Chengdu, Sichuan Voice Department Investigation

The southwest mandarin is one of the important branches of mandarin in modern Chinese language. Among it, Chengdu dialect is its representative. However, there were very few documents on the study of Chengdu dialect in the past. Seen from the study result, Mr. Shangling Zhen, the professor from Sichuan University, once made a systematic illustration in the phonetic study of Chengdu dialect in 1958, which have provided the valuable treasures~1 for our phonetic study of Chengdu dialect. But in the aspect of studying its historic development, for example, comparing Chengdu dialect with the phonetic system of the ancient rhythm book 'Qie Yun', there's no any professional study found out.The thesis is the second comprehensive study in Chengdu dialect after Mr. Shangling Zhen did fifty years ago. It consists of six parts: Part 1 introduces the general situation of Chengdu city, mainly introducing the geography and population covered by this dialect. It also introduces the status of the dialect uses, the emphasis and the main purpose of the research, and also the information of the pronunciation associates. Part 2 describes the phonetic system of Chengdu dialect from three aspects of initials, finals and tones, and gives the description of their combination rules. Moreover, the homophone table is listed as well. Part 3 introduces initial system and its historic evolvement; it also gives the introduction of the evolvement of the initial system of Chengdu dialect by comparing it with the ancient rhythm book 'Qie Yun' and the phonology nature of 'Zhongyuanyinyun'. Part 4 describes the final system and its historic evolvement. Besides, it also introduces the evolvement of the final system of Chengdu dialect by comparing it with the ancient rhythm book 'Qie Yun' and 'Zhongyuanyinyun'. Part 5 describes the tonic system of Chengdu dialect and its historic evolvement. Part 6 summarizes Chengdu dialect's development by the above comparisons. Besides, the developing track of Chengdu dialect could be foreseen from this research.This thesis describes the phonetic system of a new discovered Chengdu dialect, methodologically, and compares the phonetic system with that of both the middle ancient Chinese language and 'Zhongyuanyinyun'.