The Subgrouping of the Lishui Dialect

The material

This entry rests mainly on linguistic papers: Li Rong, "Some Problems in the Classification of Chinese Dialects" (Fangyan, 1985, no. 2); Guo Jun, "The Boundary between Wu and Jianghuai Dialects in Lishui" (Nanjing Journal of Social Sciences, 1995, no. 6); and Gu Qian, "A Geolinguistic Study of the Lishui Dialect, Jiangsu" (Nanjing Journal of Social Sciences, 2006, no. 1). None was consulted in the original printing; this library records their bibliographic data and conclusions only, and does not reproduce their phonetic data.

An older account compiled on an encyclopaedia-type page ("belonging to Wu, Xuanzhou group") is also kept, as a popular rendering of insufficient authority.

The overall picture: a Wu–Jianghuai transition zone

Gu Qian (2006) places Lishui speech in the transition zone between Jianghuai Mandarin and Wu, where several types of speech meet and mingle: going south from Nanjing one first meets a fairly pure Nanjing-type Jianghuai Mandarin, then enters a mixed transition belt that is basically of Wu type but has many unusually pronounced words; to the southeast of that belt lies typical Wu, and the south-western edge shows clear Gaochun features.

Li Rong (1985) uses Lishui as an example of how complex speech is where dialect areas meet:

不同方言区交界的地方，方言往往比较复杂。比方江苏省的溧水县，县城在城镇及以北是官话区，南部是吴语区。

Translated: Where different dialect areas meet, the speech is often quite complex. Take Lishui county in Jiangsu: the county seat and everything north of it is Mandarin-speaking, while the south is Wu-speaking.

Three proposed boundaries

The boundary within Lishui is drawn differently by different scholars:

• You Rujie, Xu Baohua and Tang Zhenzhu, "The Distribution of Wu in Lishui" (1984), put the line south of the county seat: the nine southern survey points (the county town plus Honglan, Yuge, Donglu, Baima, Gonghe, Jingqiao, Kongzhen, Yunhe and Hefeng) are Wu.
• Li Rong (1985): the county seat and everything north of it is Mandarin-speaking, the south is Wu — the line runs at the county seat.
• Guo Jun (1995), after fieldwork in September 1990, argues that the line runs north of the county seat, from Caolu in Wushan in the west to Yangcun in Dongping in the east, through the four townships of Wushan, Qunli, Chengjiao and Dongping and eighteen natural villages; south of it is Wu, with the county town itself in a Wu–Jianghuai overlap zone, and the line and everything north of it is Jianghuai Mandarin.

Guo also reviews earlier work: the provincial survey team of the 1950s took the county town as its point and assigned Lishui to Jianghuai Mandarin, a conclusion he rejects as over-generalised; many later works followed You Rujie and his colleagues.

Disagreement over the southern Wu subgrouping

Which "group" the southern Wu of Lishui belongs to is likewise disputed:

• Zhengzhang Shangfang, "Draft Classification of the Dialects of Southern Anhui", puts southern Lishui in the Tai Gao sub-group of the Xuanzhou group of Wu.
• Fu Guotong and others, "Draft Classification of the Wu Dialects", assign southern Lishui to the Xuanzhou group of Wu.
• You Rujie and his colleagues assign it to the Changzhou sub-group of the Taihu group of Wu.

All three subgroupings are reported here at second hand from Guo Jun (1995). The encyclopaedia account ("belonging to Wu, Xuanzhou group") shares its origin with the Xuanzhou proposals but is a second-hand compilation, and is kept only as a popular rendering.

Kemin speech (the Henan dialect islands)

Gu Qian (2006) records that to the east of the mixed belt, along the eastern edge of the county, a considerable area of Henan speech is embedded, with numerous dialect islands, formed by successive Henan migrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and possibly as early as the Taiping period. Locally this speech is called keminhua, "migrant speech"; it differs markedly from local Lishui speech and has had only a negligible effect on it.

Uncertainties

First, none of the three papers was consulted in the original printing, so only their bibliographic data and conclusions are recorded. The proposed boundaries (south of the county seat, at the county seat, north of the county seat) and the subgroupings of southern Wu (Tai Gao sub-group of Xuanzhou, Xuanzhou group, Changzhou sub-group of Taihu) differ between authors and are set out side by side, without a choice being made.

Second, the phonetic and lexical criteria, and the survey points, differ between the accounts — Li Rong gives only the broad north–south split, while Guo Jun uses the two- or three-way contrast of the initial consonants — and are not developed here, the originals not being available.

Third, a search of the district government's "District Overview" page found no reference to dialect there; the term keminhua used here comes from Gu Qian (2006), not from the district government.