Dujiangyan Dialect Speech Research

Dujiangyan (named Guanxian before), lying in the northwestern part of Chengdu plain, has a long history. The dialect of Dujiangyan belongs to Minjiang part of Xinan Mandarin with independent rusheng. In addition to having some general characteristics of Xinan Mandarin dialects, it also has some unique features. Since FangYan written by Yangxiong in Han dynasty, there was a long history of two thousand years to research on Sichuan dialects. From last century on ,we have began to use modern scientific methods to research on Chinese dialects. Until now, we have gotten a lot of materials about Sichuan dialects of high quality. However, there are still some problems, for example, it covers many places but without deep research.This paper is a study of the sound system of the Dujiangyan dialect, taking the east part of the Min River for represent. There are five chapters in this study.Chapter One presents the general information about the location, history, administration, and population of the county, an overview of previous studies, and a brief discussion of the research methods and databases employed in the study.Chapter Two mainly discusses the sound system of Dujiangyan dialect, including the tonal system, the initial system, the final system and the structure of syllables.Chapter Three analyses the internal differences among the Dujiangyan dialect. This includes the differences among the different pronunciations in different areas of the county, the differences among the young and the old generations, and the literary and colloquial readings.Chapter Four describes some special sound phenomena in Dujiangyan dialect with the knowledge of phonetic and phonology, including special retroflex rhyme, margin phoneme and nasal coda of the Liu rhyme category. This part is the important and creative point in the study.Chapter Five deals with the corresponding relationships between the phonological system of the Dujiangyan dialect and Guangyun sound system. Some sound changes and historical developments from Middle Chinese to the modern dialect are discussed as well.