Richard VanNess Simmons

Mixed Mandarin & Wú―Dialects of Jìngjiāng Island

This paper presents a brief overview of the island and the dialect that is spoken in the southern village of Shiwěi and a comparison of the speech of two generations. We examine the difference in the speech of a father born in 1939 and his daughter born in 1961. The comparison is primarily focused on phonological and lexical features of the language of the two speakers. Following a detailed examination and analysis of over 500 words and features, in contrast to her father we find the daughter’s speech appears to slightly trend toward Mandarin and standard Chinese forms, while the father’s speech is more conservative, with a stronger local flavor and Wu dialect coloring. In overall perspective, however, the dialect of both speakers is strongly mixed and neither can be definitively classed as either Mandarin or Wu.

A second look at the Towa sanyo : Clues to the nature of the Guanhuah studied by Japanese in the early eighteenth century

The vocabulary and usage of the Towa sanyo provide a framework for examining the characteristics of eighteenth-century Mandarin. This Edo-period Chinese primer, compiled by Okajima Kanzan, presents a language that is distinctively Mandarin, while also showing evidence of Wu dialect influence. The text contains examples of usage drawn from the literary language as well. Yet this primer has a true colloquial base and likely represents an idealized form of Guanhuah, the Mandarin koine that carried great prestige in the Jiangnan region frequented by Japanese merchants who studied the text. The colloquial of this text shows a striking similarity to the modern Harngjou dialect. But, with slight modifications, Okajimas later texts present a language more similar to the Nanjing dialect. It is thus possible to surmise that Ming-period Guanhuah may have once been strongly reminiscent of the Harngjou dialect in most of its key features