Research Of The Longde Dialect

Longde County is located at the west of Liupan Mountain in the south of Ningxia. The dialect of Longde County is belongs to the Middle-Plain Mandarin in the middle part of Gansu.This paper focuses on describing the system of Longde dialect like pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar on the basis of a large number of language facts obtained by the writer through field investigation. And the paper makes a preliminary discussion on some happened and occurrent changes of Longde dialect in pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar.The paper is composed of five parts, namely, introduction, pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar and corpus’ phonetic transcription, in which pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar are the core.“Introduction part” introduces the research content, research status, research idea, research methods and survey basis of the topic and source of materials“Pronunciation part” describes the phonetic system(the initial consonant, vowel and tone) and the mutation(the change of the initial, the final of a syllable and the tones) of Longde dialect,compares the integrating relations between the syllable initials, finals or tones of Longde dialect and that of mid-ancient pronunciation and dialects, analyzes the historical level and characteristics, literary and colloquial readings of Longde dialect. According to the research, the synchronic plane system of Longde dialect involves all kinds of phonetic features including ancient and medieval Chinese language, northwest dialect of tang and song dynasty, modern Chinese language and Mandarin. The influence of Mandarin is the most important reason of current phonetic changes of Longde dialect.“Vocabulary part” focus on the flowing descriptions and discussion of the core vocabulary, basic vocabulary and general vocabulary on the basis of systematic investigation of all kind of vocabulary of Longde dialect.(1) The comparison of core vocabulary and basic vocabulary with the representative points of mandarin dialect and Ningxia dialect and discusses the similarities and differences between Longde dialect and surrounding kin dialects.(2) The analysis of Longde dialect in ancient Chinese words, words of four-character structure, kinship terms and words borrowed from Arabic and Persian language. According to the research, the core vocabulary of Longde dialect has highly similarities with mandarin dialect. The basic vocabulary is much like the representative points of Ningxia. Comapring with mandarin. Longde dialect remains a group of historical vocabulary which can no longer used in mandarin. There is some certain reference to correctly understanding the historical documents by researching the pronunciation and semantic of this group of historical vocabulary in the dialect. The kinship terms of Longde dialect are only used in a small area.According to the research, The system of kinship terms are changing by the influence of the mandarin. The new system has not fully established yet. Words of four-character structure are relatively stable which is much like the idiom. However words of four-character structure are regularly used in spoken language with is different from the idiom. This part of vocabulary is frequently used by local people and has bright geographical features. The words borrowed from Arabic and Persian language are mainly used by the Muslim group in Longde with are the main differences between the two dialect.“Grammar part” especially describes the structure characteristics of the nouns, pronouns, adverbs, function words, appearance & format and some special sentence patterns of Longde dialect.During the study of Longde dialect, some of them are compared with the mandarin and the others are traced to historical documents.“Corpus part” includes homophone, classified vocabulary, grammar example sentence and corpus’ phonetic transcription of Longde dialect.The systematic research of this paper will enrich the Ningxia dialect research. It will have a certain meaning on the comparison research of the Middle-Plain Mandarin, especially the middle part of Gansu dialect.