Kunming Chinese

Description

Kunming Chinese, commonly regarded as lingua franca of Yunnan province, is a major variety of Yunnanese, a member of Southwestern Mandarin. Based primarily on the linguistic typology and geographic distribution, Kunming Chinese has been further classified in one of the four major subgroups of Yunnanese: Central Yunnan group. Kunming Chinese, as well as all the dialects in Yunnan province, has a long history of development, which can probably be traced back to Qin and Han dynasties. The languages of twenty-four ethnic groups inhabiting in the same speech community also play a very important role in the development of Kunming Chinese. Until now Kunming Chinese remains a less studied dialect and no complete work has been done on its major grammatical aspects, especially morphology and syntax. This book is intended to provide a descriptive account for the grammar of Kunming Chinese as spoken in Kunming city and its vicinities. The major topics discussed are: phonetics and phonology; the phonological developments in the past sixty years; morpheme categories and word formation; grammatical categories, syntactic categories; sentence types and structures. Special discussions are given to the idiosyncratic features of the dialect: fronting and deletion of nasal in nasal rhymes, loss of rhotic initial series, breathy phonation; infix, the function and loss of "-er" suffix, word blending, reduplication and its interaction with tone change; question words and question formation. The book also features an interlinear text with transcription and translation demonstrating the major features discussed.