Wu (language)
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Wu 吳語 / 吴语 - Wúyǔ |
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Spoken in |
People's Republic of China | |
| speaker | 77 million | |
| Linguistic classification |
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| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639 -1 |
zh (Chinese languages) |
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| ISO 639 -2 | ( B ) chi (Chinese languages) | ( T ) zho (Chinese languages) |
| ISO 639-3 | ||
Wu ( Chinese 吳語 / 吴语 , Pinyin Wúyǔ ), also known as Wu-Yue ( 吳越 語 / 吴越 语 , Wúyuèyǔ ), is a Chinese language spoken in the People's Republic of China around the mouth of the Yangtze River . Wu is spoken by around 77 million people. Together with the other Chinese languages, the Chinese script is used as a written language .
Chinese linguists and most Western sinologists and linguists consider Wu to be a group of dialects ( 方言 , fāngyán - "regional language") of the Chinese language. The dialects of Suzhou and Wenzhou are usually used as representative representatives of this group .
Another well-known Wu dialect is Shanghai , which is more difficult to analyze than other Wu dialects, especially from a historical-phonological point of view, due to the immigration of speakers from other dialects.
Linguistic geography
The Wu dialects are mainly spoken in Zhejiang , Shanghai and Jiangsu .
The Wu dialects are usually divided into six regions:
- Tàihú 太湖: South Jiangsu and North Zhejiang; these include the dialects of Shanghai , Suzhou , Changzhou , Hangzhou , Ningbo and Shaoxing .
- Tāizhōu台州 (in Zhejiang)
- Dōng'ōu 東 甌 / 东 瓯: Wenzhou (Zhejiang)
- Wùzhōu 婺 州: in and around Jinhua (Zhejiang)
- Chùqú 处 衢: in and around Lishui and Quzhou (Zhejiang)
- Xuānzhōu 宣州: in and around Xuancheng ( Anhui )
Phonology
Most Wu dialects have retained the three ranks of Middle Chinese plosives - voiceless non-aspirated, voiceless aspirated, voiced (e.g. p, pʰ, b) - while many other dialects no longer have voiced plosives. Most of the Wu dialects have seven or eight tones ; the Shanghai dialect with only five tones is a major exception here.
vocabulary
Grammatical auxiliary words (particles and suffixes) are very different from standard Chinese . The order of the morphemes in word formation is often reversed compared to standard Chinese. A striking feature of the Wu dialects is the use of the personal pronoun nong ( 儂 / 侬 , nóng ) for the second person singular, instead of ni ( 你 , nǐ ) as in standard Chinese .
grammar
In the Wu dialects there is a tendency towards the sentence order subject-object-verb.
literature
- Chao Yuen Ren / Zhào Yuánrèn [赵元任]: Xiàndài Wúyǔ de yánjiū《现代 吴语 的 研究》 ( Studies on the modern Wu dialects , 1928).
- Chao Yuen Ren / Zhào Yuánrèn [赵元任]: Contrastive aspects of the Wu dialects . In: Language 43: 1 (1967), pp. 92-101.
- Jerry Norman : Chinese (Cambridge, 1988). Contains an overview of the Chinese dialects.
- Qián Nǎiróng [钱 乃 荣]: Dāngdài Wúyǔ yánjiū《当代 吴语 研究》 ( Studies on the Wu dialects of the present , 1992).
Web links
- Wu Society (in Chinese)