Jin is a group of Chinese dialects or languagesspoken by roughly 63 million people in northern China. Its geographical distribution covers most of Shanxi provinceexcept for the lower Fen River valley, much of central Inner Mongolia and adjoining areas in Hebei, Henan, and Shaanxi provinces. The status of Jin is disputed among linguists; some prefer to classify it as a dialect of Mandarin, but others set it apart as a closely related, but separate sister-language to Mandarin.
Classification
Until the 1980s, Jin dialects were universally included within Mandarin Chinese. In 1985, however, Li Rongproposed that Jin should be considered a separate top-level dialect group, similar to Yue or Wu. His main criterion was that Jin dialects had preserved the entering tone as a separate category, still marked with a glottal stop as in the Wu dialects, but distinct in this respect from most other Mandarin dialects. Other linguists have subsequently adopted this classification. However, some linguists still do not agree that Jin should be considered a separate dialect group for these reasons:
Use of the entering tone as a diagnostic feature is inconsistent with the way that all other Chinese dialect groups have been delineated based on the reflexes of the Middle Chinese voiced initials.
Certain other Mandarin dialects also preserve the glottal stop, especially the Jianghuai dialects, and so far, no linguist has claimed that these dialects should also be split from Mandarin.
The Jin group lacks a prominent representative dialect. Several authors have used Taiyuan dialect as a representative, but its vocabulary is close to Mandarin dialects. In the Language Atlas of China, Jin was divided into 8 subgroups: ;Bingzhou ;Lüliang ;Shangdang ;Wutai ;Da–Bao ;Zhang-Hu ;Han-Xin ;Zhi-Yan
Phonology
Unlike most varieties of Mandarin, Jin has preserved a final glottal stop, which is the remnant of a final stop consonant. This is in common with the Early Mandarin of the Yuan Dynasty and with a number of modern southern varieties of Chinese. In Middle Chinese, syllables closed with a stop consonant had no tone; Chinese linguists, however, prefer to categorize such syllables as belonging to a separate tone class, traditionally called the "entering tone". Syllables closed with a glottal stop in Jin are still toneless, or alternatively, Jin can be said to still maintain the entering tone. Jin employs extremely complex tone sandhi, or tone changes that occur when words are put together into phrases. The tone sandhi of Jin is notable in two ways among Chinese varieties:
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 during tone sandhi.
Grammar
Jin readily employs prefixes such as , , and , in a variety of derivational constructions. For example:
"fool around" < "ghost, devil" In addition, there are a number of words in Jin that evolved, evidently, by splitting a mono-syllabic word into two, adding an 'l' in between. For example: < "hop"
< "drag"
< "scrape"
< "street" A similar process can in fact be found in most Mandarin dialects, but it is especially common in Jin. This may be a kind of reservation for double-initials in Old Chinese, although this is still controversial. For example, the character 孔 which appears more often as 窟窿 in Jin, had the pronunciation like in Old Chinese.
Vocabulary
Some dialects of Jin make a three-way distinction in demonstratives.
