Issues In Chinese Dialect Description And Classification

Issues in Chinese Dialect Description and Classification

Chinese Linguistics

This volume provides a broad introduction to Chinese linguistics. It offers an accessible synthesis of the most relevant topics in the field both for researchers and scholars on China studies and for linguists, including those with little or no previous knowledge of Chinese.

Problems in Comparative Chinese Dialectology

This book discusses the methodology of systematic Chinese Dialect classification, with particular attention to the conservative Miin and Hakka groups spoken in southern China. The primary linguistic methodology employed is the historical-comparative method, and the dialects chosen as examples of classification are those spoken in and around the township of Wann'an in western Fukien's Longyan country. The book features extensive comparative tables of dialect forms, and a two-hundred page appendix outlining the diasystem of the four principal Wann'an dialects.