Tengzhou Dialect Phonology

Tengzhou, also named as Tengxian, is a county-level city of Zaozhuang City. It lies in the southern part of Shandong Province with a long history. The dialect of Tengzhou belongs to Nanyan part of the Zhongyuan Mandarin. In addition to having some general characteristics of Mandarin dialects, it also has some unique features, this study not only provides us a fully description and research of the dialect of Tengzhou, one of the subgroups of Zaozhuang, but also remedies a defect of the material lacking in the field. There are four chapters in this study:The first chapter is preface, introducing the general situation of geographical location, population and history development of Tengzhou as well as the general situation of Tengzhou dialect.The second chapter mainly discusses the sound system of Tengzhou dialect. In addition, some phenomena of sound changes will also be briefly discussed in this chapter. Tengzhou dialect has 23 initial consonants, 37 finals, 4 individual characters tones.The third chapter deals with the corresponding relationship between the phonological system of the Tengzhou dialect and Guangyun phonological system. Some sound changes and historical development from Middle Chinese to the modern dialect is discussed as well.The last chapter describes the internal differences among the Tengzhou dialect. This includes the differences among the young and the old, literary reading and colloquial reading, and the different pronunciations in different areas of the country.