Linguist list wuu-suh | ISO 639-6 suji | |
Native speakers approx. 5-7 million (date missing) Language family Sino-TibetanChineseWuTaihuSuzhou–Shanghai–Jiaxing(Su-Hu-Jia)Suzhounese | ||
The Suzhou dialect (simplified Chinese: 苏州话; traditional Chinese: 蘇州話; pinyin: Sūzhōu huà; Suzhounese: Sou-tsøʏ ghé-ghô 蘇州閒話), also known as Suzhounese, is the variety of Chinese traditionally spoken in the city of Suzhou in Jiangsu Province, China. Suzhounese is a variety of Wu Chinese, and was traditionally considered the Wu Chinese prestige dialect. Considered one of the most flowing and elegant languages of China, it is rich in vowels and conservative in having many initials.
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Distribution
Suzhounese is spoken within the city itself and the surrounding area, including migrants living in nearby Shanghai. There is also an increasing number of Suzhounese speakers in New York City in the United States, particularly in the Manhattan Chinatown.
The Suzhou dialect is mutually intelligible with dialects spoken in its satellite cities such as Kunshan, Changshu, and Zhangjiagang, as well as those spoken in its former satellites Wuxi and Shanghai. It is also partially intelligible with dialects spoken in other areas of the Wu cultural sphere such as Hangzhou and Ningbo. However, it is not mutually intelligible with Cantonese or Standard Chinese; but, as all public schools and most broadcast communication in Suzhou use Mandarin exclusively, nearly all speakers of the dialect are at least bilingual. Owing to migration within China, many residents of the city cannot speak the local dialect but can usually understand it after a few months or years in the area.
History
A "ballad–narrative" (說晿詞話) known as "The story of Xue Rengui crossing the sea and Pacifying Liao" (薛仁貴跨海征遼故事), which is about the Tang dynasty hero Xue Rengui is believed to have been written in the Suzhou dialect.
Plural pronouns
Second- and third-person pronouns are suffixed with [toʔ] for the plural. The first-person plural is a separate root, [ni].
Varieties
Some non native speakers of Suzhou dialect speak Suzhou dialect in a "stylized variety" to tell tales.
Initials
Suzhou dialect has a set of voiced initials and exhibits unvoiced unaspirated and aspirated stops, there are unvoiced and voiced fricatives sets. Moreover, palatized initials also feature.
Finals
The Suzhou dialect has a rare contrast between "fricative vowels" [i, y] and ordinary vowels [ɪ, ʏ]. As with Shanghainese, Middle Chinese entering tone characters which end in [p t k] end as a glottal stop [ʔ] in Suzhou, while Middle Chinese nasal endings [m n ŋ] have become a nasalized vowel or [n ŋ].
Tones
Suzhou is considered to have seven tones. However, since the tone split dating from Middle Chinese still depends on the voicing of the initial consonant, these constitute just three phonemic tones: ping, shang, and qu. (Ru syllables are phonemically toneless.)
In Suzhou, the Middle Chinese Shang tone has partially merged with the modern yin qu tone.