Jin Chinese
| Jin | |
|---|---|
| 晉語 / 晋语 | |
Jinyu written in Chinese characters
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| Native to | China |
| Region | most of Shanxi province; central Inner Mongolia; parts of Hebei, Henan, Shaanxi |
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Native speakers
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48 million (2007) |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | jiny1235 |
| Linguasphere | 79-AAA-c |
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| Jin Chinese | |||||||||||
| Traditional Chinese | 晉語 | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Simplified Chinese | 晋语 | ||||||||||
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| Alternative Chinese name | |||||||||||
| Traditional Chinese | 山西話 | ||||||||||
| Simplified Chinese | 山西话 | ||||||||||
| Literal meaning | Shanxi speech | ||||||||||
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| Transcriptions | |
|---|---|
| Standard Mandarin | |
| Hanyu Pinyin | Jìn Yǔ |
| Yue: Cantonese | |
| Yale Romanization | Jeun Yuh |
| Transcriptions | |
|---|---|
| Standard Mandarin | |
| Hanyu Pinyin | Shānxī Huà |
| Yue: Cantonese | |
| Yale Romanization | Sāansāi Wá |
Jin (simplified Chinese: 晋语; traditional Chinese: 晉語; pinyin: jìnyǔ) is a group of Chinese spoken by roughly 45 million people in northern China. Its geographical distribution covers most of Shanxi province except for the lower Fen River valley, 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 classify it under Mandarin, but others set it apart as an independent branch.
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 (that is, its own dialect group). His main criterion was 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.
Oher linguists have subsequently adopted this classification. However, some linguists still do not agree that Jin should be considered a separate dialect group for these reasons:
Jin can be divided into the following 8 subdivisions:
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 the 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.)
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Wikipedia