The Study Of Nanjing Dialect’s Phonetic System

Nanjing, the capital of Jiangsu Province, situated in the center of the low reaches of the Yangtze River, East of China. Nanjing Dialect used to be the Wu Dialect, as it turned to belong to the Jianghuai Dialect. Due to the dialects contact, migration movements, and popularing mandarin, Nanjing Dialect has been changing dramatically. Therefore, describing the phonetic system of Nanjing Dialect and its characterstics is extremely essential, and reasons why it changes as well. This paper divided into six chaperts, discussing the historical evolution of Nanjing Dialect’s phonetic system.Chapter1introduces Nanjing’s historical and geography background, inclueding the current situation of Nanjing Dialect. The significance and methoes of this reseach, information of the informant, international phonetic sign are included in this chapter also.Chapter2describes the current phonetic system of Nanjing Dialect, especially the pronunciations of Nanjing’s teenagers. Sonagrams can be seen particularly in this chapter. In order to present the whole features of Nanjing Dialect, the homophone lexicon is included in this chapter too.Chapter3,4,5are the most important part in this paper, which focus on the initial consonants, compound vowels, tones of the Nanjing Dialect respectively. The initial consonants include four aspects; the compound vowels mainly include three parts:Yin-sheng rhymes, Yang-sheng rhymes, Ru-sheng rhyme; tones includes two parts:one is the tonal pattern and tone pitch changes of Shang-sheng, the another one is the Ru-sheng’s wear down.Chapter6, describes the syllabary of Nanjing dialect.Chapter7, as the last chapter, sums up the charecters of the historical evolution of Nanjing Dialect’s phonetic system, analyses the causes of the changes.