Amoy dialect


The Amoy dialect or Xiamen dialect, also known as Amoynese, Amoy Hokkien, Xiamenese or Xiamen Hokkien, is a dialect of Hokkien spoken in the city of Xiamen and its surrounding metropolitan area, in the southern part of Fujian province. Currently, it is one of the most widely researched and studied varieties of Southern Min. It has historically come to be one of the more standardized varieties.
Spoken Amoynese and Taiwanese are both mixtures of the Quanzhou and Zhangzhou spoken dialects. As such, they are very closely aligned phonologically. However, there are some subtle differences between the two, as a result of physical separation and other historical factors. The lexical differences between the two are slightly more pronounced. Generally speaking, the Southern Min dialects spoken in Xiamen, Quanzhou, Zhangzhou, Taiwan, Southeast Asia and Overseas Communities are mutually intelligible, with only slight differences.

History

In 1842, as a result of the signing of the Treaty of Nanking, Amoy was designated as a trading port in Fujian. Amoy and Kulangsu rapidly developed, which resulted in a large influx of people from neighboring areas such as Quanzhou and Zhangzhou. The mixture of these various accents formed the basis for the Amoy dialect.
Over the last several centuries, a large number of Southern Fujianese peoples from these same areas migrated to Taiwan during Dutch rule and Qing rule. "Amoy dialect" was considered the vernacular of Taiwan. Eventually, the mixture of accents spoken in Taiwan became popularly known as Taiwanese during Imperial Japanese rule. As in American and British English, there are subtle lexical and phonological differences between modern Taiwanese and Amoy Hokkien; however, these differences do not generally pose any barriers to communication. Amoy dialect speakers also migrated to Southeast Asia, mainly in the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore.

Special characteristics

Spoken Amoy dialect preserves many of the sounds and words from Old Chinese. However, the vocabulary of Amoy was also influenced in its early stages by the languages of the ancient Minyue peoples. Spoken Amoy is known for its extensive use of nasalization.
Unlike Mandarin, Amoy dialect between voiced and voiceless unaspirated initial consonants. Unlike English, it differentiates between unaspirated and aspirated voiceless initial consonants. In less technical terms, native Amoy speakers have little difficulty in hearing the difference between the following syllables:
However, these fully voiced consonants did not derive from the Early Middle Chinese voiced obstruents, but rather from fortition of nasal initials.

Accents

A comparison between Amoy and other Southern Min languages can be found there.

Tones

Amoy is similar to other Southern Min variants in that it makes use of five tones, though only two in checked syllables. The tones are traditionally numbered from 1 through 8, with 4 and 8 being the checked tones, but those numbered 2 and 6 are identical in most regions.
Tone numberTone nameTone letter
1Yin level
2Yin rising
3Yin falling
4Yin entering
5Yang level
6=2Yang rising
7Yang falling
8Yang entering

Tone sandhi

Amoy has extremely extensive tone sandhi rules: in an utterance, only the last syllable pronounced is not affected by the rules. What an 'utterance' is, in the context of this language, is an ongoing topic for linguistic research. For the purpose of this article, an utterance may be considered a word, a phrase, or a short sentence. The diagram illustrates the rules that govern the pronunciation of a tone on each of the syllables affected :

Literary and colloquial readings

Like other languages of Southern Min, Amoy has complex rules for literary and colloquial readings of Chinese characters. For example, the character for big/great,, has a vernacular reading of tōa, but a literary reading of tāi. Because of the loose nature of the rules governing when to use a given pronunciation, a learner of Amoy must often simply memorize the appropriate reading for a word on a case by case basis. For single-syllable words, it is more common to use the vernacular pronunciation. This situation is comparable to the on and kun readings of the Japanese language.
The vernacular readings are generally thought to predate the literary readings; the literary readings appear to have evolved from Middle Chinese. The following chart illustrates some of the more commonly seen sound shifts:

Vocabulary

The Swadesh word list, developed by the linguist Morris Swadesh, is used as a tool to study the evolution of languages. It contains a set of basic words which can be found in every language.

Initials


毋
暗
按
黃
港
風

心
薟
今
免
英
雙
恭

恩
完


十
克
六
乐
鸭
索
學
欲
落
肉
乎
夹
唉

急
葉
必
阅		~
色
祝
捏
食
尺
搐
物
贏

骨
越
嗍
活
喂


三
魯
明
歹

暝
定
想
腦

山
莓
彎

Grammar

Amoy grammar shares a similar structure to other Chinese dialects, although it is slightly more complex than Mandarin. Moreover, equivalent Amoy and Mandarin particles are usually not cognates.

Complement constructions

Amoy complement constructions are roughly parallel to Mandarin ones, although there are variations in the choice of lexical term. The following are examples of constructions that Amoy employs.
In the case of adverbs:
In the case of the adverb "very":
For the negative,
For the adverb "so," Amoy uses kah instead of Mandarin de :

Negative particles

Negative particle syntax is parallel to Mandarin about 70% of the time, although lexical terms used differ from those in Mandarin. For many lexical particles, there is no single standard Hanji character to represent these terms, but the most commonly used ones are presented below in examples. The following are commonly used negative particles:
  1. m̄ - is not + noun
  2. : i m̄-sī gún lāu-bú. She is not my mother.
  3. m̄ - does not + verb/will not + verb
  4. : i m̄ lâi. He will not come.
  5. verb + buē + particle - is not able to
  6. : góa khòaⁿ-buē-tio̍h. I am not able to see it.
  7. bē + helping verb - cannot
  8. : i buē-hiáu kóng Eng-gú. He can't speak English.
  9. * helping verbs that go with buē
  10. *:buē-sái - is not permitted to
  11. *:buē-hiáu - does not know how to
  12. *:buē-tàng - not able to
  13. mài - do not
  14. : mài kóng! Don't speak!
  15. bô - do not + helping verb
  16. : i bô beh lâi. He is not going to come.
  17. * helping verbs that go with bô :
  18. *:beh - want to + verb; will + verb
  19. *:ài - must + verb
  20. *:èng-kai - should + verb
  21. *:kah-ì - like to + verb
  22. bô - does not have
  23. : i bô chîⁿ. He does not have any money.
  24. bô - did not
  25. : i bô lâi. He did not come.
  26. bô - is not + adjective
  27. : i bô súi. She is not beautiful.
  28. *Hó is an exception, as it can use both m̄ and bô.

    Common particles

Commonly seen particles include:
A number of Romanization schemes have been devised for Amoy. Pe̍h-ōe-jī is one of the oldest and best established. However, the Taiwanese Language Phonetic Alphabet has become the romanization of choice for many of the recent textbooks and dictionaries from Taiwan.