A Study On Jiu Xing Yumin Dialect

Jiu Xing Yumin dialect is an endangered Chinese dialect which mainly distributed over JianDe, LanXi and TongLu of ZheJiang Province.The fishermen went ashore to pursue a life in the 1960's. They communicated with the inhabitant frequently and their life style changed gradually.In the meantime,their dialects encountered a new crisis of being endangered.This dissertation,based on the on-the-spot study and research,gives a comprehensive description of the Jiu Xing Yumin dialect and discusses the rules of dialect contact and language change as well.in particular,the linguistic nature of the dialect will be identified and the comparative research can throw much light on this problem.This dissertation consists of six chapters.Chapter One is the introduction.A brief account of the culture,geography and dialects about diu Xing Yumin,research done so far on the dialects,the purpose,the objects of studies,the methods as well as sources of the materials for this research will be included in this chapter.Chapter Two introduces the general characteristics of the dialects by the method of the traditional dialectology,and describes the phonetic systems of the dialects of MeiCheng,SanDu, Dagang,Chun'An and LanXi.The similarities and differences will be mentioned as well.Chapter Three studies on the phonological characteristics of the initials,finals and tones,and tries to clarify the phonetic peculiarities of Jiu Xing Yumin dialect.The initials.The change of voiced initials in diu Xing Yumin dialect is something like Southern Wu Dialects.Most voiced initials have devoiced and a few haye not.The ones have not devoiced are usually with Shangsheng(上声) or obstruent initials.Besides,the pronunciations of Ni-Lai initials(泥来母),Zhi-Zhang-Zhuang initials group(知章庄组声母) are of significance to identifying the nature of the dialect.The finals.There are some important peculiarities on the finals of the dialect such as the tendency of combination of Guo finals group(果摄) and Yu finals group(遇摄),the pronunciation of Jia finals group(假摄),the vowelization of Xian-Shan finals group(咸山摄) and the tendency of stop-ending's losing in entering tone characters.The tones.In Jiu Xing Yumin dialect,the tone of Shangsheng(上声) and Qusheng(去声) are not divided into Yin-tone(阴调) and Yang-tone(阳调) respectively.We can not find sufficient evidences to prove Shangsheng(上声) had ever been divided and then combined,so as Qusheng (去声).This phenomenon is particular and may be a historical feature of the Proto-Chinese.Chapter Four analyzes the rules of dialect contact and language change.Compared with the dialects of the dry land,Jiu Xing Yumin dialect is more active and easier to be changed.A view will be pointed out that even before going ashore,the fishermen used their dialects as one pleases and the dialects are lack of standard and steady forms.With the influence of the authoritative dialects or Mandarin,Jiu Xing Yumin dialect changed so much and was endangered.Variation theory,lexical diffusion theory,etc.will be used in this chapter to analyze the linguistic phenomena.Chapter Five introduces the lexical and grammatical characteristics based on a plenty of materials.In order to make the features of the dialect clear,comparative methods will be used to explain the lexical or grammatical phenomena between Jiu Xing Yumin dialect and Mandarin,Wu dialects(吴语),Hui dialects(徽语),Northern Chinese dialects,Yue dialects(粤语) and so on..Chapter Six mainly practices the method of geographical linguistics to demonstrate the spatial diffusion of language.25 dialectical maps are designed to help to throw light on the identification of the nature of Jiu Xing Yumin dialect.We are opinion that this dialect is closed related to Southern Wu dialects.Or in another word,the Southern Wu dialects influenced Jiu Xing Yumin dialect deeply in the fishermen's history.The remaining topics summarize the problems found in the investigation and try to give some constructive suggestions on the study of endangered Chinese dialects.In the end,we pick out the problems which has not be solved in this dissertation and give a tentative plan for the research in future.