Jin Chinese

Jin Chinese
Traditional Chinese 晉語
Simplified Chinese 晋语
Hanyu Pinyin Jìn Yǔ
Jin
晋语

Jinyu written in Chinese characters
Spoken in China
Region most of Shanxi province; central Inner Mongolia; parts of Hebei, Henan, Shaanxi
Native speakers 45 million  (date missing)
Language family
Language codes
ISO 639-3 cjy
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Jin (simplified Chinese: 晋语; traditional Chinese: 晉語; pinyin: jìnyǔ), or Jinese, Jinhua or Jin-yu, is a subdivision of spoken Chinese. Its exact status is disputed among linguists; some prefer to classify it under Mandarin, while others set it apart as an independent branch.

Jin is spoken over most of Shanxi province, except for the lower Fen River valley; much of central Inner Mongolia; as well as adjoining areas in Hebei, Henan, and Shaanxi provinces. Cities covered within this area include Taiyuan, Zhangjiakou, Hohhot, Jiaozuo, and Yulin. In total Jin is spoken by roughly 45 million people.

Like all other varieties of Chinese, there is plenty of dispute as to whether Jin is a language or a dialect. See Identification of the varieties of Chinese for the issues surrounding this dispute.

Contents

Classification

Until the 1980s, Jin was universally considered to be a dialect of Mandarin Chinese. In 1985, however, Li Rong proposed that Jin should be considered a separate top-level grouping, similar to Cantonese or Wu Chinese (i.e. a "language", from the Western perspective). His main criterion was the fact that Jin dialects had preserved the entering tone as a separate category, still marked with a glottal stop as in the Wu dialects, but distinct in this respect from the other Mandarin dialects. Some other linguists have subsequently adopted this classification. However, a large number of linguists studying the Chinese language(s), perhaps a majority, do not agree that Jin should be considered its own language.[1]

The main objections are:[1]

  1. Languages and dialect groups are not normally delineated based on a single feature, but rather on a cluster of features distinguishing the group from other related varieties, as well as mutual intelligibility. Use of a single diagnostic feature is inconsistent with the way that all other Chinese dialect groups have been delineated.
  2. In fact, certain (other) Mandarin dialects also preserve the glottal stop, especially the Southwestern Mandarin dialects, and so far no linguist has claimed that these dialects should also be split off.
  3. Jin is partly intelligible to nearby speakers of (other) Mandarin dialects, especially after a fairly short period of familiarization.
  4. Overall, Jin appears to be no more distinct from adjoining Mandarin dialects than Southwestern Mandarin is from the dialects that it adjoins.

Dialects

Jin can be divided into the following 8 subdivisions

Sounds

Unlike most varieties of Mandarin, Jin has preserved a final glottal stop, which is the remnant of a final stop consonant (/p/, /t/ or /k/). This is in common with Early Mandarin of the Yuan Dynasty (c. 14th century AD) and with a number of modern southern varieties of Chinese. In Middle Chinese, syllables closed with a stop consonant had no tone; Chinese linguists, however, prefer to categorize such syllables as belonging to a separate tone class, traditionally called the "entering tone". Syllables closed with a glottal stop in Jin are still toneless, or alternatively, Jin can be said to still maintain the entering tone. (In standard Mandarin Chinese, syllables formerly ending with a glottal stop have been reassigned to one of the other tone classes in a seemingly random fashion.)

Jin employs extremely complex tone sandhi, or tone changes that occur when words are put together into phrases. The tone sandhi of Jin is remarkable in two ways among Chinese varieties:

Grammar

Jin readily employs prefixes such as 圪 /kəʔ/, 忽 /xəʔ/, and 入 /zəʔ/, in a variety of derivational constructions. For example:
入鬼 "fool around" < 鬼 "ghost, devil"

In addition, there are a number of words in Jin that evolved, evidently, by splitting a mono-syllabic word into two. For example:

/pəʔ ləŋ/ < 蹦 pəŋ "hop"
/tʰəʔ luɤ/ < 拖 tʰuɤ "drag"
/kuəʔ la/ < 刮 kua "scrape"
/xəʔ lɒ̃/ < 巷 xɒ̃ "street"

A similar process can in fact be found in most Mandarin dialects (e.g. 窟窿 kulong < 孔 kong), but it is especially common in Jin.

Vocabulary

Some dialects of Jin make a three-way distinction in demonstratives. (Modern English, for example, has only a two-way distinction between "this" and "that", with "yonder" being archaic.)

Examples

References

Hou Jingyi 侯精一 and Shen Ming 沈明 (2002). Jin-yu (晋语). In Hou Jingyi 侯精一 (Ed.) Xiandai Hanyu Fangyan Gailun 现代汉语方言概论. Shanghai: Shanghai Education Press. ISBN 7-5320-8084-6.

Notes

  1. ^ a b Kurpaska, Maria (2010). Chinese Language(s): A Look Through the Prism of The Great Dictionary of Modern Chinese Dialects. Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-021914-2. 

External links