Jin (simplified: 晋语; traditional: 晉語; pinyin: jìnyǔ), or Jin-yu, is a subdivision of spoken Chinese. Its exact status is disputed among linguists; some prefer to classify it under Mandarin, while others set it apart as an independent branch.

Jin is spoken over most of Shanxi province, except for the lower Fen River valley; much of central Inner Mongolia; as well as adjourning areas in Hebei, Henan, and Shaanxi provinces. Cities covered within this area include Taiyuan, Zhangjiakou, Hohhot, Jiaozuo , and Yulin. In total Jin is spoken by roughly 45 million people.

Like all other varieties of Chinese, there is plenty of dispute as to whether Jin is a language or a dialect. See here for the issues surrounding this dispute.

History

The speech of Shanxi province is, alone among the various dialects of North China, unique enough to warrant the label of "language" from some linguists. This may well be due to the geographic isolation of Shanxi. The entire province is a plateau surrounded by mountains on all sides. This may well have contributed to the differences between Jin and all the Mandarin dialects that surround it.

Dialects

Jin can be divided into the following 8 subdivisions

• Bingzhou, or that spoken in central Shanxi, including Taiyuan
• Lüliang, or that spoken in western Shanxi and northern Shaanxi
• Shangdang, or that spoken in southeastern Shanxi
• Wutai, or that spoken in parts of northern Shanxi and central Inner Mongolia
• Datong-Baotou, or that spoken in parts of northern Shanxi and central Inner Mongolia
• Zhangjiakou-Hohhot, or that spoken in northwestern Hebei and parts of central Inner Mongolia
• Handan-Xinxiang, or that spoken in southeastern Shanxi, southern Hebei and northern Henan

Sounds

Unlike most varieties of Mandarin, Jin uses the final glottal stop. This is in common with many southern varieties of Chinese. Jin has also kept the entering tone, which is the tone that goes with the final glottal stop.

Jin employs extremely complex tone sandhi, or tone changes that occur when words are put together into phrases. The tone sandhi of Jin is rather unique in two ways among Chinese dialects:

• Tone sandhi rules depend on the grammatical structure of the words being put together. Hence, an adjective-noun compound may go through different sets of changes compared to a verb-object compound.
• There are tones that merge when words are pronounced alone, but behave differently (and hence are differentiated) during tone sandhi.

Grammar

Jin readily employs prefixes such as 圪 /kəʔ/, 忽 /xəʔ/, and 入 /zəʔ/, in a variety of derivational constructions. For example:
入鬼 "fool around" < 鬼 "ghost, devil"

In addition, there are a number of words in Jin that evolved, evidently, by splitting a mono-syllabic word into two. For example:

pəʔ ləŋ < 蹦 pəŋ "hop"
tʰəʔ luɤ < 拖 tʰuɤ "drag"
kuəʔ la < 刮 kua "scrape"
xəʔ lɒ̃ < 巷 xɒ̃ "street"

A similar process can also be found in Mandarin (e.g. 窟窿 kulong < 孔 kong), but it is especially common in Jin.

Vocabulary

Some dialects of Jin make a three-way distinction in demonstratives. (English, for example, has only a two-way distinction between "this" and "that".)

References

Hou Jingyi 侯精一 and Shen Ming 沈明 (2002). Jin-yu (晋语). In Hou Jingyi 侯精一 (Ed.) Xiandai Hanyu Fangyan Gailun 现代汉语方言概论. Shanghai: Shanghai Education Press. ISBN 7-5320-8084-6.

External links