| Shiqi | |
| Nativename: | 石岐話 |
| States: | Southern China |
| Speakers: | ? |
| Familycolor: | Sino-Tibetan |
| Fam2: | Sinitic |
| Fam3: | Chinese |
| Fam4: | Yue |
| Fam5: | Yuehai |
| Fam6: | Zhongshan |
| Isoexception: | dialect |
| Iso6: | shiq |
| Glotto: | none |
| Lingua: | 79-AAA-maf |
The Shiqi dialect is a dialect of Yue Chinese.[1] It is spoken by roughly 160,000 people in Zhongshan, Guangdong's Shiqi urban district. It differs slightly from Standard Cantonese, mainly in its pronunciation and lexicon.[2]
Shiqi has the fewest tones of any Yue dialect, perhaps a Hakka influence.[3]
| even | rising | going | entering | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ① pronounced as /˥/ 55 | ② pronounced as /˥˩/ 51 | ③ pronounced as /˩˧/ 13 | ⑤ pronounced as /˨/ 22 | ⑦a pronounced as /˥/ 5 | ⑧ pronounced as /˨/ 2 | |
This appears to be due to mergers: the fact that the entering tone has split oddly suggests that it has split twice, as in Cantonese and Taishanese, but that tone ⑦b subsequently merged with ⑧.