Fuzhou dialect
The Fuzhou language, also Foochow, Hokchew, Hok-chiu, Fuzhounese, or Fujianese, is the prestige variety of the Eastern Min branch of Min Chinese spoken mainly in the Mindong region of Eastern Fujian Province. As it is mutually unintelligible to neighbouring varieties in the province, under a technical linguistic definition Fuzhou is a language and not a dialect. Thus, while Fuzhou may be commonly referred to as a 'dialect' by laypersons, this is colloquial usage and not recognised in academic linguistics. Like many other varieties of Chinese, the Fuzhou dialect is dominated by monosyllabic morphemes that carry lexical tones, and has a mainly analytic syntax. While the Eastern Min branch it belongs to is relatively closer to other branches of Min such as Southern Min or Pu-Xian Min than to other Sinitic branches such as Mandarin, Wu Chinese or Hakka, they are still not mutually intelligible.
Centered in Fuzhou City, the Fuzhou dialect covers 11 cities and counties in China: Fuzhou City Proper, Pingnan, Gutian, Luoyuan, Minqing, Lianjiang, Minhou, Changle, Yongtai, Fuqing and Pingtan; and Lienchiang County, in Taiwan. It is also the second local language in many northern and middle Fujian cities and counties such as Nanping, Sanming, Shaowu, Shunchang, and Youxi.
The Fuzhou dialect is also widely spoken in some regions abroad, many Fuzhou people have emigrated to Japan, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and some Southeastern Asian cities. The Malaysian city of Sibu is called "New Fuzhou" due to the influx of immigrants there in the late 19th century and early 1900s.
Name
In Chinese, it is generally termed in s=福州话, which in the native language is: . It is also sometimes called 福州語, using a different term for 'speech'. Native speakers also call it Bàng-uâ, meaning "the everyday language".In English, the term "Fuzhou dialect" dominates, although "Fuzhounese" is also frequently attested. In older works written in English, the variety is called "Foochow dialect", based on the Chinese postal romanization of Fuzhou.
History
Formation
After the Han dynasty conquered the Minyue kingdom of Southeast China in 110 BC, Chinese people began settling what is now Fujian Province. The Old Chinese language brought by the mass influx of Chinese immigrants from the Chinese heartland, along with the influences of local languages, became the early Proto-Min language from which Eastern Min, Southern Min, and other Min languages arose. Within this Min branch of Chinese, Eastern Min and Southern Min both form part of a Coastal Min subgroup, and are thus closer to each other than to Inland Min groups such as Northern Min and Central Min.The famous book Qī Lín Bāyīn, which was compiled in the 17th century, is the first and the most full-scale rime book that provides a systematic guide to character reading for people speaking or learning the Fuzhou dialect. It once served to standardize the language and is still widely quoted as an authoritative reference book in modern academic research in Min Chinese phonology.
Studies by Western missionaries
In 1842, Fuzhou was open to Westerners as a treaty port after the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing. But due to the language barrier, however, the first Christian missionary base in this city did not take place without difficulties. In order to convert Fuzhou people, those missionaries found it very necessary to make a careful study of the Fuzhou dialect. Their most notable works are listed below:Status quo
By the end of the Qing dynasty, Fuzhou society had been largely monolingual. Nearly a century later, the subsequent Chinese government has, for decades, discouraged the use of the vernacular in school education and in media, greatly boosting the number of Mandarin speakers instead. Reports in 2006 indicate that a majority of young people in Fuzhou cannot speak the Fuzhou dialect.In Mainland China, the Fuzhou dialect has been officially listed as an Intangible Cultural Heritage and promotion work is being systematically carried out to preserve its use. In Matsu, currently controlled by the Republic of China located in Taiwan, the teaching of the local variant, the Matsu dialect, has been successfully introduced into elementary schools. It is also one of the statutory languages for public transport announcements in Matsu and in Fuzhou.
Writing system
Chinese characters
Most words of the Fuzhou dialect stem from Old Chinese and can therefore be written in Chinese characters. However, Chinese characters as the writing system for the Fuzhou dialect can have many shortcomings, since a great number of words are unique to the Fuzhou dialect and it lacks a formal writing system due to exclusion from the educational system for many decades.Foochow Romanized
Foochow Romanized, also known as Bàng-uâ-cê or Hók-ciŭ-uâ Lò̤-mā-cê, is a romanized orthography for the Fuzhou dialect adopted in the middle of 19th century by American and English missionaries. It had varied at different times, and became standardized several decades later. Foochow Romanized was mainly used inside of church circles, and was taught in some mission schools in Fuzhou.Phonology
Like all Chinese varieties, the Fuzhou dialect is a tonal language, and has extensive sandhi rules in the initials, rimes, and tones. These complicated rules make the Fuzhou dialect one of the most difficult Chinese varieties.Tones
There are seven original tones in the Fuzhou dialect, compared with the eight tones of Middle Chinese:| Name | Tone contour | Description | Example |
| Dark-level | high level | 君 | |
| Rising tone | middle level | 滾 | |
| Dark-departing | low falling and rising | 貢 | |
| Dark-entering | middle rising stopped | 谷 | |
| Light-level | high falling | 群 | |
| Light-departing | middle rising and falling | 郡 | |
| Light-entering | high level stopped | 掘 |
The sample characters are taken from the Qī Lín Bāyīn. More modern studies have also been done in the late 20th century and early 21st centuries, including an acoustically quantified set of data for the citation tones.
In Qī Lín Bāyīn, the Fuzhou dialect is described as having eight tones, which explains how the book got its title. That name, however, is somewhat misleading, because Ĭng-siōng and Iòng-siōng are identical in tone contour; therefore, only seven tones exist.
Ĭng-ĭk and Iòng-ĭk syllables end with either velar stop or a glottal stop. However, they are both now realized as a glottal stop, though the two phonemes maintain distinct sandhi behavior in connected speech.
Besides those seven tones listed above, two new tonal values, "˨˩" and occur in connected speech.
Little discussed in the existing literature, there is some evidence that Fuzhou uses non-modal phonation with certain tones: creaky for 陰去 ĭng-ké̤ṳ, 陰入 ĭng-ĭk, 陽去 iòng-ké̤ṳ, and breathy for 上聲 siōng-siăng. This has been shown to be perceptually relevant for tonal identification.
Tonal sandhi
The rules of tonal sandhi in the Fuzhou dialect are complicated, even compared with those of other Min dialects. When two or more than two morphemes combine into a word, the tonal value of the last morpheme remains stable but in most cases those of the preceding morphemes change. For example, "獨", "立" and "日" are words of iòng-ĭk with the same tonal value, and are pronounced,, and, respectively. When combined as the phrase "獨立日", "獨" changes its tonal value to, and "立" changes its to, therefore the pronunciation as a whole is.The two-syllable tonal sandhi rules are shown in the table below :
| ĭng-bìng | iòng-bìng iòng-ĭk | siōng-siăng | ĭng-ké̤ṳ iòng-ké̤ṳ ĭng-ĭk | |
ĭng-bìng ĭng-ké̤ṳ iòng-ké̤ṳ ĭng-ĭk-ék | ||||
iòng-bìng iòng-ĭk | ˨˩ | |||
siōng-siăng ĭng-ĭk-gák |
Ĭng-ĭk-gák are ĭng-ĭk syllables ending with -k and ĭng-ĭk-ék are those with a final -h. This distinction made between the glottal stop and the -k is said to have been maintained in the literary readings of characters until quite recently. Both are usually realized as the glottal stop by most modern speakers of the Fuzhou dialect, and have the same tone in isolation, but they are still distinguished both in the above tone sandhi behavior, and in initial assimilation that occurs after them. Although the iòng-ĭk tone is also a checked tone composed of both types of syllables, in -k and in -h, there is no split in its realization, either in isolation or in its tone sandhi behavior.
The three patterns of tone sandhi exhibited in the Fuzhou dialect may be a reflex of the voicing split from Middle Chinese into different registers. This is based on a comparison with the tonal sandhi system of the subdialect of Lianjiang, a very similar but more conservative Eastern Min variety, where three tonal categories on penultimate syllables interact with the tonal category of the final syllable to form the sandhi pattern in Lianjiang. Although the effect of the historical tonal registers from Middle Chinese is clear in Lianjiang, the Fuzhou tonal sandhi system has deviated from the older pattern, in that the tone iòng-ké̤ṳ 陽去, which is from the historical "Yang" tonal register, now follows the sandhi rules for the "Yin" register; and the sandhi tone ĭng-ĭk-gák 陰入乙, which comes from the historical "Yin" register, follow the sandhi rules for the merged "Shang" tone.
The tonal sandhi rules of more than two syllables display further complexities. For three-syllable domains:
Four-syllable words can be treated as two sequential two-syllable units, and undergo two-syllable tone sandhi accordingly; in faster speech, the first two syllables are reduced to a half dark departing tone, and the remaining two syllables undergo two-syllable tone sandhi. A domain of four syllables is the maximum, with anything larger broken down to into smaller domains.