Xichang Speech And Its Close Origin Dialects

As the living material of language history research, dialects and their related languages have aroused enormous attention among the scholars all over the world since the19th century. The specialty of Xichang speech(which belongs to Southwest mandarin) is drawing more and more attention from a large amount of scholars. However, there is still no last word on its origin.Xichang speech was designed as part of the Mingjiang section, Guanchi Area in The Area Division Draft of the Southwest Mandarin by Huang Xuezhen. Analyzed carefully, it’s not hard to find that there’s something irrational, because of the lack of foundations. For this reason, this thesis adapts the phonetic system comparison method to explore the origin of Xichang speech feasibly.This thesis is going to use the theories related to historical comparative linguistics and dialectology, combined with the traditional phonology, to compare their histories longitudinally and their phonological features horizontally. Meanwhile, related historical material and migration history will also be used to support the conclusion we draw, to find out similar dialects from the enormous seemingly close origin dialects, and then to find some clues of the origin of Xichang speech to explore its origin.This thesis is composed of four chapters:the first chapter is the introduction. It gives a general overview of the geographic survey, historical evolution in Xichang area. It also summerizes the writing motivation, research goal and significance of this thesis and reviews the research productions of Xichang speech. The second chapter give a detailed description on the initial, vowel and tone system and summarized five typical phonetic features of Xichang speech. In the third chapter, twenty representative phonetic features of Xichang speech are listed to be compared with nine seemingly close origin dialects. Their similarity degree is also calculated to find out the relatively closer dialects. Also, historical materials are used to compare Xichang speech with its seemingly close origin dialects to see their historical relations from their phonetic similarities and differentiations, so as to find out the dialects which are close to Xichang speech. In the fourth chapter, the initial, vowel and tone system of the Rhyme and Rhythm of the Central Plains(Zhongyuan Yinyun) are analyzed and compared with Xichang speech system to conclude that phonetic under stratum of Xichang speech is the same with that of the Rhyme and Rhythm of the Central Plains(Zhongyuan Yinyun) period. The homophone table is attached to the last chapter.