Investigation And Research On The Dialect Of The Junction Areas Among Xinyi, Shuyang And Suyu In The Northeast Of Jiangsu

The junction areas among Xinyi, Shuyang, and Suyu, located in the north ofJiangsu, are not only borders in the map, but also joining frontiers between two familiesof dialects---Central Plains Mandarin (CPM) and Lower Yangtze Mandarin (LYM). Alot of linguistic characteristics typically for transition zones can be found in the areas.Comprehensive investigation was carried out, village by village, on local dialectsin the junction areas. The main content of the investigation included seventeengroups of controlled phonetic characters and over one hundred basic phrases accordingto the characteristics of CPM and LYM. This work surveyed---and identified to someextent---the state-of-the-art dialects in the joining frontiers. More than40maps ofdialects were created according to the investigation for further analysis and explanationsin multiple angles.The existence of checked tone (or Chinese calque entering tone, or rùshēng inpinyin) or not is an important criterion for classification of a dialect. Long-termcompetitions between local dialects have made checked tone very sophisticated, suchas vanishing of tail vowels (or gentle tone) and different number and differentcombinations of syllables and syllable rimes. The investigation discovered that thephonetic (except for checked tone) isogloss and the vocabulary isogloss were not ableto fit the isogloss of checked tone. So the author suggest in this thesis that it is aneasier and more effective way to identify dialects by a uniform phonetic standard injoining frontiers of dialects.The research in this thesis revealed that the developments of dialects wereunbalanced and the formations of a lot of linguistic phenomena were not exactlysynchronized. Phonetics, the so-called identification words and isogloss of checkedtone in the joining frontiers, appeared in west-east direction in general. However, thereexisted a few trends on phonetics and phrases in south-north direction.This thesis suggests that what made dialects so sophisticated in the joining frontiersare more than the linguistic factors. Other non-linguistic factors include geography,political regions, traffic, sense of identification on dialects, psychological recognition,mass media and education, politics and economics, and local drama and opera, etc.