Hangzhou dialect

The Hangzhou dialect is spoken in the city of Hangzhou and its immediate suburbs, but excluding areas further away from Hangzhou such as Xiāoshān and Yúháng . The number of speakers of the Hangzhou dialect has been estimated to be about 1.2 to 1.5 million. It belongs to the family, which in turn constitutes one of the Sinitic language families. The Hangzhou dialect is of immense interest to and because , it exhibits extensive similarities with the other Wu languages; however, and , it shows many tendencies.

Classification

Geographic distribution

Dialects

Phonetics and phonology

Consonants

Vowels

Monophthongs

Diphthongs

Triphthongs

Syllable structure

Onsets

Rimes

Tones

Citation tones

The Hangzhou tonal system is similar to that of the Suzhou dialect, in that some words with ''shàng'' tone in Middle Chinese have merged with the ''yīn qù'' tone.

Tone sandhi

Grammar

Morphology

Syntax

Vocabulary

History

The most important event to impact on Hangzhou's dialect was its establishment as Ling'an, the capital of the Southern Song Dynasty. When the Northern Song Dynasty was conquered by the Jin Dynasty in 1127, large numbers of northern refugees fled to what is now Hangzhou, speaking predominently of the Henan variety. Within 30 years, contemporary accounts record that immigrants outnumbered natives in Hangzhou. This resulted in Mandarin influences in the pronunciation, lexicon and grammar of the Hangzhou dialect.

Further influence by Mandarin occurred after the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty in 1912. The local Manchu garrisons were dissolved, adding significant numbers of Beijing dialect Mandarin speakers to the population.

Because of the frequent commerce and intercourse between Hangzhou and Shaoxing, the Hangzhou dialect is also influenced by the Shaoxing dialect.

Examples