A Preliminary Research Of Local Chinese Character Usage In The Southern Min Dialect

The Southern Mm dialect is a complicated Chinese dialect. Compared with other dialects in Chinese, it consists of phonetic system, which is not so easy to analyse, with the existence of colloquial-literary strata, and a wide variety of sandhis. Furthermore, the Southern Mm dialect retains a lot of phonetic characteristics of ancient Chinese even archaic Chinese. There are plenty of especial expressions, which make it a big difference to Mandarin. Over the years, writers of the folk literature in the area encountered difficulties in recording the colloquial and the oral language. Since they could hardly find an original character to stand for .As a result, by all means, they substituted the sounds with the characters which are in different meaning. This made the usage of characters become complex and lacking in norm. Researchers keep their mind on the explanation of original Chinese characters, so the comprehensive survey on the aspect has not been made until now With consultation to the literary works and documents of the Southern Mm dialect, a conclusion is made, in this article, regarding the manner m the usage of characters and its characteristics. Differences between the usage of characters in various areas of Fujian and Taiwan are also briefly compared. Moreover, there is a preliminary analysis in the convention and development in the usage of the characters in Southern Mm dialect. Hopefully, this article can provide reference to the studies in the standardization of the usage of characters, and the verification of historical documents in the Southern Mm dialect.