Jin Chinese
Jin (; ) is a proposed group of varieties of Chinese spoken by roughly 63 million people in northern China, including most of Shanxi province, much of central Inner Mongolia, and adjoining areas in Hebei, Henan, and Shaanxi provinces. The status of Jin is disputed among linguists; some prefer to include it within Mandarin, but others set it apart as a closely related, but separate sister-group. Classification. Until the 1980s, the Jin dialects were universally included within Mandarin Chinese. However, in 1985, Li Rong proposed that Jin should be considered a separate top-level dialect group, similar to Yue  or Wu. His main criterion was that Jin dialects had preserved the entering tone as a separate category, still marked with a glottal stop as in the Wu dialects, but distinct in this respect from most other Mandarin dialects. Some linguists have adopted this classification. However, others disagree that Jin should be considered a separate dialect group for these reasons: In the "Language Atlas of China", Jin was divided into 8 subgroups: The Taiyuan dialect from the Bingzhou sub-group is sometimes taken as a convenient representative of Jin because many studies of this dialect are available, but most linguists  agree that the Taiyuan vocabulary is heavily influenced by Mandarin, making it unrepresentative of Jin. The Lüliang sub-group is usually regarded as the "core" of the Jin language group as it preserves most archaic features of Jin. However, there is no consensus as to which dialect among the Lüliang sub-group is the representative dialect. Phonology. Unlike most varieties of Mandarin, Jin has preserved a final glottal stop, which is the remnant of a final stop consonant (, or ). This is in common with the Early Mandarin of the Yuan Dynasty (c. 14th century AD) and with a number of  modern southern varieties of Chinese. In Middle Chinese, syllables closed with a stop consonant had no tone. However, Chinese linguists prefer to categorize such syllables as belonging to a separate tone class, traditionally called the "entering tone". Syllables closed with a glottal stop in Jin are still toneless, or alternatively, Jin can be said to still maintain the entering tone. In standard Mandarin Chinese, syllables formerly ending with a glottal stop have been reassigned to one of the other tone classes in a seemingly random fashion. Finals. Jin employs extremely complex tone sandhi, or tone changes that occur when words  are put together into phrases. The tone sandhi of Jin is notable in two ways among Chinese varieties: Grammar. Jin readily employs prefixes such as , , and , in a variety of derivational constructions. For example: In addition, there are a number of words in Jin that evolved, evidently, by splitting a mono-syllabic word into two, adding an 'l' in between (cf. Ubbi Dubbi, but with /l/ instead of /b/). For example: A similar process can in fact be found in most Mandarin dialects (e.g. kulong < kong), but it is especially common in Jin. This may be a kind of  reservation for double-initials in Old Chinese, although this is still controversial. For example, the character (pronounced in Mandarin) which appears more often as in Jin, had the pronunciation like in Old Chinese. Vocabulary. Some dialects of Jin make a three-way distinction in demonstratives. (Modern English, for example, has only a two-way distinction between "this" and "that", with "yon" being archaic.)