Ebook: Yunnanese and Kunming Chinese

LINCOM EUROPA, 2001 — 147 p.
А study of the language communities, the phonological systems, and the phonological developments.Paperback
Publisher: LINCOM publishers (2001)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 3895866350
ISBN-13: 978-3895866357This is an interdisciplinary study composed of extensive research and detailed analyses of Yunnanese, a Southwestern Mandarin language spoken in Yunnan, China, and Kunming Chinese — one of its major varieties spoken in the city of Kunming. The research work is conducted in three major areas: the language communities, the phonological systems, and the phonological developments in the past six decades. The language communities are discussed from the perspectives of ethnology, sociolinguistics, and dialectology, covering such aspects as history of the civilization of Yunnan and Kunming, the ethnographical and ethno-historical account for the twenty-four ethnic groups inhabiting in Yunnan province, the demographic statistics of these groups, and dialect geography of Yunnanese and its varieties, as well as the members of Southwestern Mandarin subgroup. A language survey has been conducted in some detail on the varieties of Yunnanese represented by one hundred and thirty-five locations with a comparative study of their segmental and suprasegmental structures. A comparative study on the language data representing two different varieties of Kunming Chinese spoken in two different periods of time, i.e., in 1940s and in 1990s, discloses the striking sound changes undergone by this dialect. Analyses of tone sandhi in autosegmental and metrical framework have revealed the edge sensitive characteristic of its tone system, as well as the constrains of tone sandhi imposed by syntactic structure and lexical category.Contents
Introduction
Defining Yunnanese and Kunming Chinese. — Changes of Yunnanese and Kunming Chinese. — The originality and significance of the study. — The major goal. — Organization.
Yunnan and Kunming as language communities
Introduction. — The geographic perspective. — Ethnological background of Yunnan and Kunming. — An ethnohistorical view of Yunnan people. — A brief review of language situation in Yunnan. — A brief view of Kunming Chinese.
Survey and analysis of the varieties of Yunnanese
Introduction. — Literature of Yunnanese. — Classification and distribution of Yunnanese varieties.
The phonological system of Yunnanense
Initials in Yunnanese. — Rhymes in Yunnanese. — Tones in Yunnanese.
The phonology of Kunming Chinese
Introduction. — Initials in Kunming Chinese. — Rhymes in KC. — Tones in Kunming Chinese.
The causes of the phonological changes in OKC
Introduction. — A multi-lingual and multi-dialectal community. — The role of political factors. — The influence of Sichuan Hua. — Influence from the Wu dialects. — Influence from minority languages.
Appendix A Administrative regions in Yunnan Province
Appendix B Reduplicated Structure in Kunming Chinese
Appendix C Tones of Yunnanese varieties
Appendix D Wave forms and tone contours
Appendix E Census of Kunming urban area (obtained in 1999)