Lower Yangtze Mandarin

Geographic distribution and subgrouping

Lower Yangtze Mandarin is spoken in central Anhui, eastern Hubei, most of Jiangsu north of the Yangtze, as well as the area around Nanjing. The number of speakers was estimated in 1987 at 67 million.

The Language Atlas of China divides Lower Yangtze Mandarin into three branches:

Hongchao dialects

The largest and most widespread branch, mostly concentrated in Jiangsu and Anhui provinces, with smaller areas in Zhejiang province. The best-known variety is Nanjing dialect. Other cites in the area are Hefei in the west and Yangzhou, Zhenjiang and Yancheng in the east.

Tong-Tai / Tai–Ru

Mostly spoken in the eastern Jiangsu prefectures of Taizhou and Nantong (including Rugao).

Huang–Xiao

Mostly spoken in the prefectures of Huanggang and Xiaogan in eastern Hubei province and the area around Jiujiang in northern Jiangxi.

The are also small islands of Jianghuai Mandarin (Jūnjiāhuà 軍家話) throughout Guangdong, Guangxi, Hainan and Fujian provinces, brought to these areas during the Ming dynasty by soldiers from Jiangsu, Anhui and Henan during the reign of Hongwu Emperor.

The Huizhou dialects, spoken in southern Anhui, share different features with Wu, Gan and Lower Yangtze Mandarin, making them difficult to classify. Earlier scholars had assigned to them one or other of these groups, or to a top-level group of their own. The Atlas adopted the latter position, but this remains controversial.

Relations to other groups

A linguist named Cheng evaluated the extent of relationship between dialects by using Pearson's correlation coefficients. The result was that Eastern dialects of Jianghuai "cluster", with the Xiang and Gan dialects when using a 35 world list, while Northern and Southern Mandarin were nowhere in the cluster with Eastern Jianghuai, while Northern and Southern were supposedly "genetic" relatives of Jianghuai Mandarin.

Some Chinese linguists like Ting have claimed that Jianghuai is mostly Wu containing a superstratum of Mandarin.

The linguist Dan Xu suggested that Jianghuai Mandarin is an intermediary with Standard Mandarin and Wu regarding the occurrence of postpositions in Chinese.

When Jianghuai Mandarin and Wu were compared to dialects from China's southeastern coast, it was concluded "that chain-type shifts in Chinese follow the same general rules as have been revealed by Labov for American and British English dialects."

Some works of literature produced in Yangzhou, such as Qingfengzha, a novel, contain Jianghuai Mandarin. People in Yangzhou identified by the dialect they speak, locals spoke the dialect, as opposed to sojourners, who spoke Huizhou or Wu dialects. This led to the formation of identity based on dialect. Large amounts of merchants from Huizhou lived in Yangzhou and effectively were responsible for keeping the town afloat.

A professor of Chinese at Rutgers University, Richard Vanness Simmons, claims that the Hangzhou dialect, rather than being Wu as it was classified by Yuen Ren Chao, is a Mandarin dialect closely related to Jianghuai Mandarin. The Hangzhou dialect is still classified under Wu. Chao had developed a "Common Wu Syllabary" for the Wu dialects. Simmons claimed that, had Chao compared the Hangzhou dialect to the Wu syllabary and Jianghuai Mandarin, he would have found more similarities to Jianghuai.

Phonology

A characteristic feature of Lower Yangtze Mandarin is the treatment of Middle Chinese syllable-final stops. Middle Chinese syllables with vocalic or nasal codas had a three-way tonal contrast. Syllables with stop codas (-p, -t and -k) had no phonemic tonal contrast, but were traditionally treated as comprising a fourth category, called the entering tone. In modern Mandarin varieties, the former three-way contrast has been reorganized as four tones that are generally consistent across the group, though the pitch values of the tones vary considerably. In most varieties, including the Beijing dialect on which Standard Chinese is based, the final stops have disappeared, and these syllables have been divided between the tones in different ways in different subgroups. In Lower Yangtze Mandarin, however, the stop codas have merged as a glottal stop, but these syllables remain separate from the four tonal categories shared with other Mandarin varieties. A similar development is also found in the adjacent Wu dialect group, and in the Jin group, which many linguists include within Mandarin.

In Lower Yangtze varieties, the initial n- has merged with l-. These initials have also merged in Southwest Mandarin, but as n-. Most other Mandarin varieties distinguish these initials. The Middle Chinese retroflex initials have merged with affricate initials in non-Mandarin varieties, and also in Southwest Mandarin and most Lower Yangtze varieties. However, the Nanjing dialect retains the distinction, like northern Mandarin varieties. Most Lower Yangtze varieties retain a ʐ- initial, but in central Jiangsu (including Yangzhou) it has merged with l-. Tai–Ru varieties retain a distinct ŋ- initial, but this has merged with the zero initial in other Mandarin varieties.

Nanjing Mandarin is an exception to the normal occurrence of the [i], [y] and [u] medials in Mandarin, along with is eastern Shanxi and some Southwest Mandarin dialects.

Literary and colloquial readings

The existence of literary and colloquial readings is a notable feature of Lower Yangtze Mandarin.

History

The original dialect of Nanjing was the Wu dialect in the Eastern Jin. After the Wu Hu uprising, the Jin Emperor and many northern Chinese fled south. The new capital of Eastern Jin was created at Jiankang, where modern day Nanjing is today. It was during this time that the Nanjing dialect started to transform into Jianghuai Mandarin from Wu. Further events, such as Hou Jing's rebellions during the Liang dynasty and the Sui dynasty invasion of the Chen dynasty resulted in Jiankang's destruction. During the Ming dynasty, Ming Taizu relocated southerners from below Yangzi and made Nanjing the capital. During the Taiping Rebellion, Taiping rebels seized Nanjing and made it the capital of the Taiping Kingdom. The fighting resulted in the loss of the population of Nanjing. These events all played in role in forming the Nanjing dialect of today.

Immigrants from Northern China during the middle of the Song dynasty moved south, bringing a speech type from which Northern Wu and Jianghuai reading patterns both derive from, these northern immigrants almost totally took over from the original inhabitants on the Yangtze's northern bank. Jiang-huai, like other dialects of Chinese has two forms for pronouncing words, the Bai (common, vulgar), and the Wen (literary), the Bai forms appear to preserve more ancient forms of speech dating from before the mass migration in the Song dynasty which brought in the wen pronunciations.

Jianghuai Mandarin was possibly the native tone of the founding Emperor of the Ming dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang and many of his military and civil officials.

During the Ming dynasty, Wu speakers moved into Jianghuai-speaking regions, influencing the Tairu and Tongtai dialects of Jianghuai.

In the Ming and Qing dynasties, Jianghuai speakers moved into Hui dialect areas.

The Portuguese Chinese Dictionary (PCD) written by missionaries during the Ming dynasty categorized several Jianghuai dialects with rounded finals. The eastern and southeastern variants of Jianghuai contain these rounded finals, Nanjing dialect, on the other hand, is located in another group.

In Matteo Ricci's "Dicionário Português-Chinês", words in this dictionary documenteed the Ming dynasty Mandarin. A number of words appeared to be derived from Jianghuai Mandarin dialect, such as "pear, jujube, shirt, ax, hoe, joyful, to speak, to bargain, to know, to urinate, to build a house, busy, and not yet."

The "Guanhua koine" of the early Ming era was based on Jianghuai Guanhua (Jianghuai Mandarin). Western missionaries and Korean Hangul writings of the Ming Guanhua and Nanjing dialect showed differences, which pointed to the Guanhua being a koiné and mixture of various dialects strongly based on Jianghuai.

Some linguists have studied the influence which Nanjing Jianghuai Mandarin had on Ming dynasty guanhua/Mandarin. Although the early Ming dynasty Mandarin/Guanhua was a koiné based on the Nanjing dialect, it was not entirely identical to it, with some non-Jianghuai characteristics being found in it. Francisco Varo advised that, to learn Chinese, one must acquire it from "Not just any Chinese, but only those who have the natural gift of speaking the Mandarin language well, such as those natives of the Province of Nan king, and of other provinces where the Mandarin tongue is spoken well.

Jianghuai Mandarin shares some characteristics with Ming dynasty Southern Mandarin.

Jianghuai Mandarin, along with Northern Mandarin, formed the standard for Baihua before and during the Qing dynasty up until its replacement by modern Standard Mandarin. This Baihua was used by writers all over China, regardless of the dialect they spoke. Chinese writers who spoke other dialects had to use the grammar and vocabulary of Jianghuai and Northern Mandarin in order for the majority of Chinese to understand their writing. By contrast, Chinese who did not speak southern dialects would not be able to understand a Southern dialect's writing.

Peking opera got its start in parts of Anhui and Hubei which spoke this dialect.

Dialect has also been used as a tool for regional identitity and politics in the Jiangbei and Jiangnan regions. While the city of Yangzhou was the center of trade, flourishing and prosperous, it was considered part of Jiangnan, which was known to be wealthy, even though Yangzhou was north of the Yangzi river. Once Yangzhou's wealth and prosperity were gone, it was then considered to be part of Jiangbei, the "backwater". After Yangzhou was removed from Jiangnan, its residents decided to no longer speak Jianghuai Mandarin, which was the dialect of Yangzhou. They instead replaced Mandarin with Wu and spoke Taihu Wu dialects. In Jiangnan itself, multiple dialects of Wu fought for the position of prestige dialect.

Jianghuai Mandarin is currently overtaking Wu as the language variety of multiple counties in Jiangsu. An example of this is Zaicheng Town in Lishui County, both Jianghuai and Wu were spoken in several towns in Lishui, with Wu being spoken by the greater amount of people in more towns than Jianghuai. Wu is called "old Zaicheng Speech", while Jianghuai dialect is called "new Zaicheng speech", with Wu being driven rapidly to extinction. Only old people use it to talk to relatives. The Jianghuai dialect was present there for about a century, even though all the surrounding areas around the town are Wu speaking. Jianghuai was always confined inside the town itself until the 1960s, in the present it is overtaking Wu.