Jin Chinese

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Jin
晋语
Spoken in	China
Region	most of Shanxi province; central Inner Mongolia; parts of Hebei, Henan, Shaanxi
Total speakers	45 million
Ranking	22
Language family	Sino-Tibetan Sinitic Chinese Mandarin Jin
Language codes
ISO 639-1	zh
ISO 639-2	chi (B)	zho (T)
ISO 639-3	cjy
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

Jin (simplified Chinese: 晋语; traditional Chinese: 晉語; pinyin: jìnyǔ), or Jin-yu, is a subdivision of spoken Chinese. Its exact status is disputed among linguists; some prefer to classify it under Mandarin, while others set it apart as an independent branch.

Jin is spoken over most of Shanxi province, except for the lower Fen River valley; much of central Inner Mongolia; as well as adjoining areas in Hebei, Henan, and Shaanxi provinces. Cities covered within this area include Taiyuan, Zhangjiakou, Hohhot, Jiaozuo, and Yulin. In total Jin is spoken by roughly 45 million people.

Like all other varieties of Chinese, there is plenty of dispute as to whether Jin is a language or a dialect. See Identification of the varieties of Chinese for the issues surrounding this dispute.

History

The speech of Shanxi province is, alone among the various dialects of North China, remarkable enough to warrant the label of "language" from some linguists. This may well be due to the geographic isolation of Shanxi. The entire province is a plateau surrounded by mountains on all sides. This may well have contributed to the differences between Jin and all the Mandarin dialects that surround it.

The evolution of the language in the area has made it more or less mutually unintelligible with all dialects of mainstream Mandarin, including that of neighboring Shaanxi province. However, it is not as difficult for Mandarin speakers to pick up after a period of time, compared to other varieties of Chinese such as Wu, largely because of the grammatical and lexical similarities between Jin and Mandarin.

Dialects

Jin can be divided into the following 8 subdivisions

• Bingzhou, or that spoken in central Shanxi, including Taiyuan
• Lüliang, or that spoken in western Shanxi and northern Shaanxi
• Shangdang, or that spoken in southeastern Shanxi
• Wutai, or that spoken in parts of northern Shanxi and central Inner Mongolia
• Datong-Baotou, or that spoken in parts of northern Shanxi and central Inner Mongolia
• Zhangjiakou-Hohhot, or that spoken in northwestern Hebei and parts of central Inner Mongolia
• Handan-Xinxiang, or that spoken in southeastern Shanxi, southern Hebei and northern Henan
• Zhidan-Yanchuan(志丹-延川)

Sounds

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 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.)

Jin employs extremely complex tone sandhi, or tone changes that occur when words are put together into phrases. The tone sandhi of Jin is remarkable in two ways among Chinese dialects^{[citation needed]}:

• Tone sandhi rules depend on the grammatical structure of the words being put together. Hence, an adjective-noun compound may go through different sets of changes compared to a verb-object compound.
• There are tones that merge when words are pronounced alone, but behave differently (and hence are differentiated) during tone sandhi.

Grammar

Jin readily employs prefixes such as 圪 /kəʔ/, 忽 /xəʔ/, and 入 /zəʔ/, in a variety of derivational constructions. For example:
入鬼 "fool around" < 鬼 "ghost, devil"

In addition, there are a number of words in Jin that evolved, evidently, by splitting a mono-syllabic word into two. For example:

pəʔ ləŋ < 蹦 pəŋ "hop"
tʰəʔ luɤ < 拖 tʰuɤ "drag"
kuəʔ la < 刮 kua "scrape"
xəʔ lɒ̃ < 巷 xɒ̃ "street"

A similar process can also be found in Mandarin (e.g. 窟窿 kulong < 孔 kong), but it is especially common in Jin.

Vocabulary

Some dialects of Jin make a three-way distinction in demonstratives. (Modern English, for example, has only a two-way distinction between "this" and "that", with "yonder" being archaic.)

Examples

• Hua Guofeng is a very prominent speaker of Jin.

References

Hou Jingyi 侯精一 and Shen Ming 沈明 (2002). Jin-yu (晋语). In Hou Jingyi 侯精一 (Ed.) Xiandai Hanyu Fangyan Gailun 现代汉语方言概论. Shanghai: Shanghai Education Press. ISBN 7-5320-8084-6.

External links

• Classification of the Jin Dialects
• Details of the Pingyao Dialect