Everything about Jin Linguistics totally explained
Jin (simplified: 晋语; traditional: 晉語;
pinyin: jìnyǔ), or
Jin-yu, is a subdivision of
spoken Chinese. Its exact status is disputed among linguists; some prefer to classify it under
Mandarin, while others set it apart as an independent branch.
Jin is spoken over most of
Shanxi province, except for the lower
Fen River valley; much of central
Inner Mongolia; as well as adjoining areas in
Hebei,
Henan, and
Shaanxi provinces. Cities covered within this area include
Taiyuan,
Zhangjiakou,
Hohhot,
Jiaozuo, and
Yulin. In total Jin is spoken by roughly 45 million people.
Like all other varieties of
Chinese, there's plenty of dispute as to whether Jin is a
language or a
dialect. See
Identification of the varieties of Chinese for the issues surrounding this dispute.
History
The speech of
Shanxi province is, alone among the various dialects of North China, unique enough to warrant the label of "language" from some linguists. This may well be due to the geographic isolation of
Shanxi. The entire province is a plateau surrounded by mountains on all sides. This may well have contributed to the differences between Jin and all the
Mandarin dialects that surround it.
Dialects
Jin can be divided into the following 8 subdivisions
Sounds
Unlike most varieties of
Mandarin, Jin uses the final
glottal stop. This is in common with many southern varieties of Chinese. Jin has also kept the entering tone, which is the tone that goes with the final
glottal stop.
Jin employs extremely complex
tone sandhi, or tone changes that occur when words are put together into phrases. The tone sandhi of Jin is remarkable in two ways among Chinese dialects:
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 (and hence are differentiated) during tone sandhi.
Grammar
Jin readily employs prefixes such as 圪 /kəʔ/, 忽 /xəʔ/, and 入 /zəʔ/, in a variety of derivational constructions. For example:
入鬼 "fool around" < 鬼 "ghost, devil"
In addition, there are a number of words in Jin that evolved, evidently, by splitting a mono-syllabic word into two. For example:
pəʔ ləŋ < 蹦 pəŋ "hop"
tʰəʔ luɤ < 拖 tʰuɤ "drag"
kuəʔ la < 刮 kua "scrape"
xəʔ lɒ̃ < 巷 xɒ̃ "street"
A similar process can also be found in Mandarin (for example 窟窿 kulong < 孔 kong), but it's especially common in Jin.
Vocabulary
Some dialects of Jin make a three-way distinction in demonstratives. (English, for example, has only a two-way distinction between "this" and "that".)
Further Information
Get more info on 'Jin Linguistics'.
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