Gangou language
| Gangou dialect | |
|---|---|
| 甘沟话 / 甘溝語 | |
| Native to | China |
| Region | Minhe County, Qinghai |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | – |
Gangou dialect is a variety of Mandarin Chinese that has been strongly influenced by Monguor and Tibetan. It is representative of Chinese varieties spoken in rural Qinghai that have been influenced by neighboring minority languages.[1]
Gangou Mandarin is spoken in Minhe Hui and Tu Autonomous County, at the very eastern tip of Qinghai, an area with a large minority population, and where until recently Han Chinese were also a minority in close contact with their neighbors. Many of the local Han may actually have little Chinese ancestry. The dialect has a number of common words borrowed from Monguor, as well as kinship terms from Monguor and Tibetan. Some syntactic structures, such as an SOV word order and direct objects marked by a postposition, have parallels in Monguor and to a lesser extinct Tibetan.
There are also phonological differences from Standard Mandarin, though it is not clear whether these are shared by local Mandarin dialects not so strongly influenced by minority languages. For example, Standard y and w are pronounced z and v, so yi 'one' is zi,[2] while wu 'five' and wang 'king' are pronounced vu and van (vã). There is no distinction between final -n and -ng: both are replaced by a nasal vowel. The consonants spelling j, q, x in pinyin do not exist; they are replaced by z, c, s before i[3] and by g, k, h elsewhere, reflecting their historical origin. Thus 解 jiě 'untie' is pronounced gai, not unlike Cantonese gaai², and 鞋 xié 'shoe' is pronounced hai, like Cantonese haai⁴.
References
- ^ Feng Lide and Kevin Stuart, "Interethnic cultural contact on the Inner Asian frontier: The Gangou people of Minhe County, Qinghai." Sino-Platonic Papers 33 (1992), pp 4–8.[1]
- ^ It is not clear from the reference whether this is [zi] or like the Pinyin syllable zi.
- ^ Pronounced as pinyin zi, ci, si.
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