Linguistic Atlas of Chinese Dialects

The Linguistic Atlas of Chinese Dialects (Chinese: 汉语方言地图集; pinyin: Hànyǔ Fāngyán Dìtú Jí) is a special book edited by Cao Zhiyun and published in 2008. It has three volumes and shows how people speak Chinese in many places in China. This book is called a dialect atlas and it helps us learn about the different ways people speak Chinese.

Unlike another book called the Language Atlas of China from 1987, which looked at both minority languages and groups of Chinese dialects, this new atlas focuses on showing many features of Chinese dialects through maps. It follows the style of famous books like the Atlas linguistique de la France and others, helping us see how language changes from place to place.

Methods

The project took eight years, from 2001 to 2007. It started with planning in December 2001. The team picked 930 places in China and Taiwan for their work. They chose one spot for each county in southeast China and one spot for every three or four counties in the Mandarin and Jin areas. Big cities like Suzhou, Xiamen, and Meizhou were included, along with many rural areas.

The team asked people how they said certain words and phrases. They also studied how sounds change in different situations. The information was entered into a special computer system. They talked to older people who had lived in these areas most of their lives, as they best showed the traditional ways of speaking.

The maps were made and finished in 2007.

Contents

The Linguistic Atlas of Chinese Dialects is a big book with 510 maps in three volumes. It shows how Chinese dialects are different from each other.

The first volume, called Yǔyīn juǎn, looks at sounds. It has 205 maps showing how sounds changed from older Chinese, like tones and some beginning sounds of words.

The second volume, Cíhuì juǎn, looks at words. It has 203 maps showing the special words people use in different places for the same idea, shown in Chinese characters.

The third volume, Yǔfǎ juǎn, covers grammar. It includes 102 maps showing how different grammar rules or small parts of words are used in various dialects.

Each map in the atlas shows different forms, but it does not explain the classifications; readers need to figure them out themselves. A digital version of the atlas is being made, which will have even more maps and all the survey data.