents. The issue of tones in the Zhenjiang dialect has been a topic of scholarly study. Nanjing residents use the four tones of Mandarin, while Changzhou residents use seven or eight tones. According to a study by Qiu Chunan, the Zhenjiang dialect has five citation tones: Tone 1 (42) (a sharp fall from pitch 4 to pitch 2, or ''yinping''), Tone 2 (35) (a rising tone or ''yangping''), Tone 3 (32) (slight falling tone or ''shang''), Tone 4 (55) (high even or ''qu''), and Tone 5 (5) (

checked 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 rathe ...

or ''ru'').Qiu, Chunan.
Sandhi Patterns of Zhenjiang Dialect
, ''Speech Prosody'', 2012. Qiu's study used residents who had grown up in the Daxi Road area, where the standard form of the dialect is said to be spoken. The checked tone was a feature of Chinese spoken in the Middle Ages, but it is not part of Mandarin. Applying the theory of government phonology to the issue, Bao Zhiming noted that non-even tones become even when they appear before the high even, or 55, tone.Bao, Zhiming, �
On the nature of tone
��, Unpublished Ph. D. Thesis, MIT, Cambridge, 96-104, 1990. See also

by He Junjie (''Dialect'', 2011-01).

References

{{Reflist, 1 Mandarin Chinese Zhenjiang