Longdu dialect

Longdu dialect
隆都話
Native to China
Region Dachong and Shaxi, Guangdong, Hawaii, US-Canada Chinatowns
Language codes
ISO 639-3
Glottolog long1252[1]

Location of Zhongshan within China

The Longdu dialect is the most widespread dialect of the Zhongshan Min (Chungsan Min) language division within Southern Min Chinese. Native Speakers originated from towns of Dachong (Taichung) and Shaxi, Guangdong (Saakai) (formerly known as Longdu area) in Zhongshan (Chungsan) in the Pearl River Delta of Guangdong. Despite its close proximity, Longdu 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 (two other Min enclaves exist in Zhongshan, Sanxiang and Nanlang). Its native speakers generally understand Cantonese, but not vice versa.

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

The Longdu dialect is a mother tongue of many Overseas Chinese and is slowly disappearing due to the emigration of people from the Longdu Area. As a result, a lot Longdu people has forgotten their native language.

See also

References

  1. Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Longdu". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
  2. Egerod, Søren (1956). The Lungtu Dialect: A Descriptive and Historical Study of a South Chinese Idiom. E. Munksgaard. pp. 280–281.

External links

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