Min Chinese

Min
閩語/闽语
Geographic distribution:	Mainland China: Fujian, Guangdong (around Chaozhou-Swatou, Leizhou peninsula and part of Zhongshan), Hainan, Zhejiang (Shengsi, Putuo and Wenzhou), Jiangsu (Liyang and Jiangyin), Taiwan, Southeast Asia (Singapore, Indonesia, Brunei, Philippines, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia and Laos)
Linguistic classification:	Sino-Tibetan Sinitic Chinese Min
Proto-language:	proto-Min
Subdivisions:	Northern Min Eastern Min Central Min Pu-Xian Min Southern Min
ISO 639-6:	mclr
Glottolog:	minn1248

Min Chinese
Bân gú / Mìng ngṳ̄ ('Min') written in Chinese characters
Traditional Chinese	閩語
Simplified Chinese	闽语
Hokkien POJ	Bân gú
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin Mǐn Yǔ Southern Min Hokkien POJ Bân gú Eastern Min Fuzhou BUC Mìng ngṳ̄ Pu-Xian Min Hinghwa BUC Máng-gṳ̂ Northern Min Jian'ou Romanized Mâing-ngṳ̌

A map of the primary varieties of Min.

Min or Miin^{[lower-alpha 1]} (simplified Chinese: 闽语; traditional Chinese: 閩語; pinyin: Mǐn yǔ; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: Bân gú; BUC: Mìng ngṳ̄) is a broad group of Chinese varieties spoken by over 70 million people in the southeastern Chinese province of Fujian as well as by migrants from this province in Guangdong (around Chaozhou-Swatou, or Chaoshan area, Leizhou peninsula and Part of Zhongshan), Hainan, three counties in southern Zhejiang, Zhoushan archipelago off Ningbo, some towns in Liyang, Jiangyin City in Jiangsu province, and Taiwan. The name is derived from the Min River in Fujian. Min varieties are not mutually intelligible with any other varieties of Chinese.

There are many Min speakers among overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia. The most widely spoken variety of Min outside Fujian is Hokkien (which includes Taiwanese and Amoy).

History

The Min homeland of Fujian was opened to Chinese settlement by the defeat of the Minyue state by the armies of Emperor Wu of Han in 110 BC.^[1] The area features rugged mountainous terrain, with short rivers that flow into the South China Sea. Most subsequent migration from north to south China passed through the valleys of the Xiang and Gan rivers to the west, so that Min varieties have experienced less northern influence than other southern groups.^[2] As a result, whereas most varieties of Chinese can be treated as derived from Middle Chinese, the language described by rhyme dictionaries such as the Qieyun (601 AD), Min varieties contain traces of older distinctions.^[3] Linguists estimate that the oldest layers of Min dialects diverged from the rest of Chinese around the time of the Han dynasty.^[4][5] However, significant waves of migration from the North China Plain occurred:^[6]

• The Uprising of the Five Barbarians during the Jin dynasty, particularly the Disaster of Yongjia in 311 AD, caused a tide of immigration to the south.
• In 669, Chen Zheng and his son Chen Yuanguang from Gushi County in Henan set up a regional administration in Fujian to suppress an insurrection by the She people.
• Wang Chao was appointed governor of Fujian in 893, near the end of the Tang dynasty, and brought tens of thousands of troops from Henan. In 909, following the fall of the Tang dynasty, his son Wang Shenzhi founded the Min Kingdom, one of the Ten Kingdoms in the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period.

Jerry Norman identifies four main layers in the vocabulary of modern Min varieties:

1. A non-Chinese substratum from the original languages of Minyue, which Norman and Mei Tsu-lin believe were Austroasiatic.^[7][8]
2. The earliest Chinese layer, brought to Fujian by settlers from Zhejiang to the north during the Han dynasty.^[9]
3. A layer from the Northern and Southern Dynasties period, which is largely consistent with the phonology of the Qieyun dictionary.^[10]
4. A literary layer based on the koiné of Chang'an, the capital of the Tang dynasty.^[11]

Subgrouping

Min is usually described as one of seven or ten groups of varieties of Chinese but has greater dialectal diversity than any of the other groups. The varieties used in neighbouring counties, and in the mountains of western Fujian even in adjacent villages, are often mutually unintelligible.^[12]

Early classifications, such as those of Li Fang-Kuei in 1937 and Yuan Jiahua in 1960, divided Min into Northern and Southern subgroups.^[13][14] However, in a 1963 report on a survey of Fujian, Pan Maoding and colleagues argued that the primary split was between inland and coastal groups. A key discriminator between the two groups is the evolution of the voiced and unvoiced lateral consonants reconstructed in the ancestral form of Min. In coastal varieties these merged as /l/, whereas in inland varieties the voiceless lateral became a voiceless fricative /s/ or /ʃ/.^[14][15]

Although coastal varieties can be derived from a proto-language with four series of stops or affricates at each point of articulation (e.g. /t/, /tʰ/, /d/, and /dʱ/), inland varieties contain traces of two further series, which Norman termed "softened stops" due to their reflexes in some varieties.^[16][17][18] Coastal varieties also feature some uniquely Min vocabulary, including pronouns and negatives, where inland varieties use forms cognate with vocabulary in Hakka and Yue.^[19] All coastal varieties have complex tone sandhi systems, whereas inland varieties have little or no tone sandhi.^[20]

Pan and colleagues divided the coastal varieties into three groups:^[21]

• Southern Min (Min Nan) originates from the south of Fujian and the eastern corner of Guangdong. In common parlance, Southern Min usually refers to Hokkien, of which the two major poles are the Amoy dialect of Xiamen and Taiwanese Hokkien of Taiwan. Zhenan Min of Cangnan County in southern Zhejiang is also of this type. Related Hokkien varieties are spoken in Chinese communities spread across Southeast Asia.^[22] The Teochew and Shantou dialects of the Chaoshan region of eastern Guangdong have difficult mutual intelligibility with the Amoy dialect. Chaoshan varieties are also spoken by most Thai Chinese.^[14]
• Pu-Xian Min is spoken in the city of Putian and the county of Xianyou County. Li Rulong and Chen Zhangtai examined 214 words, finding 62% shared with Quanzhou dialect (Southern Min) and 39% shared with Fuzhou dialect (Eastern Min), and concluded that Pu-Xian was more closely related to Southern Min.^[23]
• Eastern Min (Min Dong), centered around the city of Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian province, with Fuzhou dialect as the prestige form.

Pan and colleagues divided the inland varieties into two groups:^[21]

• Northern Min (Min Bei) is spoken in Nanping prefecture in Fujian, with Jian'ou dialect taken as typical.
• Central Min (Min Zhong), spoken in Sanming prefecture.

The Language Atlas of China (1987) includes three additional groups besides the five identified by Pan et al.:^[24]

• Shaojiang Min, spoken in the northwestern Fujian counties of Shaowu and Jiangle, were classified as Hakka by Pan and his associates.^[14] However, Jerry Norman suggested that they were inland varieties of Min that had been subject to heavy Gan or Hakka influence.^[25]
• Leizhou Min, spoken on the Leizhou Peninsula in southern Guangdong, had previously been included in Southern Min.
• Hainanese, spoken on the island of Hainan, had also previously been included in Southern Min.

Writing system

When using Chinese characters to write a non-Mandarin form, standard practice is to use characters that correspond etymologically to the words being represented, and to invent new characters for words with no evident ancient Chinese etymology or in some cases for alternative pronunciations of existing characters, especially when the meaning is significantly different. Written Cantonese has carried this process out to the farthest extent of any non-Mandarin variety, to the extent that pure Cantonese vernacular can be unambiguously written using Chinese characters. Contrary to popular belief, a vernacular written in this fashion is not in general comprehensible to a Mandarin speaker, due to significant changes in grammar and vocabulary and the necessary use of large number of non-Mandarin characters.

A similar process has never taken place for any of the Min varieties and there is no standard system for writing Min, although some specialized characters have been created. Given that Min combines the Chinese of several different periods and contains some non-Chinese vocabulary, one may have trouble finding the appropriate Chinese characters for some Min vocabulary. In the case of Taiwanese, there are also indigenous words borrowed from Formosan languages, as well as a substantial number of loan words from Japanese. The Min spoken in Singapore and Malaysia has borrowed heavily from Malay and, to a lesser extent, from English and other languages. The result is that cases of Min written purely in Chinese characters does not represent actual Min speech, but contains a heavy mixture of Mandarin forms.

Attempts to faithfully represent Min speech necessarily rely on romanization, i.e. representation using Latin characters. Some Min speakers use the Church Romanization (Chinese: 教會羅馬字; pinyin: Jiaohui Luomazi). For Hokkien the romanization is called Pe̍h-ōe-jī (POJ) and for Fuzhou dialect called Bàng-uâ-cê (BUC). Both systems were created by foreign missionaries in the 19th century (see Min Nan and Min Dong Wikipedia). There are some uncommon publications in mixed writing, using mostly Chinese characters but using the Latin alphabet to represent words that cannot easily be represented by Chinese characters.

Notes

1. The double ii represents the dipping tone in Mandarin, as in the province of Shaanxi.

References

1. Norman (1991), pp. 328.
2. Norman (1988), pp. 210, 228.
3. Norman (1988), pp. 228–229.
4. Ting (1983), pp. 9–10.
5. Baxter & Sagart (2014), pp. 33, 79.
6. Yan (2006), p. 120.
7. Norman & Mei (1976).
8. Norman (1991), pp. 331–332.
9. Norman (1991), pp. 334–336.
10. Norman (1991), p. 336.
11. Norman (1991), p. 337.
12. Norman (1988), p. 188.
13. Kurpaska (2010), p. 49.
14. Norman (1988), p. 233.
15. Branner (2000), pp. 98–100.
16. Norman (1973).
17. Norman (1988), pp. 228–230.
18. Branner (2000), pp. 100–104.
19. Norman (1988), pp. 233–234.
20. Norman (1988), p. 239.
21. Kurpaska (2010), p. 52.
22. Norman (1988), pp. 232–3.
23. Li & Chen (1991).
24. Kurpaska (2010), p. 71.
25. Norman (1988), pp. 235, 241.

Sources

• Baxter, William H.; Sagart, Laurent (2014), Old Chinese: A New Reconstruction, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-994537-5.
• Branner, David Prager (2000), Problems in Comparative Chinese Dialectology — the Classification of Miin and Hakka, Trends in Linguistics series 123, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, ISBN 978-3-11-015831-1.
• Chang, Kuang-yu (1986), Comparative Min phonology (Ph.D.), University of California, Berkeley.
• Kurpaska, Maria (2010), Chinese Language(s): A Look Through the Prism of "The Great Dictionary of Modern Chinese Dialects", Walter de Gruyter, ISBN 978-3-11-021914-2.
• Li, Rulong 李如龙; Chen, Zhangtai 陈章太 (1991), "Lùn Mǐn fāngyán nèibù de zhǔyào chāyì 论闽方言内部的主要差异" [On the main differences between Min dialects], in Chen, Zhangtai; Li, Rulong, Mǐnyǔ yánjiū 闽语硏究 [Studies on the Min dialects], Beijing: Yuwen Chubanshe, pp. 58–138, ISBN 978-7-80006-309-1.
• Lien, Chinfa (2015), "Min languages", in Wang, William S.-Y.; Sun, Chaofen, The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Linguistics, Oxford University Press, pp. 160–172, ISBN 978-0-19-985633-6.
• Norman, Jerry (1973), "Tonal development in Min", Journal of Chinese Linguistics 1 (2): 222–238, JSTOR 23749795.
• —— (1988), Chinese, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-29653-3.
• —— (1991), "The Mǐn dialects in historical perspective", in Wang, William S.-Y., Languages and Dialects of China, Journal of Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series 3, Chinese University Press, pp. 325–360, JSTOR 23827042, OCLC 600555701.
• —— (2003), "The Chinese dialects: phonology", in Thurgood, Graham; LaPolla, Randy J. (eds.), The Sino-Tibetan languages, Routledge, pp. 72–83, ISBN 978-0-7007-1129-1.
• Norman, Jerry; Mei, Tsu-lin (1976), "The Austroasiatics in Ancient South China: Some Lexical Evidence" (PDF), Monumenta Serica 32: 274–301, JSTOR 40726203.
• Ting, Pang-Hsin (1983), "Derivation time of colloquial Min from Archaic Chinese", Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology 54 (4): 1–14.
• Yan, Margaret Mian (2006), Introduction to Chinese Dialectology, LINCOM Europa, ISBN 978-3-89586-629-6.
• Yue, Anne O. (2003), "Chinese dialects: grammar", in Thurgood, Graham; LaPolla, Randy J. (eds.), The Sino-Tibetan languages, Routledge, pp. 84–125, ISBN 978-0-7007-1129-1.