Wenchang dialect


The Wenchang dialect is a dialect of Hainanese spoken in Wenchang, a county-level city in the northeast of Hainan, an island province in southern China.
It is considered the prestige form of Hainanese, and is used by the provincial broadcasting media.

Phonology

The initials of the Wenchang dialect are as follows:
The semivowels and are in complementary distribution with,
and may be treated as allophones of the same phoneme.
The voiced stops and occur with only about ten words each.
There are five vowels,,,, and.
The high vowels and may also occur as medials.
The possible finals are:
The Wenchang dialect has six tones on isolated syllabes: