Mai Chinese
Mai or Maihua is a variety of Chinese of uncertain affiliation spoken in the area of 崖县 Yáxiàn in southern Hainan, China. It was classified as Yue in the Language Atlas of China. Ouyang, Jiang & Zou consider Mai to be a divergent Yue Chinese variety with Hakka and other mixed influences. There are just over 10,000 speakers of Mai in southern Hainan.
A comprehensive description of Mai was published in a monograph by Ouyang, Jiang & Zou.
Names
Mai speakers refer to themselves as mai¹³nɔn⁵⁵.Classification
Jiang et al. considers Mai to be a mix of Yue Chinese, Hakka-Gan, and Hainanese Min.Distribution
Mai is spoken in the following four villages in southern Hainan.- Yanglan Village, Fenghuang Town, in the northwestern part of Sanya City. Mai speakers of Yanglan Village claimed that their ancestors had migrated from Shuinan Village over 10 generations ago.
- Linjia Village and Miaoshan Village of Miaolin Township
- Shuinan Village, Gongbei Village, etc., in Yacheng Town, western Sanya City