Kunming dialect

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article does not cite any references or sources. (December 2007) Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.

This article or section needs to be wikified to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please help improve this article with relevant internal links. (December 2007)

The Kunming dialect of standard Chinese (Mandarin), known as Kunminghua (昆明话), is spoken by the inhabitants of Kunming city and the surrounding areas of Yunnan province in the southwest of China. The dialect is basically similar to standard Chinese, the major differences being the unique pronunciation of certain sounds and the development of unique phrases and terms. As with all dialects of Chinese, speakers of the Kunming dialect read standard Chinese characters, though the pronunciation of words can, in some cases, be markedly different. For example the Chinese word 什么 (meaning 'what') is pronounced shen-me in the standard dialect, but in vernacular Kunming dialect the word is pronounced nǎn-yàng. In some cases entirely unique phrases are used, which may or may not have equivalent written characters. One common example is the term 'rèn bù dé' meaning 'I don't know.' The standard dialect term is markedly different: 不知道 'bu zhi-dao'. Another example would be "hai-zi" meaning shoes in the kunming dialect, whereas in mandarin "hai-zi" means child and "xie zi" is the phrase for shoes in mandarin.