Longdu dialect explained

Longdu dialect
Nativename:隆都話
States:China
Region:Dachong and Shaxi, Guangdong, Hawaii, US-Canada Chinatowns
Speakers:?
Familycolor:Sino-Tibetan
Fam2:Sinitic
Fam3:Chinese
Fam4:Min
Fam5:Coastal Min
Fam6:Eastern Min
Fam7:(Zhongshan Min)
Ancestor:Proto-Sino-Tibetan
Ancestor2:Old Chinese
Ancestor3:Proto-Min
Map:Zhongshan map2005.jpg
Mapcaption:Location of Zhongshan 中山 within Guangdong 广东 Province, China
Isoexception:dialect
Glotto:long1252
Glottorefname:Longdu Region
Iso3:none
Iso3comment:(is proposed[1])

The Longdu dialect is a variety of the Eastern Min branch of Chinese originating from the towns of Dachong and Shaxi in Zhongshan in the Pearl River Delta of Guangdong.[2] The two regions Shaxi and Dachong are together informally known as the Longdu region to locals and those overseas. There are more than 40 villages in the region and are held together by their shared dialect, which may be classified as endangered due to its deterioration in status and rapidly decreasing popularity even within the Longdu region. Despite its proximity, the Longdu dialect is not very closely related to the surrounding dialects in the region, which belong to the Yue group. As such, Longdu forms a "dialect island" of Min speakers. It is one of three enclaves of Min in Zhongshan, the others being Sanxiang and Nanlang.[3] Here is some history of LongDu dialect 隆都话: https://www.mychinaroots.com/report/demo/gazetteer

Vocabulary

According to Søren Egerod, who published an extensive study of the dialect based on fieldwork conducted in 1949, the vocabulary consists of three layers:

Distribution

The Longdu dialect is the mother tongue of many overseas Chinese. Its native speakers generally understand Cantonese, but not vice versa. According to the Language Documentation Training Center at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa: "A lot of children do not speak the language in their daily lives. The population of speakers is diminishing."[5] It is slowly disappearing due to the emigration of people from the Longdu region to other countries, and due to the lack of inter-generational knowledge sharing. At school, only Mandarin is taught to children due to its status as the official national language, whereas in the home, parents and grandparents teach the children only Cantonese, given that the Longdu region is within Zhongshan, Guangdong, and that Cantonese is generally viewed as the lingua franca of Guangdong.

See also

External links

Notes and References

  1. Web site: Change Request Documentation: 2021-045 . 31 August 2021 . 30 May 2022.
  2. Web site: Longdu (Jiamin) - About Longdu.
  3. Book: The Reflexes of Initial Nasals in Proto-Southern Min-Hingua . Nicholas C. . Bodman . 2–20 . 20006706 . For Gordon H. Fairbanks . Veneeta . Acson . Richard L. . Leed . Oceanic Linguistics Special Publications . 20 . University of Hawaii Press . 1985 . 20 . 978-0-8248-0992-8. pp. 5–6.
  4. Book: Søren . Egerod. The Lungtu Dialect: A Descriptive and Historical Study of a South Chinese Idiom. E. Munksgaard . 1956. 280–281.
  5. Web site: Longdu (Jiamin) - About Longdu.