Pronunciation [ɦãtseiɦʊ] | ISO 639-6 hgou | |
Native to People's Republic of China Region Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China Native speakers (1.2 million cited 1987) Language family Sino-Tibetan
Chinese
Wu
Taihu
Hangzhou dialect | ||
Hangzhou dialect (simplified Chinese: 杭州话; traditional Chinese: 杭州話; pinyin: hángzhōuhuà; Rhangzei Rhwa), is spoken in the city of Hangzhou and its immediate suburbs, but excluding areas further away from Hangzhou such as Xiāoshān (蕭山) and Yúháng (余杭) (both originally county-level cities and now the districts within Hangzhou City). The number of speakers of the Hangzhouvian has been estimated to be about 1.2 to 1.5 million. It is a dialect of Wu, one of the Chinese varieties. Hangzhouvian is of immense interest to Chinese historical phonologists and dialectologists because phonologically, it exhibits extensive similarities with the other Wu dialects; however, grammatically and lexically, it shows many Mandarin tendencies.
Contents
Classification
Hangzhou dialect is classified under the Wu Chinese, although some western linguists claim Hangzhou is a Mandarin Chinese language.
Richard Vanness Simmons, a professor of Chinese at Rutgers University in New Jersey, USA, claims that the Hangzhou dialect, rather than being Wu as it was classified by Yuen Ren Chao, is a Mandarin variant closely related to Jianghuai Mandarin. Hangzhou dialect is still classified under Wu. Chao had developed a "Common Wu Syllabry" for the Wu dialects. Simmons claimed that had Chao compared Hangzhou dialect to the Wu syllabary and Jianghuai Mandarin, he would have found more similarities to Jianghuai. Jianghuai Mandarin shares an "old literary layer" as a stratum with southern languages like Min Nan, Hakka, Gan and Hangzhou dialects, which it does not share with Northern Mandarin. Sino-Vietnamese also shares some of these characteristics. The stratum in Min Nan specifically consist of Zeng group and Geng group's "n" and "t" finals when an "i" initial is present.
John H. McWhorter claimed that the Hangzhou was categorized as a Wu dialect because seven tones are present in Hangzhou, which is significantly more than the typical number of tones found in northern Mandarin dialects, which is four.
Geographic distribution
It stretches from yuhang xiasha in east to the Qiangtang River in south. A growing number of Hangzhounese speakers is emerging overseas in New York City, United States.
Finals
Tones
The Hangzhou tonal system is similar to that of the Suzhou dialect, in that some words with shàng tone in Middle Chinese have merged with the yīn qù tone. Since the tone split dating from Middle Chinese still depends on the voicing of the initial consonant, these constitute just three phonemic tones: pin, shang, and qu. (Ru syllables are phonemically toneless.)
Vocabulary
Time
Expression of person, categorized by generation
bobo(伯伯)-- father's brother guvu(姑夫)-- father's sister's husbandHistory
The most important event to impact on Hangzhou's dialect was its establishment as Lin'an, the capital of the Southern Song Dynasty. When the Northern Song Dynasty was conquered by the Jin Dynasty in 1127, large numbers of northern refugees fled to what is now Hangzhou, speaking predominantly Mandarin of the Henan variety. Within 30 years, contemporary accounts record that immigrants outnumbered natives in Hangzhou. This resulted in Mandarin influences in the pronunciation, lexicon and grammar of the Hangzhou dialect.
Further influence by Mandarin occurred after the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty in 1912. The local Manchu garrisons were dissolved, adding significant numbers of Beijing dialect Mandarin speakers to the population.
Because of the frequent commerce and intercourse between Hangzhou and Shaoxing, the Hangzhou dialect is also influenced by the Shaoxing dialect.