Sichuanese dialects

History

Like many of the southern provinces in China, Sichuan was fully sinicized by the end of the Tang dynasty. The modern variety of Chinese spoken in the region formed relatively recently. In the thirteenth century, the population of Sichuan dropped precipitously, suspected to be due in part to a series of plagues and Mongol invasions. The population did not recover until it was replenished by subsequent migrations from Hubei, as well as Xiang-, Gan- and Hakka-speakers in the following centuries. These varieties largely supplanted the earlier varieties of Chinese in Sichuan, known as Ba–Shu Chinese or Old Sichuanese. Like Min Chinese, Ba-Shu Chinese was different from the Middle Chinese of the Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties but was instead a divergent dialect group independently descended from the Old Chinese of the Han dynasty, which formed a substratum that influenced the formation of the modern dialect group. That helps to explain the distinctiveness of Modern Sichuanese within the Mandarin dialect continuum.

Phonology

Tones

There are five phonemic tones in Sichuanese: dark level tone, light level tone, rising tone, departing tone and entering tone (or checked tone). In some regions the checked tone of Sichuanese has been merged into another tone, which is very different from standard Mandarin, whose checked tone has been merged irregularly into the other four tones. According to Phonology of Sichuan dialect (四川方言音系), among all the 150 Sichuanese-speaking cities and counties, 48 keep the checked tone while the other 102 have only four tones. Particularly, in some sub-dialects of the Minjiang dialect (such as the Yingjing dialect), the departing tone has developed into two different tones: a colloquial tone (which is similar to the second tone as a characteristic of Ba-Shu: 平声似去) and a literary tone (which is the same as the Chengdu dialect).

The tone contours of the Sichuanese dialects are highly and quite different from those of Beijing Mandarin. In Sichuanese, the first tone (dark level tone) is a high level tone (like Beijing), the second tone (light level tone) is a low falling tone (the mirror image of Beijing), the third tone (rising tone) is a high falling tone and the fourth tone (departing tone) is a low or mid rising tone (interchanged compared to Beijing) and the fifth tone (entering tone) is mid or high if it is not merged, as shown in the chart below.

In the areas which keep the entering tone, the five tones of Sichuanese are nearly identical to the values of 5 of the 6 tones of the indigenous Southern Qiang language.

Tone Sandhi

Tone sandhi is common in Sichuanese, though the specifics differ between areas. For the Chengdu-Chongqing dialect, generally tone sandhi is split into 4 categories.

The first type involves reduplicated words: generally, if the constituent characters have a light level tone (2nd tone) or departing tone (4th tone), the second character changes to the dark level tone (1st tone). Examples: (爸爸[²¹], 婆婆[²¹], 舅舅[⁴¹], 帕帕[⁴¹]). If the constituent characters have a rising tone (3rd tone), the second character changes to the light level tone. Examples:(姐姐[³²], 板板[³²]).

The second type involves words ending in 兒 (i.e. Erization). If there is one character before the 兒 and it has the 2nd tone, the 兒 character changes to the 1st tone. Examples: (娃儿[²¹], 瓢儿[²¹]). If there is a two-character compound before the 兒, the character before the 兒 changes into the 1st tone. Examples: (葡萄_儿[²¹], 麻雀_儿[²¹]).

The third type involves specific characters. For example, function word characters like 去, 頭, 面, 上 change into the 1st tone in most of the cases. Examples: (上去[⁴¹], 屋头[²¹], 外面[⁴¹], 身上[¹¹).

The fourth type involves two-character compounds and three-character compounds. In many cases, the 2nd character's tone changes into the 1st tone. Examples: (姑娘[²¹], 经佑[¹¹], 院坝[⁴¹], 龙门阵[²¹⁴], 明年子[²¹³]).

Initials

Initials (or syllable onsets) are initial consonants of possible syllables. There are 21 initials in the Chengdu dialect of Sichuanese (academically referred as Standard Sichuanese). Four Sichuanese initial consonants do not exist in Beijing: and . On the other hand, five initials in Beijing do not exist in Sichuanese: and .

The following is the initial consonant inventory of Sichuanese, transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet, and under every IPA symbol in the inventory below there is the transcription of that sound in Sichuanese Pinyin and a Chinese character using that initial:

Finals

A final, the remainder of syllable after the initial, consists of an optional medial glide, a vowel and an optional final consonants. There are 36 finals in the Chengdu dialect of Sichuanese. Four Sichuanese finals do not exist in Beijing: , , , and . On the other hand, three Beijing finals do not exist in Sichuanese: , , and .

The following is the inventory of Sichuanese finals, transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet, and under every IPA symbol in the inventory below there is the standard orthography of that sound in Sichuanese Pinyin and a Chinese character using that final:

Tense vowels for checked tone

There is a discrepancy between Old Sichuanese and New Sichuanese in terms of finals. In the "old" Minjiang dialect, the stop consonants for checked-tone syllables in Middle Chinese have developed into tense vowels to create a phonemic contrast, and in several cities and counties the tense vowels are followed by a glottal stop to emphasize the contrast. Meanwhile, the checked tone has disappeared in other Sichuanese dialects. The following table shows the tense vowels of Minjiang dialect's three sub-dialects, spoken in Luzhou, Qionglai and Leshan, and a comparison with other Sichuanese dialects is also presented.

Literary and colloquial readings

The existence of literary and colloquial readings (文白异读), is a notable feature in Sichuanese and some other Sinitic varieties, such as Cantonese or Hokkien. In Sichuanese, colloquial readings tend to resemble Ba-Shu Chinese (Old Sichuanese) or Southern Old Mandarin, while literary readings tend to resemble modern standard Mandarin. For example, in the Yaoling dialect (摇铃话), the colloquial reading of "物" (means "things") is , which is very similar to its pronunciation of Ba-Shu Chinese in the Song dynasty (960–1279). Meanwhile, its literary reading, , is relatively similar to the standard Mandarin pronunciation . The table below shows some examples of Chinese characters with both literary and colloquial readings in Sichuanese.

Vocabulary

Only 47.8% of Sichuanese vocabulary is in common with the Beijing dialect on which Standard Chinese is based; indeed Sichuanese shares more vocabulary with the Xiang and Gan varieties of Chinese, even though Sichuanese is usually classified as a dialect of Mandarin.

The vocabulary of Sichuanese has three main origins: Ba-Shu (or Ancient Sichuanese), Middle Chinese and the languages of the immigrants, including Proto-Mandarin from Hubei, Xiang, Gan and Hakka, which were brought to Sichuan during the Ming and Qing dynasties. Recently, many loanwords have been introduced to Sichuanese from standard Mandarin and English. Meanwhile, new Sichuanese words are developing in large cities, such as Chengdu and Chongqing, which then spread at a dramatic speed through Sichuan. "雄起" (xiong²qi³) (meaning "to cheer someone on") is a typical example of a novel Sichuanese word, equivalent to "加油" (jiāyóu) in standard Mandarin. "耙耳朵" (Pá ěr duo) is a word exclusive to Sichuanese, which means "henpecked husbands". A standard Mandarin equivalent of "耙耳朵" is "妻管严" (qī guǎn yán). The prototype of "耙耳朵" comes from a kind of bicycle with "ears" in Chengdu, which was first invented by men in Chengdu in order to make their wives sit more comfortably. There are still a few such bikes on streets of Chengdu.

Relation with other Chinese languages

The Chengdu dialect is usually taken as a representative of Sichuanese. Sichuanese shares the most similar vocabulary with Yunnanese, a dialect of Southwestern Mandarin spoken in the neighboring province. However, the relationship between Sichuanese and Northern Mandarin dialects, including the standard language, is weaker than the relationship between Xiang and Gan.

In terms of vocabulary, Sichuanese has the second closest relationship with Xiang. The two varieties share a large number of exclusively unique words. This is mainly because many Xiang-speaking immigrants from Hunan moved to Sichuan during the great wave of immigration during the Ming and Qing dynasties, so Xiang does not have such a close relationship with other southwestern varieties of Chinese, such as those spoken in Yunnan, Guangxi or Hubei. For example, in both Sichuanese and Xiang the verb "to squat" is "跍" (gu¹) but "蹲" (dūn) in standard Mandarin, the noun "kitchen" is "灶屋" (zao⁴vu²) but "厨房" (chúfáng) in standard, and the adjective "thick" is "酽" (ȵian⁴) but "浓" (nóng) in standard. Furthermore, the Sichuanese vocabulary also contains words from Old Xiang and Middle Xiang, such as "謱謰" (sloppy), "革" (old) and "崽" (son).

Status

Though Sichuanese is not as endangered as some other languages of China, the prevalence of Sichuanese has dramatically lessened as the popularity of Mandarin Chinese has risen. Government policy limits the use of Sichuanese in broadcasting, television and many public places. Furthermore, the use of Sichuanese as a teaching medium is not permitted in the curriculum, which has resulted in a reduction of fluency among young people in Sichuanese-speaking areas since the 1980s and 1990s. The Sichuanese spoken by them is greatly influenced by the national language.

The decline of Sichuanese threatens to severely impact Ba-Shu culture, rooted in the Sichuanese dialect, particularly traditional Shu arts such as Sichuan opera, which risk severe decline or even extinction. China enacted laws in 2000 mandating the use of Mandarin. Provinces, including Sichuan, established language committees to advise, monitor, and enforce Mandarin usage. The mandate inevitably caused massive decline in audience members and the performance of traditional Ba-shu folk art.