query: what are the two dialects of chinese?

title: Mandarin Chinese

text: Mandarin Chinese Mandarin (; ) is a group of related varieties of Chinese spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of Standard Mandarin or Standard Chinese. Because Mandarin originated in North China and most Mandarin dialects are found in the north, the group is sometimes referred to as the Northern dialects (). Many local Mandarin varieties are not mutually intelligible. Nevertheless, Mandarin is often placed first in lists of languages by number of native speakers (with nearly a billion). Mandarin is by far the largest of the seven or ten Chinese

title: Mandarin Chinese

text: same thing, it is combined with 教, which means teach, to form the word teacher. List of Chinese prefix and suffix Mandarin Chinese Mandarin (; ) is a group of related varieties of Chinese spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of Standard Mandarin or Standard Chinese. Because Mandarin originated in North China and most Mandarin dialects are found in the north, the group is sometimes referred to as the Northern dialects (). Many local Mandarin varieties are not mutually intelligible. Nevertheless, Mandarin is often placed first in lists of languages

title: Linguistic Atlas of Chinese Dialects

text: 510 maps, each containing data for all 930 sites, in three volumes: In each map of the atlas, the different forms are classified, but the classifications are not explained, and must be deduced by the reader. A digital version of the atlas is in preparation, to include additional maps and the full survey data. Linguistic Atlas of Chinese Dialects The Linguistic Atlas of Chinese Dialects (), edited by Cao Zhiyun and published in 2008 in three volumes, is a dialect atlas documenting the geography of varieties of Chinese. Unlike the "Language Atlas of China" (1987), which maps the distribution of

title: Linguistic Atlas of Chinese Dialects

text: Linguistic Atlas of Chinese Dialects The Linguistic Atlas of Chinese Dialects (), edited by Cao Zhiyun and published in 2008 in three volumes, is a dialect atlas documenting the geography of varieties of Chinese. Unlike the "Language Atlas of China" (1987), which maps the distribution of both minority languages and Chinese dialect groups, the new atlas is a collection of maps of various features of dialects, in the tradition of the "Atlas linguistique de la France" and its successors. The project spanned 8 years, from 2001 to 2007. A year of preparatory work began in December 2001, including selecting survey

title: Uyghur dialects

text: "Soviet" has remained in the name. The differences between the two standard languages are mostly seen in the orthography, where Standard Xinjiang Uyghur uses an Arabic-derived alphabet, Uyghur Ereb Yéziqi, while Standard Soviet Uyghur uses an Cyrillic-derived alphabet, Uyghur Siril Yéziqi; and in the lexicon where Standard Xinjiang Uyghur is heavily influenced by Chinese, in particular Mandarin Chinese, while Standard Soviet Uyghur is heavily influenced by Russian. Uyghur dialects Uyghur is a Turkic language spoken in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, administered by China, by the Uyghur people. It is a language with two standard languages and several dialects. However,

title: Mandarin Chinese

text: person, number, tense, mood, or case. Although modern varieties, including the Mandarin dialects, use a small number of particles in a similar fashion to suffixes, they are still strongly analytic. The basic word order of subject–verb–object is common across Chinese dialects, but there are variations in the order of the two objects of ditransitive sentences. In northern dialects the indirect object precedes the direct object (as in English), for example in the Standard Chinese sentence: In southern dialects, as well as many southwestern and Lower Yangtze dialects, the objects occur in the reverse order. Most varieties of Chinese use post-verbal

title: Dialects of the Azerbaijani language

text: Dialects of the Azerbaijani language Azerbaijani language is distinguished the two types: Azerbaijani, North and Azerbaijani, South. At the same time, there are a number of dialects such as Salchuq, Qashqai and Khalaj languages. Although there are various dialects of Azerbaijani language, they do not significantly differentiate one another. These dialects are mutually intelligible. The Southern Azerbaijani contains a lot of Arabic and Persian words. There can be problems with the understanding between the southern and northern Azerbaijani because of these words. This difference has begun to increase since 1828. The dialects of Azerbaijani language are commonly divided into four

title: General Chinese

text: that many traditional Chinese characters are restricted to specific compounds, and that many homonymic characters distinguish meanings of what are historically the same word, and which are therefore understandable in context, Chao believed that General Chinese begins to approach the effectiveness of traditional characters in representing Chinese. Character GC has a separate character for each syllable. However, romanized GC has distinct onsets and rhymes. The onsets are as follows: 泥 and 娘 are both transcribed , as these are not distinct in modern dialects. 喻, a conflation of two older initials, 云 "hy~hw" and 以 "y~w", is transcribed or ∅

title: Linguistic Atlas of Chinese Dialects

text: be representative of rural dialects of their county, so dialect islands were omitted. A questionnaire was compiled, to elicit the pronunciation of 425 characters representing common Chinese morphemes, the local term for 470 items and the local form of 110 grammatical forms. Of the 930 sites selected, 91 sites were identified as key sites representing various dialect subgroups, to be subject to additional surveys. At these sites tone sandhi phenomena were to be investigated, and a much longer character list would be used. Fieldwork was conducted between December 2002 and December 2006, and the resulting data entered into a geographic

title: Dialects of Serbo-Croatian

text: Dialects of Serbo-Croatian The dialects of Serbo-Croatian include the regional varieties of Serbo-Croatian as a whole or as part of its standard varieties: Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian. They are part of the dialect continuum of South Slavic languages that joins the Macedonian dialects to the south, Bulgarian dialects to the southeast and Slovene dialects to the northwest. The primary dialects are named after the most common question word for "what": Shtokavian ("štokavski") uses the pronoun "što" or "šta", Chakavian ("čakavski") uses "ča" or "ca", Kajkavian ("kajkavski"), "kaj" or "kej". The pluricentric Serbo-Croatian standard language and all four contemporary standard

title: Two-cell Chinese Braille

text: and medials to fit all the allowable combinations in a single cell. The medial "-i-" is represented by dot 5 (), the medial "-u-" by dot 6 (), and the medial "-ü-" by both dots 5 and 6 (). The "z c s" series is derived from "zh ch sh" as if they contained a "-i-" medial; these two series are not distinguished in many Mandarin dialects. As in traditional Chinese Braille, "k g h" and "q j x" are unified, as they never contrast. A null/zero initial (a vowel-initial syllable) is indicated with the null consonant . At least

title: Sichuanese dialects

text: tone is merged into the dark level tone. The Minjiang, Ya'an-Shimian and Renshou-Fushun dialects are spoken mainly in South and West Sichuan, regions in which the inhabitants have significantly more indigenous Sichuanese descent than those of North and East Sichuan. Thus, these dialects are often referred as Old Sichuanese, as the preserve many characteristics of Bashu, the extinct language formerly spoken by the first Sichuanese Han Chinese people. The Chengdu-Chongqing dialect, named after the two largest cities in greater Sichuan, are spoken in a contiguous area mainly in North and East Sichuan. It is often referred as New Sichuanese because

title: Dialects of the Azerbaijani language

text: main groups, Eastern (Derbent, Baku, Shamakhi, Mugan and Lankaran dialects), Western (Qazakh, Karabakh, Ganja and Ayrum dialects), Northern (Nukha, Zaqatala - Qakh dialects), Southern (Yerevan, Nakhchivan, Ordubad and Tabriz dialects). The dialects are mutually intelligible but differ with regard to accent, syntax, and vocabulary. Eastern and northern groups of dialects were significantly influenced by the Kypchak language. The dialects can be distinguished on the basis of the geographical location like Iran, Turkey, Iraq, Russia (Dagestan) and Georgia. According to these areas, Afshar, Qashqai, Aynallu, Bayat, Shahsven, Qajar and Turkman dialects are classified. These dialects are commonly classified regarding to the

title: Rup dialects

text: resettled to Bulgaria and nowadays, the Rup dialects outside Bulgaria are spoken only by the Muslim Bulgarians (Pomaks) in Western Thrace in Greece. Unlike the Northwestern or the Balkan dialects, the dialects included in the Rup group are not uniform and have vastly different phonological characteristics. What brings them together is the vast array of reflexes of Old Church Slavonic ѣ (yat). Whereas the Western Bulgarian dialects have only for yat in all positions and the Balkan dialects have or , depending on the character of the following syllable, the Rup dialects feature a number of different reflexes, none of

title: Yiddish dialects

text: phonetic elements of what is presented as an Eastern-Western dialect continuum, and mapping their geographic distribution. A more recent extensive phonetic description, also of both Eastern and Western Yiddish, is given by Neil G. Jacobs in Jacobs 2005. Yiddish dialects Yiddish dialects are variants of the Yiddish language and are divided according to the region in Europe where each developed its distinctiveness. Linguistically, Yiddish should be divided in distinct Eastern and Western dialects. From Eastern Yiddish, Northeastern dialects were dominant in 20th-century Yiddish culture and academia, while Southern dialects of Yiddish are now the most commonly spoken, preserved by many

title: Wu Chinese

text: interception. Wu dialects are typified linguistically as having preserved the voiced initials of Middle Chinese, having a majority of Middle Chinese tones undergo a register split, and preserving a checked tone typically terminating in a glottal stop, although some dialects maintain the tone without the stop and certain dialects of Southern Wu have undergone or are starting to undergo a process of devoicing. The historical relations which determine Wu classification primarily consist in two main factors: firstly, geography, both in terms of physical geography and distance south or away from Mandarin, that is, Wu varieties are part of a Wu–Min

title: Varieties of Chinese

text: the tone categories of Middle Chinese, but in Shanghainese several of these have merged. Many Chinese varieties exhibit tone sandhi, in which the realization of a tone varies depending on the context of the syllable. For example, in Standard Chinese a third tone changes to a second tone when followed by another third tone. Particularly complex sandhi patterns are found in Wu dialects and coastal Min dialects. In Shanghainese, the tone of all syllables in a word is determined by the tone of the first, so that Shanghainese has word rather than syllable tone. Most morphemes in Chinese varieties are

title: Moravian dialects

text: to reflect dialects which pronounce these two sounds differently. Czech translation: Eastern Moravian dialects are transitional dialects between Czech and Slovak. They are spoken in the strip of land extending from Břeclav to Hodonín, Kyjov, Uherské Hradiště, Zlín and Vsetín. The Eastern group contains two dialects of specific interest, the Moravian Wallachian dialect () and the Moravian-Slovak dialect (). Features of Eastern Moravian dialects include: Lachian dialects ("Lach dialects", ), spoken in north-eastern Moravia and the adjacent regions of Silesia around Opava, Ostrava, Frýdek-Místek and Frenštát pod Radhoštěm, are transitional dialects sharing more features of Polish. Defining phonological features include

title: Sichuanese dialects

text: there is the standard orthography of that sound in Sichuanese Pinyin and a Chinese character using that final: There is a discrepancy between Old Sichuanese and New Sichuanese in terms of finals. In the "old" Minjiang dialect, the stop consonants for checked-tone syllables in Middle Chinese have developed into tense vowels to create a phonemical contrast, and in several cities and counties the tense vowels are followed by a glottal stop to emphasize the contrast. Meanwhile, the checked tone has disappeared in other Sichuanese dialects. The following table shows the tense vowels of Minjiang dialect's three sub-dialects, spoken in Luzhou,

title: Wu Chinese

text: permit, to allow 「事體」 thing (business, affair, matter) 「歡喜」 to like, to be keen on something, to be fond of, to love 「物事」 things (more specifically, material things) In Wu dialects, the morphology of the words are similar, but the characters are switched around. Not all Wu Chinese words exhibit this phenomenon, only some words in some dialects. In Wu Chinese, there are colloquialisms that are traced back to ancestral Chinese varieties, such as Middle or Old Chinese. Many of those colloquialisms are cognates of other words found in other modern southern Chinese dialects, such as Gan, Xiang, or Min.

title: Varieties of Chinese

text: and a low -like vowel. In other dialects, including Mandarin dialects, has merged with , leaving a single mid vowel with a wide range of allophones. Many dialects, particularly in northern and central China, have apical or retroflex vowels, which are syllabic fricatives derived from high vowels following sibilant initials. In many Wu dialects, vowels and final glides have monophthongized, producing a rich inventory of vowels in open syllables. Reduction of medials is common in Yue dialects. The Middle Chinese codas, consisting of glides and , nasals , and , and stops , and , are best preserved in southern

title: Dialects of the Azerbaijani language

text: program. The Academy of Sciences of the Azerbaijan SSR published a one-volume dictionary named "Dialectological Dictionary of the Azerbaijani Language" covered more than six thousand words in 1964. At the end of the 20 century and the beginning of the 21 century “Dictionary of the Dialects of the Azerbaijani language” was published. Dictionary contained samples from Zangibasar, Sharur, Yardimli, Tebriz, Gubadli, Lachin, Kalbacar, Balakan, Qakh and Zagatala. Dialects of the Azerbaijani language Azerbaijani language is distinguished the two types: Azerbaijani, North and Azerbaijani, South. At the same time, there are a number of dialects such as Salchuq, Qashqai and Khalaj

title: Romanization of Chinese

text: for Chinese Romanization. Most broadly, it is used to provide a useful way for foreigners who are not skilled at recognizing Chinese script to read and recognize Chinese. It can also be helpful for clarifying pronunciation among Chinese speakers who speak mutually unintelligible Chinese dialects. Romanization facilitates entering characters on standard keyboards such as QWERTY. Chinese dictionaries have complex and competing sorting rules for characters, and romanization systems simplify the problem by listing characters in their Latin form alphabetically. The Indian Sanskrit grammarians who went to China two thousand years ago to work on the translation of Buddhist scriptures into

title: Romanian dialects

text: Romanian dialects The Romanian dialects ("subdialecte" or graiuri) are the several varieties of the Romanian language (Daco-Romanian). The dialects are divided into two types, northern and southern, but further subdivisions are less clear, so the number of dialects varies between two and occasionally twenty. Most recent works seem to favor a number of three clear dialects, corresponding to the regions of Wallachia, Moldavia, and Banat (all of which actually extend into Transylvania), and an additional group of varieties covering the remainder of Transylvania, two of which are more clearly distinguished, in Crișana and Maramureș, that is, a total of five.

title: Eastern Han Chinese

text: dialects show evidence of the voiceless sonorant initials postulated for Old Chinese, but they had disappeared by the Eastern Han period in most areas. The Old Chinese voiceless lateral and nasal initials yielded a initial in eastern dialects and in western ones. Most modern reconstructions of Old Chinese distinguish labiovelar and labiolaryngeal initials from the velar and laryngeal series. However, the two series are not separated in Eastern Han glosses, suggesting that Eastern Han Chinese had a medial like Middle Chinese. Moreover, this medial also occurs after other initials. In addition, Eastern Han Chinese had medials and . In some

title: Rup dialects

text: they are often considered to be transitional between the two groups. The Rhodopean dialects occupy the middle part of the Rup dialects, i.e. the central and western Rhodopes. Due to the mountainous terrain and the relative isolation the speakers which lasted well into the beginning of the 20th century, the Rhodopean dialects are both very well preserved and extremely idiosyncratic with regard to the other Bulgarian dialects. The Rhodopean dialects have the following common phonological and morphological properties: Стойков, Стойко: Българска диалектология, Акад. изд. "Проф. Марин Дринов", 2006 Rup dialects The Rup dialects, or the Southeastern dialects, are a group

title: Mandarin Chinese

text: "Chinese". Chinese speakers refer to the modern standard language as but not as "Guānhuà". Linguists use the term "Mandarin" to refer to the diverse group of dialects spoken in northern and southwestern China, which Chinese linguists call "Guānhuà". The alternative term "Běifānghuà" (), or "Northern dialects", is used less and less among Chinese linguists. By extension, the term "Old Mandarin" or "Early Mandarin" is used by linguists to refer to the northern dialects recorded in materials from the Yuan dynasty. Native speakers who are not academic linguists may not recognize that the variants they speak are classified in linguistics as

title: Wu Chinese

text: Middle Chinese, such as "etc.", thus maintaining the three-way contrast of Middle Chinese stop consonants and affricates, , , "etc." (For example, 「凍 痛 洞」 , where other varieties have only .) Because Wu dialects never lost these voiced obstruents, the tone split of Middle Chinese may still be allophonic, and most dialects have three syllabic tones (though counted as eight in traditional descriptions). In Shanghai, these are reduced to two word tones. Wu varieties and Germanic languages have the largest vowel quality inventories in the world. The Jinhui dialect spoken in Shanghai's Fengxian District has 20 vowel qualities. For

title: Dialects of Fars

text: Dialects of Fars Dialects of Pars are a group of southwestern and northwestern Iranian dialects spoken in the central Pars province. The southwestern dialects can be divided into three families of dialects according to geographical distribution and local names: Southwestern ("Lori"), South-central (Kuhmareyi) and Southeastern ("Larestani"). Under linguistic typology a part of the dialects of the region can be classified as follows: And the extinct old Kazeruni and Old Shirazi (Sherazi) dialects. This group of dialects is not to be confused with the standard Persian, the official language of Iran; and they are not restricted to the present border of

title: Dialects of Fars

text: Fars province. Dialects of Fars Dialects of Pars are a group of southwestern and northwestern Iranian dialects spoken in the central Pars province. The southwestern dialects can be divided into three families of dialects according to geographical distribution and local names: Southwestern ("Lori"), South-central (Kuhmareyi) and Southeastern ("Larestani"). Under linguistic typology a part of the dialects of the region can be classified as follows: And the extinct old Kazeruni and Old Shirazi (Sherazi) dialects. This group of dialects is not to be confused with the standard Persian, the official language of Iran; and they are not restricted to the present

title: History of the Chinese language

text: from the northeast (Manchuria) to the southwest (Yunnan), use various Mandarin dialects as their home language. The prevalence of Mandarin throughout northern China is largely due to north China's plains. By contrast, the mountains and rivers of southern China promoted linguistic diversity. Until the mid-20th century, most southern Chinese only spoke their native local variety of Chinese. However, despite the mix of officials and commoners speaking various Chinese dialects, Nanjing Mandarin became dominant at least during the Qing dynasty. Since the 17th century, the Empire had set up orthoepy academies () to make pronunciation conform to the Qing capital Beijing's

title: Bengali dialects

text: the word, much like Western dialects (including Standard Bengali). The dialects of Rangpur and Pabna do not have contrastive nasalised vowels. This dialect is spoken in the area which is known as Manbhum. The latter two, along with Kharia Thar and Mal Paharia, are closely related to Western Bengali dialects, but are typically classified as separate languages. Similarly, Rajbangsi and Hajong are considered separate languages, although they are very similar to North Bengali dialects. There are many more minor dialects as well, including those spoken in the bordering districts of Purnea and Singhbhum and among the tribals of the eastern

title: Romanian dialects

text: in word-final positions where others have (compare, for instance, Moldavian vs Wallachian , both meaning "mother"). The most important phonetic process that helps in distinguishing the Romanian dialects concerns the consonants pronounced in standard Romanian as the affricates and : The Romanian dialects have proven hard to classify and are highly debated. Various authors, considering various classification criteria, arrived at different classifications and divided the language into two to five dialects, but occasionally as many as twenty: Most modern classifications divide the Romanian dialects into two types, southern and northern, further divided as follows: Romanian dialects The Romanian dialects ("subdialecte"

title: Rup dialects

text: which is similar to the ones in the Western Bulgarian or the Balkan dialects. These reflexes include: in all positions, broad е () in all positions, before a hard syllable and broad e () before a soft syllable, broad e () in a stressed syllable and normal e in an unstressed syllable, etc. etc. The following phonological and morphological characteristics apply to all Rup dialects: The Rup dialects can furthermore be divided into two large groups, "true" Rup dialects (further divided into western and eastern Rup dialects based on geographical grounds) and Rhodopean dialects. The two groups are sometimes treated

title: Mandarin Chinese

text: light that it is difficult or impossible to discriminate. These atonal syllables also occur in non-Mandarin dialects, but in many southern dialects the tones of all syllables are made clear. There are more polysyllabic words in Mandarin than in all other major varieties of Chinese except Shanghainese. This is partly because Mandarin has undergone many more sound changes than have southern varieties of Chinese, and has needed to deal with many more homophones. New words have been formed by adding affixes such as "lao-" (老), "-zi" (子), "-(e)r" (儿/兒), and "-tou" (头/頭), or by compounding, e.g. by combining two words

title: Eifel dialects

text: Eifel dialects The Eifel dialects () are those dialects spoken in the Eifel mountains of Germany. They divide into two language regions: the dialects spoken in the southern Eifel ("Eifelisch") are part of the Moselle Franconian dialect group and closely resemble Luxembourgish. In the northern Eifel, by contrast, the dialects ("Eifelplatt") belong to the Ripuarian dialect group and are more like "Öcher Platt" or "Kölsch". In between there is a dialect continuum of typical transitions, whereby more or less every village speaks a little differently from its neighbours. The development of territorial structures in the Eifel since the Roman era

title: Northwestern Bulgarian dialects

text: Balkan dialect. Most other phonological and morphological features of the Northwestern Bulgarian dialects are similar to the characteristics of the Eastern Bulgarian dialects and the formal language: щ~жд (~) for Proto-Slavic ~ and Old Church Slavonic щ~жд (~), ъ () for both Old Church Slavonic ѫ (yus) and ъ (), vowel reduction, etc. Northwestern Bulgarian dialects The Northwestern Bulgarian dialects are two closely related dialects of the Bulgarian language, which are located west of the yat boundary and thus are part of the Western Bulgarian dialects. The range of the dialects includes most of northwestern Bulgaria, to the west of

title: Dialects of Macedonian

text: fixed stress, antepenultimate in the Republic of Macedonia, and penultimate in Greece and Albania. The Eastern region, along with the neighbouring Bulgarian dialects, has various non-fixed stress systems. In Lower Vardar and Serres-Nevrokop unstressed are reduced (raised) to . The reduction of unstressed vowels (as well as the aforementioned allophonic palatalisation of consonants) is characteristic of East Bulgarian as opposed to West Bulgarian dialects, so these dialects are regarded by Bulgarian linguists as transitional between East and West Bulgarian. Dialects of Macedonian The dialects of Macedonian comprise the Slavic dialects spoken in the Republic of Macedonia as well as some

title: Classical Chinese lexicon

text: Classical Chinese lexicon Classical Chinese lexicon is the lexicon of Classical Chinese, a language register marked by a vocabulary that greatly differs from the lexicon of modern vernacular Chinese. In terms of conciseness and compactness, Classical Chinese rarely uses words composed of two Chinese characters; nearly all words are of one syllable only. This stands directly in contrast with modern Chinese dialects, in which two-syllable words are extremely common. This phenomenon exists, in part, because polysyllabic words evolved in Chinese to disambiguate homophones that result from sound changes. This is similar to such phenomena in English as the "pen–pin" merger

title: German dialects

text: known as Luxembourgish. High Franconian dialects are transitional dialects in between the two greater High German groups. High Franconian dialects include East Franconian and South Franconian. Upper German dialects include Alsatian, Swabian, Low Alemannic, Central Alemannic, High Alemannic, Highest Alemannic, Southern Austro-Bavarian, Central Austro-Bavarian and Northern Austro-Bavarian. They are spoken in parts of the Alsace, southern Germany, Liechtenstein, Austria, and in the German-speaking parts of Switzerland and Italy. Wymysorys, Sathmarisch and Siebenbürgisch are High German dialects of Poland and Romania. The High German varieties spoken by Ashkenazi Jews (mostly in Czarist Russia, then the former Soviet Union and Poland) have

title: Japanese dialects

text: Japanese dialects The dialects of the Japanese language fall into two primary clades, Eastern (including Tokyo) and Western (including Kyoto), with the dialects of Kyushu and Hachijō Island often distinguished as additional branches, the latter perhaps the most divergent of all. The Ryukyuan languages of Okinawa Prefecture and the southern islands of Kagoshima Prefecture form a separate branch of the Japonic family, and are not Japanese dialects, although they are sometimes referred to as such. Regional variants of Japanese have been confirmed since the Old Japanese era. Man'yōshū, the oldest existing collection of Japanese poetry, includes poems written in dialects

title: Bengali dialects

text: Bengali dialects The dialects of the Bengali language (বাংলা উপভাষাসমূহ "Bangla Upobhashashomuho") are part of the Eastern Indo-Aryan language group of the Indo-European language family widely spoken in the Bengal region of South Asia. Although the spoken dialects of Bengali are mutually intelligible with neighbouring dialects, they sometimes lack mutual intelligibility with the Standard Bengali language and sometimes would not be understood by a native speaker of Standard Bengali. However, the Standard Bengali emerges from the West-Central or Rarhi dialect spoken mainly in Kolkata and Nadia districts. Bengali dialects can be thus classified along at least two dimensions: spoken vs.

title: Rup dialects

text: as separate dialectal groups. The "true" Rup dialects include the Strandzha dialect, the Thracian dialect, the Serres-Nevrokop dialect and, with some reservations, the Babyak and Razlog dialects. The Rhodopean dialects comprise the Smolyan, Hvoyna, Paulician and Chepino dialect, whereas the Zlatograd dialect is transitional between the two groups. The Babyak and Razlog dialect are usually classified as Rup dialects on account of the reflexes of Old Church Slavonic ѣ (yat). However, most of their other phonological properties are similar or identical to the ones of the Southwestern Bulgarian dialects, and especially to the Samokov and Ihtiman dialect, and that's why

title: Ojibwe dialects

text: Algonquin; they are strongly differentiated from other dialects of Ojibwe. A set of features characterise the northern dialects, and are found to varying degrees in adjacent transition dialects. Severn Ojibwe, also called Oji-Cree or Northern Ojibwa, and Anihshininiimowin in the language itself, is spoken in northern Ontario and northern Manitoba. Although there is a significant increment of vocabulary borrowed from several Cree dialects, Severn Ojibwe is a dialect of Ojibwe. Two minor sub-dialects have been identified: Big Trout Lake, and Deer Lake, with Big Trout Lake being further subdivided into a Severn subgroup and a Winisk River subgroup. Severn Ojibwe

title: Malaysian Chinese

text: Chinese community. Some of these may be limited to those with specific a surname sharing a common bloodline or origin, others are open to speakers of particular dialects. The clan association may be involved in promoting Chinese culture, for example by forming Chinese orchestra. There are seven major clan associations and numerous minor ones. The major clan associations are: Malaysian Chinese festivals are passed down through the generations from their ancestors in China but localised elements have been mixed with the original. The festivals can be broadly categorised into two groups i.e. cultural and religious. Cultural festivals include Chinese New

title: Middle Chinese

text: unaspirated voiced initials, suggesting that they had become prenasalized stops in some northwestern Chinese dialects. The rime dictionaries and rime tables yield phonological categories, but with little hint of what sounds they represent. At the end of the 19th century, European students of Chinese sought to solve this problem by applying the methods of historical linguistics that had been used in reconstructing Proto-Indo-European. Volpicelli (1896) and Schaank (1897) compared the rime tables at the front of the "Kangxi dictionary" with modern pronunciations in several varieties, but had little knowledge of linguistics. Bernhard Karlgren, trained in transcription of Swedish dialects, carried

title: Malaysian Chinese

text: Malay, "Sina-karan" in Tamil, and "Huaren" (Chinese people) or "Huaqiao" (Overseas Chinese) by Chinese themselves. Most of the Chinese in Malaysia are of Min (e.g. Hokkien), Yue (Cantonese) and Hakka speaking ancestry, and different towns and cities in Malaysia may be dominated by different Chinese dialects among Chinese speakers, for example Cantonese in Kuala Lumpur and Hokkien in Penang; Mandarin however is now also widely used. Culturally, most Malaysian Chinese have maintained their Chinese heritage, including their various dialects, although the descendants of the earliest Chinese migrants who arrived from the 15th to 17th centuries have assimilated aspects of the

title: Hakka Chinese

text: a yin-yang splitting in the Qu tone, giving rise to seven tones in all (with yin-yang registers in Ping and Ru tones and a Shang tone). In Taiwan, there are two main dialects: Sixian and Hailu (alternatively known as Haifeng). Most Hakka dialect speakers found on Taiwan originated from these two regions. Sixian speakers come from Jiaying Prefecture (), mainly from the four counties of Chengxiang (now Meixian), Zhengping (now Jiaoling), Xingning and Pingyuan. The Hailu dialect contains postalveolar consonants (, , and ), which are uncommon in other southern Chinese varieties. Wuhua, Dabu, and Xingning dialects have two sets

title: Sichuanese dialects

text: by many Tibetan, Yi, Qiang and other ethnic minority groups as a second language. Sichuanese is more similar to Standard Chinese than southeastern Chinese varieties but is still quite divergent in phonology, vocabulary, and even grammar. The Minjiang dialect is especially difficult for speakers of other Mandarin dialects to understand. Sichuanese can be further divided into a number of dialects, Chengdu–Chongqing dialect, Minjiang dialect, Renshou–Fushun dialect, and Ya'an–Shimian dialect. The dialect of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province and an important central city is the most representative dialect of Southwestern Mandarin and is used widely in Sichuanese opera and other

title: Northwestern Bulgarian dialects

text: Northwestern Bulgarian dialects The Northwestern Bulgarian dialects are two closely related dialects of the Bulgarian language, which are located west of the yat boundary and thus are part of the Western Bulgarian dialects. The range of the dialects includes most of northwestern Bulgaria, to the west of the line between Nikopol, Pleven and Mezdra and to the north of the line between Vratsa and Belogradchik. They bear strong resemblance to their neighbouring Eastern Bulgarian dialects and with some exceptions, mainly the pronunciation of yat, have the same phonological and morphological features as the neighbouring subdialects of the Eastern Bulgarian Central

title: Catalan dialects

text: Catalan dialects The dialects of the Catalan language feature a relative uniformity, especially when compared to other Romance languages; both in terms of vocabulary, semantics, syntax, morphology, and phonology. Mutual intelligibility between its dialects is very high, estimates ranging from 90% to 95%. The only exception is the isolated idiosyncratic Alguerese dialect. In 1861, linguist Manuel Milà i Fontanals split Catalan into two main dialects: Western and Eastern. The most obvious phonetic difference lies in the treatment of unstressed a and e, which have merged to in Eastern dialects, but remain distinct as and in Western dialects. There are a

title: Ojibwe dialects

text: differentiated dialects may show a mixture of transitional features. For example, the Border Lakes dialect is not strongly distinguished from the adjacent Western Ojibwe (Saulteaux) and Southwestern Ojibwe (Chippewa) dialects, and is characterized by the "grading of a few minor features." In some situations there is a mismatch between speakers' self-designations and what is supported by linguistic data. For example, the communities at Golden Lake, Ontario and Maniwaki, Quebec are described by speakers at those locations as members of the Algonquin dialect, although linguistically both are distinct from the clearly Algonquin communities north of those locations, and are assigned to

title: Pre-Hilalian Arabic dialects

text: centers outside the main Arabized areas, such as Tunis and Salé. Pre-Hilalian Arabic dialects are classified in three types: Two geographical groups of pre-Hilalian dialects are distinguished: Additionally, the Maltese language is often classified as pre-Hilalian, since it shares many pre-Hilalian features. Pre-Hilalian Urban dialects were formerly spoken in other cities such as Tripoli, Mascara and Azemmour, where they are extinct, replaced by the more widespread Hilalian dialects. Currently, many (Old) Urban dialects are endangered because of the prevalence of the Hilalian-based new urban koinés in everyday communication. Pre-Hilalian Arabic dialects Pre-Hilalian dialects are a continuum of Arabic dialects native

title: Chinese Canadians in the Greater Toronto Area

text: from the Siyi area of Guangdong province spoke the Siyi dialects of Yue Chinese, as well as the Taishanese dialect of Yue; as of 2000 many speakers of the Siyi dialects, including the immigrants and their children, lived in the Toronto Chinatown. As of 2000 the Chinese variety with the largest representation was Metropolitan Cantonese, due to the two major waves of Hong Kong immigration in the 20th century that made Hong Kong Chinese the largest subgroup in Toronto. In the 1990s there were speakers of Cantonese Chinese in the traditional Toronto Chinatown; and also in Agincourt, Willowdale, and other

title: Chinese dictionary

text: and/or Old Chinese rime groups, as well as bronze script or oracle bone script forms. While dictionaries published in Mainland China intended for study or reference by high school/college students are generally printed in Simplified Chinese, dictionaries intended for scholarly research are set in Traditional Chinese. Twenty centuries ago, the "Fangyan" was the first Chinese specialized dictionary. The usual English translation for "fangyan" (方言 lit. "regional/areal speech") is "dialect", but the language situation in China is uniquely complex. In the "dialect" sense of English dialects, Chinese has Mandarin dialects, yet "fangyan" also means "non-Mandarin languages, mutually unintelligible regional varieties of

title: Bourbonnais dialects

text: Bourbonnais dialects The Bourbonnais dialects are spoken in the historic region of Bourbonnais (centre of France), i.e. in the whole Allier department and in the southeast of the Cher department (around Saint-Amand-Montrond. They are situated at the borderline between the Oïl language, Occitan language and Franco-Provençal language zones. There are, actually, two indigenous languages in Bourbonnais: Thus "Bourbonnais" is an ambiguous term: it can refer to idioms of the Occitan language (Bourbonnais of Oc), or to French dialects of the Bourbonnais (Bourbonnais of Oïl). Bourbonnais dialects were submitted to a Parisian top-down approach, like all other regional languages in France.

title: Varieties of Chinese

text: and traditions that are identifiable to all Chinese, regardless of dialect group. Works cited Varieties of Chinese Chinese, also known as Sinitic, is a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family consisting of hundreds of local language varieties, many of which are not mutually intelligible. The differences are similar to those within the Romance languages, with variation particularly strong in the more mountainous southeast. These varieties, often called "dialects", have been classified into seven to ten groups, the largest being Mandarin (e.g. Beijing dialect), Wu (e.g. Shanghainese), Min (e.g. Hokkien), and Yue (e.g. Cantonese). Chinese varieties differ most in their phonology,

title: Norwegian dialects

text: though most Norwegians rely on experience to tell them apart. One of the most important differences among dialects is which ending, if any, verbs have in the infinitive form. In Old Norwegian, most verbs had an infinitive ending (-a), and likewise in a modern Norwegian dialect, most of the verbs of the dialect either have or would have had an infinitive ending. There are five varieties of the infinitive ending in Norwegian dialects, constituting two groups: One ending (western dialects) Two different endings (eastern dialects) The split distribution of endings is related to the syllable length of the verb in

title: Mandarin Chinese

text: the four tones of Middle Chinese, the level, rising and departing tones have also developed into four modern tones in a uniform way across Mandarin dialects; the Middle Chinese level tone has split into two registers, conditioned on voicing of the Middle Chinese initial, while rising tone syllables with voiced obstruent initials have shifted to the departing tone. The following examples from the standard language illustrate the regular development common to Mandarin dialects (recall that pinyin "d" denotes a non-aspirate , while "t" denotes an aspirate ): In traditional Chinese phonology, syllables that ended in a stop in Middle Chinese

title: General Chinese

text: system with similar sound values and tone spellings to Gwoyeu Romatzyh. The character version of General Chinese uses distinct characters for any traditional characters that are distinguished phonemically in any of the control varieties of Chinese, which consist of several dialects of Mandarin, Wu, Min, Hakka, and Yue. That is, a single syllabic character will only correspond to more than one logographic character when these are homonyms in all control dialects. In effect, General Chinese is a syllabic reconstruction of the pronunciation of Middle Chinese, less distinctions which have been dropped nearly everywhere. The result is a syllabary of 2082

title: Mandarin Chinese

text: classification based on phonetic criteria, principally the evolution of Middle Chinese voiced initials. His Mandarin group included dialects of northern and southwestern China, as well as those of Hunan and northern Jiangxi. Li Fang-Kuei's classification of 1937 distinguished the latter two groups as Xiang and Gan, while splitting the remaining Mandarin dialects between Northern, Lower Yangtze and Southwestern Mandarin groups. The widely accepted seven-group classification of Yuan Jiahua in 1960 kept Xiang and Gan separate, with Mandarin divided into Northern, Northwestern, Southwestern and Jiang–Huai (Lower Yangtze) subgroups. Of Yuan's four Mandarin subgroups, the Northwestern dialects are the most diverse, particularly

title: Persian dialects in Khuzestan

text: Persian dialects in Khuzestan There are a number of Khuzestani Persian dialects and accents unique to the province of Khuzestan in southwestern Iran. There are two main regional classifications, in addition to less common varieties: These are generally unintelligible to speakers of Modern Standard Persian and are related to and are rooted in old Persian and Elamite languages. Those regional variety of Kouzestani accents are much closer to Standard Persian than Khouzestani dialects and are easily understood by the average Persian-speaker elsewhere in Iran. Persian dialects of Khuzestan are halfway between north Iranian dialects and Dari dialects, or midway between

title: Reconstructions of Old Chinese

text: the syllable. The major sources for the sounds of Old Chinese, covering most of the lexicon, are the sound system of Middle Chinese (7th century AD), the structure of Chinese characters, and the rhyming patterns of the "Classic of Poetry" ("Shijing"), dating from the early part of the 1st millennium BC. Several other kinds of evidence are less comprehensive, but provide valuable clues. These include Min dialects, early Chinese transcriptions of foreign names, early loans between Chinese and neighbouring languages, and families of Chinese words that appear to be related. Middle Chinese, or more precisely Early Middle Chinese, is the

title: Hungarian dialects

text: Hungarian dialects The dialects of the Hungarian language identified by Ethnologue are: Great Hungarian Plain, West Danube, Danube-Tisza (territories between the two rivers), King's Pass Hungarian (Pass in Apuseni Mountains), Northeast Hungarian, Northwest Hungarian, Székely and West Hungarian. These dialects are, for the most part, mutually intelligible. The Hungarian Csángó dialect, which is mentioned but not listed separately by Ethnologue, is spoken primarily in Bacău County in eastern Romania. The Csángó Hungarian group has been largely isolated from other Hungarian people, and they therefore preserved a dialect closely resembling an earlier form of Hungarian. The Hungarian researchers distinguish ten dialects.

title: Catalan dialects

text: few other differences in pronunciation, verbal morphology, and vocabulary. Western Catalan comprises the two dialects of Northwestern Catalan and Valencian; the Eastern block comprises four dialects: Central Catalan, Balearic, Rossellonese, and Alguerese. Each dialect can be further subdivided in several subdialects. There are two spoken standards for the language based on the Eastern and Western dialects respectively: Valencians are only surpassed in number of Catalan-speakers by Catalans themselves, representing approximately a third of the whole Catalan-speaking population. Therefore, in the context of linguistic conflict, recognition and respect towards the dual standard, as well as the dual Catalan–Valencian denomination, pacifies the

title: Japanese dialects

text: alongside Eastern, Western, and the rest of Kyushu. A small group of dialects spoken in Hachijō-jima and Aogashima, islands south of Tokyo, as well as the Daitō Islands east of Okinawa. Hachijō dialect is quite divergent and sometimes thought to be a primary branch of Japanese. It retains an abundance of inherited ancient Eastern Japanese features. The relationships between the dialects are approximated in the following cladogram: Japanese dialects The dialects of the Japanese language fall into two primary clades, Eastern (including Tokyo) and Western (including Kyoto), with the dialects of Kyushu and Hachijō Island often distinguished as additional branches,

title: Balkan dialects of Bulgarian

text: especially the regions of Dobrich and Varna. The most significant feature of the dialects, as in most Eastern Bulgarian dialects, is the pronunciation of Old Church Slavonic ѣ (yat) as or , depending on the character of the following syllable. The Balkan dialects, and in particular, the Central Balkan dialect, lie at the foundation of formal Bulgarian. However, they are not identical to the standard language because many of its features derive from the Western Bulgarian dialects, including the Macedonian dialects, or are a compromise between Eastern and Western standard. For the phonological and morphological characteristics of the individual dialects

title: Written Chinese

text: syllables. For over two thousand years, the prevailing written standard was a vocabulary and syntax rooted in Chinese as spoken around the time of Confucius (about 500 BC), called Classical Chinese, or 文言文 "wényánwén". Over the centuries, Classical Chinese gradually acquired some of its grammar and character senses from the various dialects. This accretion was generally slow and minor; however, by the 20th century, Classical Chinese was distinctly different from any contemporary dialect, and had to be learned separately. Once learned, it was a common medium for communication between people speaking different dialects, many of which were mutually unintelligible by

title: Dialects of Polish

text: dialects () in the Czech Republic as part of this language. However, the standard linguistic sources on the Slavic languages normally describe them as dialects of the Czech language, or sometimes as transitional Polish–Czech dialects. In modern times spoken mainly by the Polish minority in Lithuania and the Polish minority in Belarus. often considered a descendant of a pidgin of the Polish language and Old Ruthenian language spoken in Red Ruthenia in the Middle Ages, A number of dialects are not easily classifiable according to the above scheme. Among the most notable of them: Dialects of Polish Modern sources on

title: Dialects of Macedonian

text: a large group of features. In addition, a more detailed classification can be based on the modern reflexes of the Proto-Slavic reduced vowels ("yers"), vocalic sonorants and the back nasal (o). That classification distinguishes between the following 3 major groups: Northern dialects Western Dialects: Eastern and Southern dialects Most linguists classify the dialects in the Pirin (Blagoevgrad) region of Bulgaria and in the far east of Greek Macedonia as Bulgarian and the dialects in the rest of Greece and in Republic of Macedonia as Macedonian. As far as consonantal features are concerned, the entire Western region is distinguished from the

title: Classical Chinese lexicon

text: of many dialects in the American south: because the words "pin" and "pen" sound alike in such dialects of English, a certain degree of confusion can occur unless one adds qualifiers like "ink pen" and "stick pin." Similarly, Chinese has acquired many polysyllabic words in order to disambiguate monosyllabic words that sounded different in earlier forms of Chinese but identical in one region or another during later periods. Because Classical Chinese is based on the literary examples of ancient Chinese literature, it has almost none of the two-syllable words present in modern Chinese varieties. Classical Chinese has more pronouns compared

title: Dialects of Macedonian

text: dialects as part of the Bulgarian language. Prior to the codification of standard Macedonian in 1945, the dialects of Macedonia were for the most part classified as Bulgarian. In Greece, the identification of the dialects spoken by the local Slavophone minority with either Bulgarian or Macedonian is often avoided, and these dialects are instead described simply as "Slavic", "Dopia" ('Local'), Stariski (old) or Našinski (ours). Linguistically, the dialects of Macedonia in the wider sense can be divided into Eastern and Western groups (the boundary runs approximately from Skopje and Skopska Crna Gora along the rivers Vardar and Crna) based on

title: Chinese Voice

text: TV digital platform, and reach the country's growing Asian population. The proportion of New Zealanders of Asian origin doubled between 1991 and 2001, with the fastest increase being in Auckland's Chinese population. More than 80,000 New Zealanders speak Chinese and at least one other language, including almost 36,000 who speak Yue dialects like Cantonese. Almost 32,000 New Zealanders can only speak Chinese, including 10,000 who can only speak Yue dialects like Cantonese. Many are multilingual. The company set up Chinese Voice stations over several years as it acquired new terrestrial radio frequencies in Auckland. Cantonese language radio station Chinese Radio

title: Norrland dialects

text: Norrland dialects Norrland dialects () is one of the six major dialect groupings of the Swedish language. It comprises the dialects in most of Norrland, except those of Gästrikland and southern Hälsingland, where Svealand Swedish is spoken. Local dialects from Härjedalen and northwest Jämtland (specifically Frostviken in Strömsund Municipality), which traditionally are counted as variants of the Norwegian dialect of Trøndersk, are also excluded, while Jämtland dialects and other dialects of the region are considered to be true Norrland dialects. The border between Norrland dialects and Svealand Swedish runs through Hälsingland, such that the northern Hälsingland dialects are regarded as

title: Gan Chinese

text: result of increased interest in protecting the local language, Gan now has begun to appear in various regional media, and there are also newscasts and television programs broadcast in Gan Chinese. There are differences within the Gan speaking region. For example, in Anfu county, which was categorized as Ji-Cha, there are two main dialects, called Nanxiang Hua (Southern region) and Baixiang Hua (Northern region). People from one region cannot even understand people from the other region if they were not well educated or exposed to the other dialects. The "Language Atlas of China" (1987) divides Gan into nine dialect subgroups:

title: Persian dialects in Khuzestan

text: Modern and Classical Persian dialects. Note that native Khuzestani Persian speakers can interchange colloquial and formal dialects in conversational speech. Persian dialects in Khuzestan There are a number of Khuzestani Persian dialects and accents unique to the province of Khuzestan in southwestern Iran. There are two main regional classifications, in addition to less common varieties: These are generally unintelligible to speakers of Modern Standard Persian and are related to and are rooted in old Persian and Elamite languages. Those regional variety of Kouzestani accents are much closer to Standard Persian than Khouzestani dialects and are easily understood by the average

title: Written Chinese

text: family in terms of both geographical area and number of speakers. This version of written Chinese is called Vernacular Chinese, or 白話/白话 "báihuà" (literally, "plain speech"). Despite its ties to the dominant Mandarin language, Vernacular Chinese also permits some communication between people of different dialects, limited by the fact that Vernacular Chinese expressions are often ungrammatical or unidiomatic in non-Mandarin dialects. This role may not differ substantially from the role of other linguae francae, such as Latin: For those trained in written Chinese, it serves as a common medium; for those untrained in it, the graphic nature of the characters

title: Varieties of Chinese

text: dialects, particularly Yue dialects. In Jin, Lower Yangtze Mandarin and Wu dialects, the stops have merged as a final glottal stop, while in most northern varieties they have disappeared. In Mandarin dialects final has merged with , while some central dialects have a single nasal coda, in some cases realized as a nasalization of the vowel. All varieties of Chinese, like neighbouring languages in the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area, have phonemic tones. Each syllable may be pronounced with between three and seven distinct pitch contours, denoting different morphemes. For example, the Beijing dialect distinguishes ' ( "mother"), ' (

title: Korean dialects

text: Korean dialects A number of Korean dialects are spoken in the Korean Peninsula. The peninsula is extremely mountainous and each dialect's "territory" corresponds closely to the natural boundaries between different geographical regions of Korea. Most of the dialects are named for one of the traditional Eight Provinces of Korea. One is sufficiently distinct from the others to be considered a separate language, the Jeju language. Despite North–South differences in the Korean language, the two standards are still broadly intelligible. One notable feature within the divergence is the North's lack of anglicisms due to isolationism and self-reliance—pure/invented Korean words are used

title: General Chinese

text: character. This phenomenon is familiar from Chinese transcriptions of foreign names. Romanized General Chinese has distinct symbols for the onsets (many of them digraphs, and a few trigraphs) and the rimes distinguished by any of the control dialects. For example, it retains the final consonants "p, t, k", and the distinction between final "m" and "n", as these are found in several modern dialects, such as Cantonese. General Chinese also maintains the "round-sharp" distinction, such as "sia" vs. "hia", though those are both "xia" in Beijing Mandarin. It also indicates the "muddy" (voiced) stops of Shanghainese. Indeed, Chao characterized GC

title: Dialects of Polish

text: the five of standard Polish) and (in the northern dialects) phonemic word stress, an archaic feature preserved from Common Slavic times and not found anywhere else among the West Slavic languages. The two Kresy dialects are spoken in the Kresy, the former eastern Polish territory annexed by the Soviet Union in 1945 and currently forming part of Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. Both dialect groups have been in decline since World War II as a result of Soviet expulsions of millions of Poles from the Kresy. Poles living in Lithuania (particularly in the Vilnius region), in Belarus (particularly the northwest), and

title: Literary and colloquial readings of Chinese characters

text: of prestigious varieties. Colloquial readings are usually used in informal settings because their usage in formal settings has been supplanted by the readings of the prestige varieties. Because of this, the frequency of literary readings in a Chinese variety reflects its history and status. For example, before the promotion of Modern Standard Chinese (Mandarin), the dialects of the central plains had few literary readings, but they now have literary readings that resemble the phonology of Modern Standard Chinese. Outside the central plains, the relatively influential Beijing and Canton dialects have fewer literary readings than other varieties. In some Chinese varieties,

title: Four tones (Middle Chinese)

text: consonant, not because they have a tone contour that contrasts with non-entering tones. In dialects such as Shanghainese, tone classes are numbered even if they are not phonemically distinct. The tonal aspect of Chinese dialects that is so important today is believed by some linguists to have been absent from Old Chinese, but rather came about in Early Middle Chinese after the loss of various finals. (However, another popular view maintains that "Old Chinese" near the time 1000BC already had tones, though Proto-Chinese might not have tones.) The four tones of Middle Chinese, "píng" "level", "shǎng" "rising", "qù" "departing", and

title: Norrland dialects

text: of Lycksele lappmark. The Ångermanland dialects may be further subdivided as follows: The Medelpad dialects (Swedish: "medelpadsmål") are spoken in Medelpad, with the exception of the westernmost parish of Haverö, where the Hogdal dialects are spoken. In comparison to other Norrland dialects, the Medelpad dialects are relatively uniform. The most important outer isogloss is the one with the Hälsing dialects to the south, which defines the limits of the "vowel balance" characteristic of Norrland dialects. One characteristic that distinguishes the Medelpad dialects (for example, Indal–Liden) from other nearby dialects is the pronunciation of both short and long "i" and "y"

title: Drèents dialects

text: Drèents dialects Drèents (also Dreins, Dreints, Drents, Drints; ) is a collective term for the dialects spoken in Drenthe, a province of the Netherlands. The dialects, which are still spoken by half the population of Drenthe, are Dutch Low Saxon variants. All the dialects of the province of Drenthe are classified as Dutch Low Saxon. The dialects from the north and the east (see below: 'Noordenvelds' and 'Veenkoloniaals') are somehow more related to Gronings, the dialects from the south-west are 'Stellingwerfs', and the dialects in a few villages along the southern border with the "Grafschaft" Bentheim (Germany) are considered to

title: Mandarin Chinese

text: For example, the dialects of Jinan, Chengdu, Xi'an and so on all have four tones that correspond quite well to the Beijing dialect tones of (55), (35), (214), and (51). The exception to this rule lies in the distribution of syllables formerly ending in a stop consonant, which are treated differently in different dialects of Mandarin. Middle Chinese stops and affricates had a three-way distinction between tenuis, voiceless aspirate and voiced (or breathy voiced) consonants. In Mandarin dialects the voicing is generally lost, yielding voiceless aspirates in syllables with a Middle Chinese level tone and non-aspirates in other syllables. Of

title: Varieties of Chinese

text: has disappeared again in many varieties.) However, most Chinese varieties have reduced the number of tonal distinctions. For example, in Mandarin, the tones resulting from the split of Middle Chinese rising and departing tones merged, leaving four tones. Furthermore, final stop consonants disappeared in most Mandarin dialects, and such syllables were distributed amongst the four remaining tones. In Wu, voiced obstruents were retained, and the tone split never became phonemic: the higher-pitched allophones occur with initial voiceless consonants, and the lower-pitched allophones occur with initial voiced consonants. (Traditional Chinese classification nonetheless counts these as different tones.) Most Wu dialects retain

title: Chinese Voice

text: radio station. The station targets New Zealanders of Chinese origin, with specific programming blocks for different ages, employment statuses, occupations and interests More than 80,000 New Zealanders speak Chinese and at least one other language, including almost 45,000 who speak northern dialects like Mandarin. Almost 32,000 New Zealanders can only speak Chinese, including 10,000 who can only speak northern dialects like Mandarin. Many Chinese New Zealanders are also multilingual. AM936 was established in February 2004. It was set up to combine imported talk and music programming from China with locally produced language programming, including live talkback on news stories, migrant

title: History of Modern Standard Chinese

text: History of Modern Standard Chinese Mandarin, officially Modern Standard Chinese, is the official language used by the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China (Taiwan) and Singapore. Since ancient history, the Chinese language has always consisted of a wide variety of dialects; hence prestige dialects and linguae francae have always been needed. Confucius, for example, used "yǎyán" (雅言), or "elegant speech", rather than colloquial regional dialects; text during the Han dynasty also referred to "tōngyǔ" (通語), or "common language". Rime dictionaries, which were written since the Southern and Northern Dynasties, may also have reflected one or more systems of

title: Wu Chinese

text: Pu (276–324), speakers easily perceived differences between dialects in different parts of China including the area where Wu varieties are spoken today. According to records of the Eastern Jin, the earliest known dialect of Nanjing was an ancient Wu dialect. After the Wu Hu uprising and the Disaster of Yongjia in 311, the Jin Emperor and many northern Chinese fled south, establishing the new capital Jiankang in what is modern-day Nanjing. The lower Yantze region became heavily inundated by settlers from Northern China, mostly coming from what is now northern Jiangsu province and Shandong province, with smaller numbers of settlers

title: Varieties of Chinese

text: Varieties of Chinese Chinese, also known as Sinitic, is a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family consisting of hundreds of local language varieties, many of which are not mutually intelligible. The differences are similar to those within the Romance languages, with variation particularly strong in the more mountainous southeast. These varieties, often called "dialects", have been classified into seven to ten groups, the largest being Mandarin (e.g. Beijing dialect), Wu (e.g. Shanghainese), Min (e.g. Hokkien), and Yue (e.g. Cantonese). Chinese varieties differ most in their phonology, and to a lesser extent in vocabulary and syntax. Southern varieties tend to have

title: Pashto dialects

text: between Wanetsi and the regional standard Kandahari: Pashto dialects Pashto dialects ( "da Pax̌to gəṛdoduna") are divided into two varieties: Northern Pashto ("Pakhto") and Southern Pashto ("Pashto"). Northern Pashto is spoken in eastern and northeastern Afghanistan (including Kabul), and central, northern and eastern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (including Peshawar); while Southern Pashto is spoken to the south of it, in southern and western Afghanistan (including Kandahar), southern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and northern Balochistan (including Quetta). Each of the two varieties of Pashto is further divided into a number of dialects. "Ethnologue" divides Pashto into Northern, Southern and Central Pashto, and Wanetsi. In the

title: Pashto dialects

text: Pashto dialects Pashto dialects ( "da Pax̌to gəṛdoduna") are divided into two varieties: Northern Pashto ("Pakhto") and Southern Pashto ("Pashto"). Northern Pashto is spoken in eastern and northeastern Afghanistan (including Kabul), and central, northern and eastern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (including Peshawar); while Southern Pashto is spoken to the south of it, in southern and western Afghanistan (including Kandahar), southern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and northern Balochistan (including Quetta). Each of the two varieties of Pashto is further divided into a number of dialects. "Ethnologue" divides Pashto into Northern, Southern and Central Pashto, and Wanetsi. In the medieval era, a consonant shift took place

title: Two-cell Chinese Braille

text: as etc. is also used for reduplication rather than repeating a syllable or word. When attached to a word, it repeats a syllable; standing alone, it repeats a word: Chinese braille punctuation is based on that of French Braille, but they are generally split between two cells. This gives them the 'full-width' feel of print Chinese, as well as avoiding confusion with letters. Two-cell Chinese Braille Two-cell Chinese Braille was designed in the 1970s and is used in parallel with traditional Chinese Braille in China. Each syllable is rendered with two braille characters. The first combines the initial and medial;

title: Peräpohjola dialects

text: Peräpohjola dialects The Peräpohjola dialects are forms of Finnish spoken in Lapland in Finland, Sweden, and Norway. The dialect group belongs to the Western Finnish dialects and it is divided into five more specific dialect groups. Like the Northern Ostrobothnian (Oulu) dialects, Peräpohjola dialects are Western dialects that show features from Eastern dialects. For instance the reflex to standard "-ts-" in "metsä" is "mettä" according to a Western pattern, whereas the reflex of standard "-d-" is deletion, 'j', or 'v', as in Eastern dialects, e.g. "vedän" - "vejän". Epenthetic vowels ("tyhjä - tyhyjä") are not common although found in southern

title: Dialects of Macedonian

text: Dialects of Macedonian The dialects of Macedonian comprise the Slavic dialects spoken in the Republic of Macedonia as well as some varieties spoken in the wider geographic region of Macedonia. They are part of the dialect continuum of South Slavic languages that joins the Macedonian language with Bulgarian to the east and Serbo-Croatian to the north. The precise delimitation between these languages is fleeting and controversial. Macedonian authors tend to treat all dialects spoken in the geographical region of Macedonia as Macedonian, including those spoken in the westernmost part of Bulgaria (so-called Pirin Macedonia), whereas Bulgarian authors treat all Macedonian

title: Georgian dialects

text: proposed by Gigineishvili, Topuria, and K'avtaradze (1961): The Central dialects, sometimes considered part of the Eastern group, are spoken in central and southern Georgia, and provide the basis for Standard Georgian language. This group is spoken by the mountaineers in northeast Georgia. Two of these dialects, Ingiloan and Fereidanian, are spoken outside Georgia, the former by the indigenous Georgians in northwest Azerbaijan, and the latter by the descendants of the 17th-19th century Georgian deportees and migrants in Iran. Georgian dialects Georgian (, "Kartuli") is a Kartvelian language spoken by about 4.1 million people, primarily in Georgia but also by indigenous

title: Uyghur dialects

text: Uyghur dialects Uyghur is a Turkic language spoken in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, administered by China, by the Uyghur people. It is a language with two standard languages and several dialects. However, these are all mutual intelligible at large, in spite of the various differences. Various classifications of the dialects of Uyghur have been proposed through time. Today, however, it is widely accepted that there are three major dialect groups. This was originally introduced by E. R. Tenishev, but has since been modified by other linguists, like M. Osmanov, though the original classification by E. R. Tenishev remains the

title: Dialects of Serbo-Croatian

text: variants are based on the Eastern Herzegovinian subdialect of Neo-Shtokavian. The other dialects are not taught in schools or used by the state media. The Torlakian dialect is often added to the list, though sources usually note that it is a transitional dialect between Shtokavian and the Bulgaro-Macedonian dialects. Burgenland Croatian and Molise Slavic are varieties of the Chakavian dialect spoken outside the South Slavic dialect continuum, which combine influences from other dialects of Serbo-Croatian as well as influences from the dominantly spoken local languages. Another common distinction among the dialects is made through the reflex of the long Common

title: Hungarian dialects

text: "mikor → "mikó "when", and "akkor → "akkó "then". Hungarian dialects The dialects of the Hungarian language identified by Ethnologue are: Great Hungarian Plain, West Danube, Danube-Tisza (territories between the two rivers), King's Pass Hungarian (Pass in Apuseni Mountains), Northeast Hungarian, Northwest Hungarian, Székely and West Hungarian. These dialects are, for the most part, mutually intelligible. The Hungarian Csángó dialect, which is mentioned but not listed separately by Ethnologue, is spoken primarily in Bacău County in eastern Romania. The Csángó Hungarian group has been largely isolated from other Hungarian people, and they therefore preserved a dialect closely resembling an earlier