Jin Chinese

Jin (simplified Chinese: 晋语; traditional Chinese: 晉語; pinyin: Jìnyǔ) is a group of varieties of Chinese spoken by roughly 48 million people in northern China,^[1] including most of Shanxi province, much of central Inner Mongolia, and adjoining areas in Hebei, Henan, and Shaanxi provinces. The status of Jin is disputed among linguists; some prefer to include it within Mandarin, but others set it apart as a closely related, but separate sister-group.

Classification

After the concept of

1. Use of the entering tone as a diagnostic feature is inconsistent with the way that all other Chinese dialect groups have been delineated based on the reflexes of the Middle Chinese voiced initials.
2. Certain other Mandarin dialects also preserve the glottal stop, especially the Jianghuai dialects, and so far, no linguist has claimed that these dialects should also be split from Mandarin.

Dialects

The Language Atlas of China divides Jin into the following eight subgroups:^[4]

• Bingzhou subgroup [zh] (Chinese: 并州片), spoken in central Shanxi (the ancient Bing Province), including Taiyuan. Most dialects under this subgroup can distinguish the light entering tone from the dark one, with only 1 level tone. In many dialects, especially those to the south of Taiyuan, the voiced obstruents from Middle Chinese become tenuis in all 4 tones, namely [b] → [p], [d] → [t] and [g] → [k].
• Lüliang subgroup [zh] (Chinese: 呂梁片), spoken in western Shanxi (including Lüliang) and northern Shaanxi. Dialects under this subgroup can differentiate light entering tone from dark entering tone. In most dialects, the voiced obstruents from Middle Chinese become aspirated in both level and entering tones, namely [b] → [pʰ], [d] → [tʰ] and [g] → [kʰ].
• Shangdang
  ) in southeastern Shanxi. Dialects under this subgroup can differentiate light entering tone from dark entering tone. The palatalization of velar consonants does not occur in some dialects.
• Wutai subgroup [zh] (simplified Chinese: 五台片; traditional Chinese: 五臺片), spoken in parts of northern Shanxi (including Wutai County) and central Inner Mongolia. A few Dialects under this subgroup can differentiate light entering tone from dark entering tone, while the others cannot. The fusion of the level tone and the rising one occurred in some dialects, though some linguists claim every dialect under this subgroup has this feature.^[5]
• Da-Bao subgroup [zh] (Chinese: 大包片), spoken in parts of northern Shanxi and central Inner Mongolia, including Baotou.
• Zhangjiakou–Hohhot subgroup (simplified Chinese: 张呼片; traditional Chinese: 張呼片), spoken in Zhangjiakou in northwestern Hebei and parts of central Inner Mongolia, including Hohhot.
• Han-Xin subgroup [zh] (Chinese: 邯新片), spoken in southeastern Shanxi, southern Hebei (including Handan) and northern Henan (including Xinxiang).
• Zhi-Yan subgroup (Chinese: 志延片), spoken in Zhidan County and Yanchuan County in northern Shaanxi.

The

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

• Tone sandhi rules depend on the grammatical structure of the words being put together. Hence, an adjective–noun compound may go through different sets of changes compared to a verb–object compound.^[11]
• There are Jin varieties in which the "dark level" tone category (yīnpíng 阴平) and "light level" (yángpíng 阳平) tone have merged in isolation but can still be distinguished in tone sandhi contexts. That is, while e.g. Standard Mandarin has a tonal distinction between Tone 1 and Tone 2, corresponding words in Jin Chinese may have the same tone when pronounced separately. However, these words can still be distinguished in connected speech. For example, in Pingyao Jin, dark level tou 偷 'secretly' and ting 听 'to listen' on the one hand, and light level tao 桃 'peach' and hong 红 'red' on the other hand, all have the same rising tone [˩˧] when pronounced in isolation. Yet, when these words are combined into touting 偷听 'eavesdropping' and taohong 桃红 'peach red', the tonal distinction emerges. In touting, tou has a falling tone [˧˩] and ting has a high-rising tone [˧˥], whereas both syllables in taohong still have the same low-rising tone [˩˧] as in isolation.^[12]

Grammar

Jin readily employs prefixes such as

In addition, there are a number of words in Jin that evolved, evidently, by splitting a mono-syllabic word into two, adding an 'l' in between (cf.

/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.

This may be a kind of reservation for double-initials in Old Chinese, although this is still controversial. For example, the character 孔 (pronounced /kʰoːŋ/ in Mandarin) which appears more often as 窟窿 /kʰuəʔ luŋ/ in Jin, had the pronunciation like /kʰloːŋ/ in Old Chinese.^{[citation needed]}

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 "yon" being archaic.)^{[citation needed]}

Vocabulary

Lexical diversity in Jin Chinese is obvious, with some words having a very distinct regionality. Usually, there are more unique words in the core dialects than in the non-core dialects and moreover, some cannot be represented in Chinese characters.

References

Citations

Sources

• The Commercial Press
  .
• Hou 侯, Jingyi 精一; Shen 沈, Ming 明 (2002), Hou, Jingyi (ed.), 现代汉语方言概论 [Overview of Modern Chinese Dialects] (in Chinese (China)), Shanghai Education Publishing House,
  ISBN 7-5320-8084-6
• Kurpaska, Maria (2010), Chinese Language(s): A Look Through the Prism of The Great Dictionary of Modern Chinese Dialects, De Gruyter Mouton,
  ISBN 978-3-11-021914-2
• Yan, Margaret Mian (2006), Introduction to Chinese Dialectology, LINCOM Europa,
  ISBN 978-3-89586-629-6
  .

External links

Jin Chinese test of Wikipedia at Wikimedia Incubator

• Classification of the Jin Dialects
• Details of the Pingyao Dialect