Amoy dialect
The Amoy dialect or Xiamen dialect, also known as Amoyese, Amoynese, Amoy Hokkien, Xiamenese or Xiamen Hokkien, is a dialect of Hokkien spoken in the city of Xiamen and its surrounding metropolitan area, in the southern part of Fujian province. Currently, it is one of the most widely researched and studied varieties of Southern Min. It has historically come to be one of the more standardized varieties.
Amoyese and Taiwanese are both historically mixtures of Quanzhou and Zhangzhou dialects. As such, they are very closely aligned phonologically. There are some differences between the two, especially lexical, as a result of physical separation and the differing histories of mainland China and Taiwan during the 20th century. Amoyese and Taiwanese are mutually intelligible. Intelligibility with other Hokkien, especially inland, is more difficult. By that standard, Amoyese and Taiwanese may be considered dialects of a single language. Ethnolinguistically, however, Amoyese is part of mainland Hokkien.
History
In 1842, as a result of the signing of the Treaty of Nanking, Amoy was designated as a trading port in Fujian. Amoy and Kulangsu rapidly developed, which resulted in a large influx of people from neighboring areas such as Quanzhou and Zhangzhou. The mixture of these various accents formed the basis for the Amoy dialect.Over the last several centuries, a large number of Southern Fujianese people from these same areas migrated to Taiwan during Dutch and Qing rule. The "Amoy dialect" was considered the vernacular of Taiwan. Eventually, the mixture of accents spoken in Taiwan became popularly known as Taiwanese during Imperial Japanese rule. As in American and British English, there are subtle lexical and phonological differences between modern Taiwanese and Amoy Hokkien; however, these differences do not generally pose any barriers to communication. Amoy dialect speakers also migrated to Southeast Asia, mainly in Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Brunei, Thailand, Cambodia and Myanmar.
Special characteristics
The spoken Amoy dialect preserves many of the sounds and words from Old Chinese. However, the vocabulary of Amoy was also influenced in its early stages by the Minyue languages spoken by the ancient Minyue peoples. Spoken Amoy is known for its extensive use of nasalization.Unlike Mandarin, the Amoy dialect distinguishes between voiced and voiceless unaspirated initial consonants. Unlike English, it differentiates between unaspirated and aspirated voiceless initial consonants. In less technical terms, native Amoy speakers have little difficulty in hearing the difference between the following syllables:
However, these fully voiced consonants did not derive from the Early Middle Chinese voiced obstruents, but rather from fortition of nasal initials.
Tones
Amoy is similar to other Southern Min variants in that it largely preserves the Middle Chinese tone system of six distinct tones in syllables which do not end in a stop consonant and two tones in syllables which do end in a stop consonant. The tones are traditionally numbered from 1 through 8, with 4 and 8 being the checked tones. The distinction between tones 2 and 6 has been lost among most speakers.| Tone number | Tone name | Tone letter |
| 1 | Yin level | |
| 2 | Yin rising | |
| 3 | Yin falling | |
| 4 | Yin entering | |
| 5 | Yang level | |
| 6 | Yang rising | |
| 7 | Yang falling | |
| 8 | Yang entering |
Tone sandhi
Amoy has extremely extensive tone sandhi rules: in an utterance, only the last syllable pronounced is not affected by the rules. What an 'utterance' is, in the context of this language, is an ongoing topic for linguistic research. For the purpose of this article, an utterance may be considered a word, a phrase, or a short sentence. The diagram illustrates the rules that govern the pronunciation of a tone on each of the syllables affected :Image:Taiwanese Hokkien tones.svg
Literary and colloquial readings
Like other languages of Southern Min, Amoy has complex rules for literary and colloquial readings of Chinese characters. For example, the character for big/great, 大, has a vernacular reading of tōa, but a literary reading of tāi. Because of the loose nature of the rules governing when to use a given pronunciation, a learner of Amoy must often simply memorize the appropriate reading for a word on a case-by-case basis. For single-syllable words, it is more common to use the vernacular pronunciation.The vernacular readings are generally thought to predate the literary readings, as is the case with the Min Chinese varieties; the literary readings appear to have evolved from Middle Chinese. The following chart illustrates some of the more commonly seen sound shifts:
Vocabulary
The Swadesh word list, developed by the linguist Morris Swadesh, is used as a tool to study the evolution of languages. It contains a set of basic words which can be found in every language.Phonology
Initials
- Word-initial alveolar consonants when occurring before are pronounced as alveo-palatal sounds.
- can fluctuate freely in initial position as either a flap or voiced alveolar plosive stop.
- can occur in both word initial and final position.
- when occurring before can be pronounced as voiceless sounds,.
Finals
毋 | 暗 | 按 | 黃 | 港 | 風 | |
心 | 薟 | 今 | 免 | 英 | 雙 | 恭 |
恩 | 完 |
十 | 克 | 六 | 樂 | 鴨 | 索 | 學 | 欲 | 落 | 肉 | 乎 | 夾 | 唉 | ||||||
急 | 葉 | 必 | 閲 | ~ 色 | 祝 | 捏 | 食 | 尺 | 搐 | 物 | 贏 | |||||||
骨 | 越 | 嗍 | 活 | 喂 |
- Final consonants are pronounced as unreleased.
三 | 魯 | 明 | 歹 | |||
暝 | 定 | 想 | 腦 | |||
山 | 莓 | 彎 |
Grammar
Amoy grammar shares a similar structure to other Chinese dialects, although it is slightly more complex than Mandarin. Moreover, equivalent Amoy and Mandarin particles are usually not cognates.Complement constructions
Amoy complement constructions are roughly parallel to Mandarin ones, although there are variations in the choice of lexical term. The following are examples of constructions that Amoy employs.In the case of adverbs:
In the case of the adverb "very":
For the negative,
For the adverb "so," Amoy uses kah instead of Mandarin de :
Negative particles
Negative particle syntax is parallel to Mandarin about 70% of the time, although lexical terms used differ from those in Mandarin. For many lexical particles, there is no single standard Hanji character to represent these terms, but the most commonly used ones are presented below in examples. The following are commonly used negative particles:- m̄ - is not + noun
- : i m̄-sī gún lāu-bú. "She is not my mother."
- m̄ - does not/will not + verb
- : i m̄ lâi. "He will not come."
- verb + bōe + particle - is not able to
- : góa khòaⁿ-bōe-tio̍h. "I am not able to see it."
- bōe + helping verb - cannot
- : i bōe-hiáu kóng Eng-gú. "He can't speak English."
- * helping verbs that go with bōe
- *:bōe-sái - is not permitted to
- *:bōe-hiáu - does not know how to
- *:bōe-tàng - not able to
- mài - do not
- : mài kóng! "Don't speak!"
- bô - do not + helping verb
- : i bô beh lâi. "He is not going to come."
- * helping verbs that go with bô :
- *:beh - want to + verb; will + verb
- *:ài - must + verb
- *:èng-kai - should + verb
- *:kah-ì - like to + verb
- bô - does not have
- : i bô chîⁿ. "He does not have any money."
- bô - did not
- : i bô lâi. "He did not come."
- bô '- is not + adjective'
- : i bô súi. "She is not beautiful."
- *hó is an exception, as it can use both m̄ and bô.
Common particles
Commonly seen particles include:- 與 - indicates passive voice
- 共 - identifies the object
- 加 - "more"
- 共 - identifies the object
- 濟 - "more"