query: what are the different 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: 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: 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: Slovene dialects

text: Slovene dialects Slovene dialects () are the regional spoken varieties of Slovene, a South Slavic language. Spoken Slovene is often considered to have at least 48 dialects ("narečja") and subdialects ("govori"). The exact number of dialects is open to debate, ranging from as many as 50 to merely 7. The various dialects are so different from each other that a speaker of one dialect may have a very difficult time understanding a speaker of another, particularly if they belong to different regional groups. Speakers of dialects that strongly differ accommodate each other by gravitating toward standard Slovene. Slovene dialects are

title: Varieties of Chinese

text: categories in different dialects are often realized as quite different pitch contours. Middle Chinese had a three-way tonal contrast in syllables with vocalic or nasal endings. The traditional names of the tonal categories are "level"/"even" ( '), "rising" ( ') and "departing"/"going" ( "). Syllables ending in a stop consonant , or (checked syllables) had no tonal contrasts but were traditionally treated as a fourth tone category, "entering" ( "), corresponding to syllables ending in nasals , , or . The tones of Middle Chinese, as well as similar systems in neighbouring languages, experienced a tone split conditioned by syllabic

title: Peräpohjola dialects

text: Karesuando, Karungi, Korpilombolo, Pajala, Tärendö, Vittangi and Övertorneå. In Sweden the Tornio dialects together with Gällivare dialects are also called "meänkieli". It has an official minority language status. It has many Swedish loanwords, and partly a different spelling compared to Finnish, because of a different standardization organisation. Kemi dialects are spoken in Finland in the municipalities of Inari, Kemi, Kittilä, Rovaniemi, Simo, Sodankylä, Tervola and Utsjoki. Kemijärvi dialects are spoken in Kemijärvi, Pelkosenniemi, Salla and Savukoski. Gällivare dialects are spoken in Sweden in Gällivare and some surrounding villages. Finnish language has been a common language spoken at home in the

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: 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: 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: 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: 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: Chinese surname

text: but those are not ethnically Han Chinese. For example, Aixinjueluo ( , also romanized from the Manchu language as Aisin Gioro), was the family name of the Manchu royal family of the Qing dynasty. Transliteration of Chinese family names (see List of common Chinese surnames) into foreign languages poses a number of problems. Chinese surnames are shared by people speaking a number of dialects and languages which often have different pronunciations of their surnames. The spread of the Chinese diaspora into all parts of the world resulted in the Romanization of the surnames based on different languages. As a result,

title: Mandarin Chinese

text: contrast to the larger sets of monophthongs common in other dialect groups (and some widely scattered Mandarin dialects). The Middle Chinese coda was still present in Old Mandarin, but has merged with in the modern dialects. In some areas (especially the southwest) final has also merged with . This is especially prevalent in the rhyme pairs "-en/-eng" and "-in/-ing" . As a result, "jīn" "gold" and "jīng" "capital" merge in those dialects. The Middle Chinese final stops have undergone a variety of developments in different Mandarin dialects (see Tones below). In Lower Yangtze dialects and some north-western dialects they have

title: Standard Chinese

text: Chinese has long had considerable dialectal variation, hence prestige dialects have always existed, and linguae francae have always been needed. Confucius, for example, used "yǎyán" () rather than colloquial regional dialects; text during the Han dynasty also referred to "tōngyǔ" (). Rime books, which were written since the Northern and Southern dynasties, may also have reflected one or more systems of standard pronunciation during those times. However, all of these standard dialects were probably unknown outside the educated elite; even among the elite, pronunciations may have been very different, as the unifying factor of all Chinese dialects, Classical Chinese, was

title: Chinese language

text: spoken varieties, most syllables tend to be open syllables, meaning they have no coda (assuming that a final glide is not analyzed as a coda), but syllables that do have codas are restricted to nasals , , , the retroflex approximant , and voiceless stops , , , or . Some varieties allow most of these codas, whereas others, such as Standard Chinese, are limited to only , and . The number of sounds in the different spoken dialects varies, but in general there has been a tendency to a reduction in sounds from Middle Chinese. The Mandarin dialects in

title: Yue Chinese

text: have disappeared entirely in most Mandarin dialects, including the Beijing-based standard, with the syllables distributed across the other tones. For example, the characters , , , , , , , , , and are all pronounced "yì" in Mandarin, but they are all different in Yue (Cantonese "jeoi6", "ngat6", "ngai6", "jik1", "jik6", "ji3", "ji6", "ai3", "jap1", and "jat6", respectively). Similarly, in Mandarin dialects the Middle Chinese final has merged with , but the distinction is maintained in southern varieties of Chinese such as Hakka, Min and Yue. For example, Cantonese has "taahm" (譚) and "tàahn" (壇) versus Mandarin "tán", "yìhm"

title: Norrland dialects

text: of Norrbotten displays less West Nordic influence than other more westerly dialects. The greatest West Nordic/Norwegian—or, perhaps, least East Nordic/Swedish—influence is found in Jamtlandic. As with other regiolects, it is difficult to clearly define a unique set of characteristics for the Norrland dialects. The distribution of different features of the dialect have differing boundaries (called isoglosses), which are described in the following summary of phenomena regarded as typical of Norrland dialects. Just as it is difficult to precisely define unique linguistic traits for Norrland dialects, it is also difficult to split the group geographically into various subdialects; different traits are

title: Savonian dialects

text: are rather different from the standard language and are recognized as local dialects. There are large variations between different Savonian dialects, but a few of the most stereotypical features are: Although standard and known elsewhere, the usage of verb compounds is particularly prevalent in Savo Finnish and a prolific source of creative expressions. The first verb is in the infinitive and indicates the action, and the second verb is declined and indicates the manner. For example, "seistä toljotat" "you stand there gawking" consists of words meaning "to-stand you-gawk". Northern Savonian dialects are spoken in the municipalities of Hankasalmi (Eastern part),

title: Savonian dialects

text: Ranua in Lapland. Also the language spoken by forest settlers in Värmland and Norwegian Hedmark of Central Scandinavia belonged to the old Savonian dialects. The area of Savonian dialects consist one third of the whole area of Finland. The Savonian dialects are of different origin than Western Finnish dialects. Savonian dialects form a dialect continuum with other Eastern dialects of Finnish and Karelian language with whom they have common ancestry in the Proto-Karelian language spoken in the coast of Lake Ladoga in the Iron Age. Although the Savonian dialects are spread over a large geographical area with significant variations, they

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 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: Norwegian dialects

text: radical forms of Oslo dialects among political radicals in Oslo, to movements preserving local dialects. There is widespread and growing acceptance that Norwegian linguistic diversity is worth preserving. The trend today is a regionalisation of the dialects causing smaller dialectal traits to disappear and rural dialects to merge with their nearest larger dialectal variety. There is no standard dialect for the Norwegian language as a whole, and all dialects are by now mutually intelligible. Hence, widely different dialects are used frequently and alongside each other, in almost every aspect of society. Criticism of a dialect may be considered criticism of

title: Pashto dialects

text: nine phonemes represented in the column headings below show key phonetic differences between the dialects. Five of them are consonants written in the Pashto alphabet, and four are vowels written in the Latin script; sounds are transcribed in the IPA: In general, the Karlani dialects, both in southern and northern varieties, show more vocabulary differences than the non-Karlani southern and northern dialects. However, the most distinctive of the Pashto dialects is Wanetsi. Although Wanetsi follows the normal phonetic rules of the southern dialects near it, it is still greatly different from them in lexicon: Examples of sentences showing the difference

title: Chinese in New York City

text: while Chinatowns in Brooklyn and Queens have also witnessed influxes of Mandarin-speaking Chinese. However, the different Chinese cultural and language groups as well as socioeconomic statuses are often subdivided among different boroughs of New York City. In Queens, the Chinatowns are very diverse, composed of different Chinese regional groups mainly speaking Mandarin although speaking other dialects as well, and who are more often middle- or upper-middle class. As a result, the Mandarin lingua franca is primarily concentrated in Queens. However, since Manhattan's Chinatown and Brooklyn's Chinese enclaves still hold large Cantonese speaking populations, who were the earlier Chinese immigrants to

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: Mandarin Chinese

text: did not recover until the 17th century. The dialects in this area are now relatively uniform. However, long-established cities even very close to Beijing, such as Tianjin, Baoding, Shenyang, and Dalian, have markedly different dialects. Unlike their compatriots on the southeast coast, few Mandarin speakers engaged in overseas emigration until the late 20th century, but there are now significant communities of them in cities across the world. The classification of Chinese dialects evolved during the 20th century, and many points remain unsettled. Early classifications tended to follow provincial boundaries or major geographical features. In 1936, Wang Li produced the first

title: Four tones (Middle Chinese)

text: a glottal stop, nor [-p], [-t], or [-k]. Sample dialects and their realization of tone are given below. Different authors typically have different opinions as to the shapes of Chinese tones. Tones typically have a slight purely-phonetic drop at the end in citation form. It is therefore likely that a tone with a drop of one unit (54, say, or 21) is not distinct from a level tone (a 55 or 22); on the other hand, what one author hears as a significant drop (53 or 31) may be perceived by another as a smaller drop so it is often

title: Central Franconian dialects

text: Middle Franconia, where East Franconian dialects are spoken. The Central Franconian dialects are of particular interest to linguists because of the tonal distinctions made between different words, for example (Ripuarian) "zɛɪ" (tonal accent 1) "sieve" vs. "zɛɪ" (tonal accent 2) "she". See Pitch-accent languages#Franconian dialects. Central Franconian dialects <br> Central Franconian () refers to the following continuum of West Central German dialects: Luxembourgish is often included within Moselle Franconian, but sometimes regarded as a separate group. The German-speaking Community of Belgium comprises both Ripuarian and Moselle Franconian dialects. The Central Franconian dialects are part of the Rhinelandic continuum stretching from

title: Ojibwe dialects

text: the Nipissing dialect. The degree of mutually intelligibility between nonadjacent dialects of Ojibwe varies considerably; recent research has helped to show the extent of the distance between Ottawa and the maximally different Severn Ojibwe dialect spoken in northwestern Ontario. Because the dialects of Ojibwe are at least partly mutually intelligible, Ojibwe is usually considered to be a single language with a number of dialects. However, the relatively low degrees of mutual intelligibility between some nonadjacent Ojibwe dialects led to the suggestion that Ojibwe "...could be said to consist of several languages...". The Northern dialects of Ojibwe are Severn Ojibwe and

title: Norwegian dialects

text: happens, similar sounds with small functional loads merge. There are great differences between the intonation systems of different Norwegian dialects. Three variations of the first person plural nominative pronoun exist in Norwegian dialects: There is considerable variety in the way the first person singular nominative pronoun is pronounced in Norwegian dialects. They appear to fall into three groups, within which there are also variations: The Norwegian word for the English "not" exists in these main categories: Examples of the sentence "I am not hungry," in Norwegian: Some common interrogative words take on forms such as: Norwegian dialects The Norwegian dialects

title: Bengali dialects

text: speakers are fluent in Choltibhasha, one or more Ancholik dialect, and one or more forms of "Gramyo Bangla" (গ্রাম্য বাংলা) (i.e. 'rural Bengali'), dialects specific to a village or town. To a non-Bengali, these dialects may sound or look vastly different, but the differences are mostly in phonology and vocabulary, and not so much a grammatical one, one exception is the addition of grammatical gender in some eastern dialects. Many dialects share features with the so-called "Shadhu Bhasha" or "pure language", which was the written standard until the 19th century. Comparison of Bengali dialects gives us an idea about archaic

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: Varieties of Chinese

text: as written works rather than spoken works. Another factor that limits the political implications of dialect is that it is very common within an extended family for different people to know and use different dialects. Before 1945, other than a small Japanese-speaking population, most of the population of Taiwan were Han Chinese, who spoke Taiwanese Hokkien or Hakka, with a minority of Taiwanese aborigines, who spoke Formosan languages. When the Kuomintang retreated to the island after losing the Chinese Civil War in 1949, they brought a substantial influx of speakers of Northern Chinese, and viewed the use of Mandarin as

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: 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: 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: 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: Chinese Indonesians

text: 2.2 million native speakers of various Chinese varieties in Indonesia in 1982: 1,300,000 speakers of Southern Min varieties (including Hokkien and Teochew); 640,000 Hakka speakers; 460,000 Mandarin speakers; 180,000 Cantonese speakers; and 20,000 speakers of the Eastern Min varieties (including Fuzhou dialect). Additionally, an estimated 20,000 spoke different dialects of the Indonesian language. Many of the Chinese living in capital city Jakarta and other towns located in Java are not fluent in Chinese languages, due to New Order's banning of Chinese languages, but those who are living in non-Java cities especially in Sumatra and Kalimantan can speak Chinese and its

title: Basque dialects

text: in the different Basque dialects also gives a good overview over some of the differences and common features. Key to verb forms: Basque dialects all diverge from this standard inventory to a larger or lesser extent. The grapheme "j" (historically /j/) displays by far the most noticeable divergence, followed by the fricatives and affricates. Hualde (1991) describes the following: There have been various attempts throughout history to promote standardised forms of Basque dialects to the level of a common standard Basque. Basque dialects Basque dialects are linguistic varieties of the Basque language which differ in pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar from

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: Classical Chinese

text: homophones that result from sound changes. This is similar to such phenomena in English as the "pen–pin" merger of many dialects in the American south and the "caught-cot" merger of most dialects of American English: because the words "pin" and "pen", as well as "caught" and "cot", 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

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: History of Chinese Australians

text: licenses policy. Around most of the goldfields of Victoria the Chinese were organized into these camps. The camps were the forerunners to later Chinatowns in many places. In the Bendigo protectorate there were seven different camps for the Chinese in the area and six in Ballarat. The organization of these camps was often done around clan, or dialect differences where this was applicable. While most of the men were from the Guangdong province, several different dialects of the Chinese language were present on the goldfields. These camps were their own little communities. The parties of men who left China did

title: Spanish dialects and varieties

text: Spanish dialects and varieties Some of the regional varieties of the Spanish language are quite divergent from one another, especially in pronunciation and vocabulary, and less so in grammar. While all Spanish dialects adhere to approximately the same written standard, all spoken varieties differ from the written variety, to different degrees. There are differences between European Spanish (also called Peninsular Spanish) and the Spanish of the Americas, as well as many different dialect areas both within Spain and within Hispanic America. Prominent differences of pronunciation among dialects of Spanish include: Among grammatical features, the most prominent variation among dialects is

title: Chinese language

text: and Yue dialects are spoken. The vast majority of Chinese immigrants to North America spoke the Taishan dialect, from a small coastal area southwest of Guangzhou. Local varieties of Chinese are conventionally classified into seven dialect groups, largely on the basis of the different evolution of Middle Chinese voiced initials: The classification of Li Rong, which is used in the "Language Atlas of China" (1987), distinguishes three further groups: Some varieties remain unclassified, including Danzhou dialect (spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island), Waxianghua (spoken in western Hunan) and Shaozhou Tuhua (spoken in northern Guangdong). Standard Chinese, often called Mandarin, is

title: History of Modern Standard Chinese

text: standard pronunciation during those times. However, all of these standard dialects were probably unknown outside the educated elite; even among the elite, pronunciations may have been very different, as the unifying factor of all Chinese dialects, Classical Chinese, was a written standard, not a spoken one. The Ming (1368–1644) and Qing dynasties (1644–1912) began to use the term "guānhuà" (官話), or "official speech", to refer to the speech used at the courts. It seems that during the early part of this period, the standard was based on the Nanjing dialect, but later the Beijing dialect became increasingly influential, despite the

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: 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: 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: Middle Chinese

text: a slightly different system, which is believed to reflect southern pronunciation. In this system, the voiced fricatives and are not distinguished from the voiced affricates and , respectively, and the retroflex stops are not distinguished from the dental stops. Several changes occurred between the time of the "Qieyun" and the rime tables: The following table shows a representative account of the initials of Late Middle Chinese. The voicing distinction is retained in modern Wu dialects, but has disappeared from other varieties. In Min dialects the retroflex dentals have merged with the dentals, while elsewhere they have merged with the retroflex

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: Pashto dialects

text: retroflex sibilants, respectively, and does not merge them into other phonemes unlike the northern dialects. The dialects spoken by the tribes from the Karlani confederacy of Pashtuns are lexicologically different and very varied. Moreover, the Karlani dialects have a tendency towards a change in the pronunciation of vowels. Depending on the particular dialect, the standard Pashto [a], [ā], [o], [u] may change into [ā], [â/å/o], [ȯ/ȫ/e], [i], respectively. In the Karlani dialects of Waziristan, Bannu, and Tani (southern Khost), which follow the vowel shift to the greatest extent, these four vowels normally change into [ā], [o], [e], [i], respectively. The

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: Massachusett dialects

text: translation of the Lord's Prayer and a bilingual catechism by the English missionary Abraham Pierson in 1658. Coweset is only attested in a handful of lexical items that bear clear dialectal variation after thorough linguistic review of Roger Williams' "A Key into the Language of America" and place names, but most of the languages are only known from local place names and passing mention of the Native peoples in local historical documents. Within what is usually regarded as Massachusett, there were certainly dialects as it was spoken by several different peoples across a broad region, and widely adopted as a

title: Bengali dialects

text: Bengali language and the Rohingya language. More than other languages of South Asia, Bengali exhibits strong diglossia between the formal, written language and the vernacular, spoken language. Two styles of writing, involving somewhat different vocabularies and syntax, have emerged : Spoken Bengali exhibits far more variation than written Bengali. Formal spoken Bengali, including what is heard in news reports, speeches, announcements, and lectures, is modelled on Choltibhasha. This form of spoken Bengali stands alongside other spoken dialects, or "Ancholik Bangla" (আঞ্চলিক বাংলা) (i.e. 'regional Bengali'). The majority of Bengalis are able to communicate in more than one dialect – often,

title: Mandarin Chinese

text: particles to indicate aspect, but the particles used vary. Most Mandarin dialects use the particle "-le" (了) to indicate the perfective aspect and "-zhe" (着/著) for the progressive aspect. Other Chinese varieties tend to use different particles, e.g. Cantonese "zo" 咗 and "gan" 紧/緊 respectively. The experiential aspect particle "-guo" (过/過) is used more widely, except in Southern Min. The subordinative particle "de" (的) is characteristic of Mandarin dialects. Some southern dialects, and a few Lower Yangtze dialects, preserve an older pattern of subordination without a marking particle, while in others a classifier fulfils the role of the Mandarin particle.

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: Wu Chinese

text: not just Shanghai. Duval argued that many Chinese critics had a low opinion of Wu works, mainly originating from the eroticism within them, and that contributed to the decline in Wu literature. A BBS set up in 2004, in which topics such as phonology, grammar, orthography and romanization of Wu Chinese are widely talked about. The cultural and linguistic diversity within China is also a significant concerning of this forum. A website aimed at modernization of Wu Chinese, including basics of Wu, Wu romanization scheme, pronunciation dictionaries of different dialects, Wu input method development, Wu research literatures, written Wu experiment,

title: Dialects of Serbo-Croatian

text: (for example Jakab Szabár) and also the Burgenland Croatian language (József Ficzkó). The variety uses the Latin alphabet with the same diacritical modifiers as the Croatian alphabet. In the course of language development it acquired some of its own specialised vocabulary, sometimes different from that used in standard Croatian. Sampled differences from standard Croatian are presented in the table in turn. Burgenland Croatian written language is based mainly on the local Chakavian speech with some influences from the other Croatian dialects spoken in Burgenland. These dialects include: Molise Slavic or "Slavomolisano" is a variety of the Shtokavian dialect with some

title: Eastern Slovak dialects

text: language, as codified by Ľudovít Štúr in the 1840s, was based largely on Central Slovak dialects spoken at the time. Eastern dialects are considerably different from Central and Western dialects in their phonology, morphology and vocabulary, set apart by a stronger connection to Polish and Rusyn. At the beginning of the 20th century, there was an unsuccessful attempt to standardise an East Slovak. Diaspora from the region has contributed to a scattered literary presence of Eastern Slovak dialects. The newspaper "Slovák v Amerike" ("The Slovak in America"), founded in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1889, as well as "Amerikánsko-Slovenské noviny" (American-Slovak News),

title: Regional differences and dialects in Indian English

text: Regional differences and dialects in Indian English Indian English has developed a number of dialects, distinct from the General/Standard Indian English that educators have attempted to establish and institutionalise, and it is possible to distinguish a person's sociolinguistic background from the dialect that they employ. These dialects are influenced by the different languages that different sections of the country also speak, side by side with English. The dialects can differ markedly in their phonology, to the point that two speakers using two different dialects can find each other's accents mutually unintelligible. Indian English is a "network of varieties", resulting from

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: Pashto dialects

text: Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan. In an intermediate area of Pashtunistan, mainly Ghilji, transitional dialects or mixings are found. For example š/ṣ̌/ҳ/xəja “woman”, and špaž/ẓ̌/γ̌/g “six”. The differences between the standard varieties of Pashto are primarily phonological, and there are simple conversion rules. The morphological differences between the standard varieties are very few and unimportant. Two of the key phonemes whose pronunciation vary between the different Pashto dialects are ښ and ږ. The southern dialect of Kandahar is considered to be the most conservative with regards to phonology. It retains the original pronunciation of these two phonemes as voiceless and voiced

title: Chinese Singaporeans

text: dialects, customs, cultural, and religious practices in Singapore. Although Singaporean culture is diverse in nature, Singapore is one of the few countries outside Greater China with a vibrant Chinese-speaking presence. On one glance, Singapore's infrastructure and environment might seem Western, but on closer observation, certain aspects of Chinese culture is generally present across all corners of Singapore. This includes the widespread use of different Chinese varieties, various Chinese writings across Singapore, various Chinese press and entertainment media, a thriving Chinese pop culture, various Chinese organisations, Chinese cultural festivals, Chinese opera, Chinese religious activities, Chinese bookshops etc. Chinese immigrants to Singapore

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: 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: Dalecarlian dialects

text: diminishes as one goes forth to the surrounding dialects of Rättvik, Leksand, Särna or neighbouring province Hälsingland. It is therefore more correct to specify these three together to constitute the Dalecarlian language, whilst Elfdalian or Övmål is one of the three main dialects and traditionally all three may be divided into village dialects. Traditionally, in some of the major Mora villages such as Östnor, Bonäs or Vika, several different dialects were discernible within the same village, the differences between these internal dialects surviving for generations. The closest form to the old Dalecarlian dialects is spoken only in the Upper Siljan

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: 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: 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: 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: Han Chinese

text: a standard literary Chinese had emerged with vocabulary and grammar that was significantly different from the various forms of spoken Chinese. A simplified and elaborated version of this written standard was used in business contracts, notes for Chinese opera, ritual texts for Chinese folk religion, and other daily documents for educated people. During the early 20th century, written vernacular Chinese based on Mandarin dialects, which had been developing for several centuries, was standardized and adopted to replace literary Chinese. While written vernacular forms of other varieties of Chinese exist, such as written Cantonese, written Chinese based on Mandarin is widely

title: Norrland dialects

text: found in different areas. Nevertheless, the mediaeval parishes have played a large role in the subdivision of the Norrland dialects. Even those parishes that were organised later in the 1600s, such as Upper Kalix parish and Burträsk parish, have strong dialectal features. The Swedish language came to Lappmark in the 18th and 19th centuries as ethnic Swedes began to settle the area. They came from many different regions, and some even spoke Finnish or a Sami language natively. This resulted in a blending of both dialects and languages. Most of the Lappmark dialects thus lack such archaic features as the

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: Fornes dialects

text: Fornes dialects Fornes (second syllable stressed) is the dialect native to Forni di Sopra and Forni di Sotto, two villages which, from 1300 to 1700 AD, were governed separately from the surrounding areas by the Savorgnani family of Venice and known as 'I Forni Savorgnani'. As the two villages are 9 km (over 5 miles) from each other and there was traditionally poor communication in the snowy months of the year, these villages' dialects diverged and are still markedly different both from each other and from the language spoken further down the mountains (Friulian). According to studies by some institutions

title: Standard Chinese phonology

text: feature, known in Chinese as "erhua", is particularly characteristic of the Beijing dialect; many other dialects do not use it as much, and some not at all. It occurs in two cases: The "r" final is pronounced with a relatively lax tongue, and has been described as a "retroflex vowel". In dialects that do not make use of the rhotic coda, it may be omitted in pronunciation, or in some cases a different word may be selected: for example, Beijing "zhèr" "here" and "nàr" "there" may be replaced by the synonyms "zhèli" and "nàli". Syllables in Standard Chinese have the

title: Wu Chinese

text: Xuanzhou division, which has a larger influence from the surrounding Mandarin varieties than Northern Wu, making it typologically much different from the rest of Wu. In the "Language Atlas of China" (1987), Wu was divided into six subgroups: Chinese dialectologist Cao Zhiyun has rearranged some of the divisions based on a larger corpus of data. According to Cao, Southern Wu can be divided into three broad divisions (note that he is using the pre-republican boundaries for the cited locations): The Wu dialects are notable among Chinese varieties in having kept the "muddy" (voiced; whispery voiced word-initially) plosives and fricatives of

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: 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: 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: 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: 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: Mandarin Chinese

text: (i.e. /p/, /t/ or /k/) were considered to belong to a special category known as the "entering tone". These final stops have disappeared in most Mandarin dialects, with the syllables distributed over the other four modern tones in different ways in the various Mandarin subgroups. In the Beijing dialect that underlies the standard language, syllables beginning with original voiceless consonants were redistributed across the four tones in a completely random pattern. For example, the three characters , all "tsjek" in Middle Chinese (William H. Baxter's transcription), are now pronounced "jī", "jǐ" and "jì" respectively. Older dictionaries such as "Mathews' Chinese-English

title: Chinese surname

text: it is common for the same surname to be transliterated differently. In certain dialects, different surnames could be homonyms so it is common for family names to appear ambiguous when transliterated. Example: 鄭/郑 (pinyin: Zheng) can be romanized into Chang, Cheng, Chung, Teh, Tay, Tee, Tsang, Zeng or Zheng, (in pinyin, Chang, Cheng, Zheng and Zeng are all different names). Translating Chinese surnames from foreign transliteration often presents ambiguity. For example, the surname "Li" are all mandarin-based pinyin transliteration for the surnames 黎 (Lí); 李, 理 and 里 (Lǐ); 郦/酈, 栗, 厉/厲, and 利 (Lì) depending on the tone which

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: 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: 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,