Ramsey 1987 Chapter 6.Pdf

6 TODA Y'S DIALECTS The modern dialects are usually classified into seven major groups: In the list of those groups below, the population estimates are based upon a total Han Chinese population of 950 million. Dialect Group Estimated Population Where Spoken NoRTH 1. Mandarin 679,250,000 (71.5%) all of North and Southwest SouTH 2. Wu 80,750,000 (8.5%) coastal area around Shanghai, Zhejiang 3. Gan 22,800,000 .(2.4%) Jiangxi' 4. Xiang 45,600,000 (4.8%) Huoan 5. Hakka 35,150,000 (3.7%) widely scattered from Sichuan to Taiwan 6. Yue 47,500,000 (5.0%) Guangdong, Guangxi (and overseas communities) ?.Min 38,950,000 (4.1%) FJ.Ijian, coa&_tal areas of §outh NoRTH Mandarin The Northern varieties of Chinese are usually known a~ the Mandarin dialects. They are typi&ea by the Peking dialect, which is the basis ,o,f the standard language and of "Mandarin" in a much narrower and older-sense. These dialects are spoken by more than two-thir.ds of the Chinese people. With the total Chinese population having now passed the billion mark, this proportion means that there are around 700 million Mandarin speakers in the world-considerably more than the number of people who speak English as their first language. The .area where these Mandarin dialects are spoken covers more than three fourths of China. (See Fig 5.) It extends over all of :North China and Sichuan, as well as the more recently Sinicized territqries of the North west and Southwest. 88 THE CHINESE LANGUAGE This enormous dialect area is customarily divided by Chinese linguists into four subgroups: (1) Northern Mandarin, spoken in the Northeast and including-the- Peking dialect; (2) Northwestern Mandarin, which in cludes the dialects of the Loess Plateau and the territories to the west of it; (3) Southwestern Mandarin, spoken in Sichuan and adjacent regions; (4) Eastern, or Lower Yangtze Mandarin, represented by1 the dialects spoken around Nanking. The actual linguistic differences between these groups are relatively slight and are difficult to delineate in any systematic way. Alp10st all of the Mandarin dialects ~re mutually intelligible. They are characterized by a number of common features, which, when taken together, distinguish them fairly clearly from .the other dialect groups. Here are a few of those features: Mandarin dialects do not have a series of voiced stops, with sounds such as English b, d, or g. (The Peking c9nsonants ,that are written with these letters in Pinyin Romanization are phonetically unvoiced.) This feature separates Man darin from Shanghainese and the other Wu dfalects (as well as from some of the, Xiang dialects of Hunan). The tone system of the Peking dialect is typical of most Northern speech. The great majority of Mandarin dialects have just four tones (although a few places in the extreme north have just three tones, and a few other dialects near the Yangtze have five or six). There is a great deal of variation in qow these tones are actually pronounc~d-for example, the third and fourth tones have pitch patterns in the Sichuan dialect that are almost exactly the reverse of those in the stan~ard lan guage. But the four tone categories are almost always the same. Unlike Cantonese and other Southern dialects, Mandarin does not have -p, -t, -k, or -m as final consonants. The pronoun system is one of the most distinctive features of Mandarin. The third person pronoun tii is found in virtually all Mandarin dialects; completely different forms are used for this pronoun in Southern dialects. ,Plurals are indi cated in Mandarin by the suffix -men (e.g., wo '1,' women 'we'; tii 'he, she,' tiimen 'they'). Many Mandarin dialects have the inclusive pronoun zdmen 'we (you and 1),' which is different from women 'we (he or they and 1).' The subordinative particle in Mandarin is -de'or -di (e.g., wade shu 'my book'). This pa~ticle is as a' rule not found in the dialect groups spoken south of the Yangtze Rivet. SOUTH Wu The Wu dialects are spoken in the Yangtze delta and the coastal region around Shanghai. This is an area' in the most fertile and densely TODA Y'S DIALECTS 89 populated part of China. There are more than eighty million speakers of Wu, and they live in a space approximately the size of the state of Georgia (which has a population of about five and a half million). The heart of this Wu-speaking area is Shanghai, China's largest city. Located on the flatlands of the rich Shanghai delta, this great metropolis of eleven million people serves as the economic and cultural focal point for the entire Yangtze basin. It is, above all, a city of industry and com merce. Its 8,000 factories produce everything from shoe polish and sweets to automobiles and steel, and altogether account for one-eighth of China's total industrial output. Its port, which is connected to the Yang tze estuary by the muddy Whangpoo River, accommodates a volume of cargo that ranks it among the twelve busiest in the world. The cultural. impact of Shanghai on the rest of China is considerable. Of all the PRC's urban areas, it is by far the most cosmopolitan. Of course, Communist reform long ago destroyed the wicked opulence of what was once called "the Paris of Asia" -there are no more opium dens or prostitutes, posh foreign restaurants, hotels, or bars. Shanghai's old racetrack, for exam ple, has become People's Park. Yet, in spite of more than thirty years of reeducation and reorientation, an atmosphere of smart sophistication still remains in Shanghai. Clothing is more colorful and, by Western stan dards, more stylish than elsewhere in the country. After the fall of the Gang of Four, Shanghai's women took up permanent waves and makeup again more quickly than did their counterparts in other cities. Nanking Road, which runs through the heart of what was formerly the British settlement, still has its reputation for better shopping, and bureaucrats from elsewhere seldom leave Shanghai without a visit to its stores. The appearance of downtown Shanghai, too, has changed little since 1949, and much of it still looks like the Paris of Asia. The foreign communities may have been disenfranchised, but the streets and buildings where they once lived are still there, occupied by others and used for different pur poses. The look of this European architecture stands in sharp contrast to that of the monumental mixture of imperial and Stalinist style to be seen in Peking. Nothing else in China is quite like Shanghai. By Chinese standards Shanghai is a new city. It began to be built up by foreign capital in the latter half of the nineteenth century; before that, it was an insignificant Southern town. Ancient records tell us that around 200 B.C. it was the site of a tiny fishing village, which was part of the kingdom of Wu. (The Wu dialects are named after this ancient "barbar ian" state.) Soochow was the most important city in the area then; it was the capital of Wu. After Wu territory became Chinese, Soochow kept 90 THE CHINESE LANGUAGE its position of prominence in the Yangtze delta, continuing as a cultural and literary center through all the succeeding Chinese dynasties. Shang hai, meanwhile, became .the port for Soochow in about A.D. 500, and its fortunes remained tied t6 that other city until the mid-nineteenth century. :Yhen, with the granting of the foreign concessions, its orientation changed, and ·it quickly came to eclipse Soochow in po'pulation and money. The needs of the foreign community, which was bent on the exploitation of all of China, rpade it a boom ·town, as skilled and semi skilled labor poured in from the surrounding areas to take advantage of economic opportunity. Many of these migrants were also refugees, for the enclaves of Shanghai offered those willing to cut their roots with tradition ·a sanctuary against the very real physical dangers of living in.a Chinese countryside that was rapidly becoming chaotic. By the end of the nineteenth century the population of Shanghai had swelled to over four million. Now it is three times that large. The language of Shanghai reflects this turbulence. It comes in many varieties, depending on neighborhood and social group, and there is evi dence of rapid generational change. Earlier missionary descriptions indi cate that around the turn of the century it still had a sound system and vocabulary much like that of Sooc,how. But increased immigration of artisans and clerks from slightly farther down the·coast began to give the metropolitan area a more Southern'flavor, and today colloquial Shanghai ~peech ,.i_s different from that of Soochow, with an apparent mixture of elements from various places in the Wu dialect area. In discussing the linguistic state of affairs, one Western writer notes this mixing and refers to "the so-called Shanghai dialect," saying that it is "not a pure dialect at all, but·a metropolitan.hodge-podge." Nevertheless, in the Wu dialect area today, Shanghai is clearly the place to be from, and anyone from anywhere near the metropolitan area will identify himself as "·Shangliainese." The upper-class dialect of Soochow, which was'once the object of esteem and envy even in Shang hai itself, is now thought of as slightly old-fashioned or quaint. The majority speech of downtown Shanghai has become by far the most< import;;mt of the Wu dialects. The feature for which Sh;;tnghainese and the rest of the Wu dialects are Q.est known is a three-way distinction in the initial consonants; for exam ple, between p,anq p' and.b.

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