The Phonetic Research On Shandong Heze’s Dialects

Heze locates in the juncture of Shandong, Henan, Anhui and Jiangsu Province. It comprises Mudan district, Dingtao district, Dongming County, Juye County, Juancheng County, Yuncheng County, Chengwu County, Cao County and Shan County. According to Language Atlas of China (Second Edition), Heze belongs to Xuluo and Zhengcao Dialect of Central Plains Mandarin. As The dialect part of Local Gazetteer of Shandong points out, it is subordinate to West Lu area of West region in Shandong Dialect. The dialects of Heze’s district and county share similarities, but do have internal diversity.Based on the existing data, the analysis of Heze Dialect currently is either conducted under the whole background of Shandong Dialect, or focused on some features of individual counties. There is no systematic study of phoneme in the whole Heze area for now. Generally, current research of Heze dialect is still weak. Therefore, this dissertation will take phoneme in the whole Heze region as research object. It includes initials, finals, tones and phonetic changes of Heze downtown and its districts and counties. This research will analyze internal similarities and divergence of Heze dialect. As Heze stands in the juncture of Shandong, Henan, Anhui and Jiangsu Province, as well as Dongming County is affected by Henan dialect, this study will further investigate the influence of language contact among adjacent provinces and administrative division on Heze dialect, which is centered on the analysis of Heze’s phonetic appearance.This dissertation topic derives from Shandong humanities & social sciences major project "The dialect study of Shandong and adjacent regions". The dissertation is featured by its synchronic description of linguistic phenomenon in Heze dialect and carries on diachronic analysis on some linguistic phenomenon. It also adopts methods and make a comparison among all districts and counties in Heze, for sake of discovering differences and seeking rules. The corpus to be analyzed is from first-hand field investigation and will serve as mainstay. When necessary,The first chapter is introduction. It will introduce administrative division of Heze, research status of this region and the methods and theoretical framework of this dissertation.The second chapter will list single-character phonetic system, which includes initials, finals and tones.The third chapter will analyze the features of initials in Heze dialect, which contains the pronunciation in Heze’s every districts and counties of "ying yi wei yu" initials, Zhi group characters, Jing and Jian Group characters, Initial Ri characters.The fourth chapter will focus on the features of finals in Heze dialect in the aspects of Yin Rhyme, Yang Rhyme and Ru Rhyme,which consists of the finals of the first grade in Guo-She of Jian gropu words, finals of the first and second grade in Zeng-She and Geng-she words and the condition of r-ending retroflexion and retroflex final, kaikou of Xie group in second division of Jian system words’modern feature, pronunciation type of finals in DangJiang-She and ShanZhen-she Words and pronunciation type of nasal consonant and so on.The fifth chapter will mainly explicate the characteristics of tones in Heze dialect. It sorts out connecting changed tone of two words and the relation of modified tones before unstressed syllables.The sixth chapter analyses the difference and similarities of Heze dialect and adjacent counties’ dialect in terms of initials, finals and tones.The Conclusion explains the reflection and reasons of differences among the youth, middle age and old.