Shanxi Dialects Historical Level Research

After the conception of the Jin Dialect was put forward, more and more linguists and dialectologists paid their attention to the dialects in Shanxi Province. Taking the Taihang Mountains and the Yellow River as its natural barrier, Shanxi is in a relatively occlusive environment. Moreover, Shanxi is the cradle of the Chinese culture, and the preferred place that the minorities of the north move southward as well. As a result, the dialects in Shanxi province are either exoteric or conservative, some phonetic characteristics evolve quickly and the others slowly.The dialects in Shanxi have abundant literary and colloquial readings. These two kinds of readings belong to different strata which have different origins. The goal of the Analysis of the Historical Strata is to differentiate the literary and colloquial readings and divide them into different strata, and then have historical comparatives in each stratum.Professor Pan Wuyun classified the linguistic strata into three kinds: the main stratum, the borrowed stratum and the rudimental stratum. This dissertation takes the Analysis of the Historical Strata as its main research method, tries to differentiate the complicated phonetic phenomena and then classify them into different strata, ascertain the time order in each stratum according to historical literatures, and finally, explain the evolutive route.The dissertation has two parts as following:In the forward, we have a brief introduction of the research actuality on the phonetic characteristics of Jin Dialect, the research significance, main research methods of the dissertation and the source of the dialectal data.The text consists of seven chapters. The first chapter gives an introduction to the history of Shanxi province. In Chapter two to five, we analyze historical strata on rhyme classes of "Guo果" "Yu遇" "Dang宕" and "Geng梗". In Chapter six and seven, we discuss the structure and the evolutive route of voiced syllable initials and initial classes of "Zhi知".