Northern Min language
| Northern Min | |
|---|---|
| Min Bei | |
| Mâing-bă̤-ngṳ̌/閩北語 | |
| Native to | China |
| Region | Nanping (northwest Fujian) |
|
Native speakers
|
(2,191,000 cited 1987) |
|
Sino-Tibetan
|
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| Dialects | |
| Kienning Colloquial Romanized (Jian'ou dialect) | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | minb1236 |
Northern Min
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Counties of Nanping prefecture, Fujian
|
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Northern Min (simplified Chinese: 闽北; traditional Chinese: 閩北; pinyin: Mǐnběi), is a group of mutually intelligibleMin varieties spoken in Nanping prefecture of northwestern Fujian.
Early classifications of varieties of Chinese, such as those of Li Fang-Kuei in 1937 and Yuan Jiahua in 1960, divided Min into Northern and Southern subgroups. However, in a 1963 report on a survey of Fujian, Pan Maoding and colleagues argued that the primary split was between inland and coastal groups. In a reclassification that has been followed by most dialectologists since, they restricted the term Northern Min to inland dialects of Nanping prefecture, and classified the coastal dialects of Fuzhou and Ningde as Eastern Min.
According to the Language Atlas of China, Northern Min varieties are spoken throughout the counties of Wuyishan (formerly Chong'an), Jianyang, Jian'ou, Zhenghe and Songxi, in the southern part of Pucheng County and the northeastern part of Shunchang County, and in Yanping District except for the urban area of Nanping, which is an island of an isolated Mandarin dialect of uncertain affinity. The Jianyang and Jian'ou dialects are often taken as representative.
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Wikipedia