Fuqing dialect
The syllabic nasal [ŋ̍] in the modern Rongcheng dialect is read as [iŋ]; some sources have not yet listed this final in their charts.
[6]: 32–35 According to the original listing of the rimes in the Qī Lín Bāyīn, the medial vowel did not change with the tones.
Similarly, [uʔ] in the upper departing (上入) tone becomes the open rime [oʔ], where the vowel has again changed.
Synchronically, this alternation can affect vowels when tone sandhi occurs; please see the section on rime changes.
Within lexical or semantic items, the three features of initial, rime and tone are subject to sandhi phenomena.
In colloquial Fuqing speech, the initial consonants of Chinese characters or syllables are subject to change under specific circumstances within lexical items.
The first modern work to examine the phonology of the Fuzhou dialect, the Mǐnyīn Yánjiū (閩音研究), used the term "initial assimilation" (in simplified Chinese: 声母类化; traditional Chinese: 聲母類化; pinyin: shēngmǔ lèihuà) to refer to this phenomenon.
Initial assimilation in the Fuqing dialect occurs in polysyllabic lexemes (i.e. lexical items or words of two or more syllables or Chinese characters) and certain semantic groups.
Not every phrase will undergo initial assimilation, and the ones that do may differ from their counterparts in the other Min Dong varieties.
(肩臂) (手臂) (算學) (數學) (枕頭) (額頭) (甘蔗) (福州蔗) Type A dentals after voicing assimilation do not become the standard [l], but are slightly flapped.
[13] As with the majority of southern varieties of Chinese, the Fuqing dialect exhibits tone sandhi.
In many local dialects of the Fuzhou area (within the Eastern Min family), the last syllable of a word does not undergo tone sandhi.
The Fuqing dialect is divided into several branches, based on their phonology:[6]: 125 There is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between the three branches despite their differences, and the original Rongcheng dialect, spoken in an area now part of Yuping Road (Chinese: 玉屏街道; pinyin: Yùpíng Jiēdào), is well understood across the whole Fuqing region.
But the Fuqing dialect has devoiced the obstruents, turning them into voiceless consonants, just as other Eastern Min varieties of Chinese have.
The Fuqing dialect does have two voiced obstruent phonemes, /β/ and /ʒ/, but these appear in connected speech, and are not considered part of the initials.
Where in the rime book Qī Lín Bāyīn (戚林八音), an entering tone character begins with an unvoiced consonant (e.g. the initials 花, 嘉, 歌, 之, 過, 橋, 奇), in the colloquial reading these lose their final glottal stop.
Nevertheless, in literary reading, these characters retain their glottal stop as a marker of the entering tone in Fuqing as well as in Fuzhou.
Initials, rimes and tones may be affected independently of each other, yielding a total of seven possible outcomes:[6]: 49 When there is a difference between literary and colloquial readings, the colloquial one is used in vernacular speech, common surnames and place names of the Greater Fuzhou area, whilst the literary reading is generally used in more literary compound words, in given names, and place names outside the local area.
[6]: 52 Fuqing has had a long history of migration, with which has come a large number of different sources of vocabulary, creating several layers or lexical strata.
One of the layers that the Fuqing dialect has is the Minyue language,[20] which today remains as a source of colloquial vocabulary.
Some such words are replaced by coinages from local roots, e.g. bicycle, which in the Fuqing dialect is 跤踏車 (also written 骹踏車) instead of being directly cognate to the standard Taiwanese Mandarin 腳踏車, literally foot-tread-vehicle, with the morpheme for foot being substituted by its local equivalent.
With contact with foreign countries, there have also been loanwords from non-Chinese languages, such as 加蘇林 for gasoline/petroleum, which in standard Mandarin would be 石油.
For example, a "night school" is 夜校, derived from standard Mandarin, and not *暝晡校 or *暝晡堂 as might have been expected from native Fuqing dialect roots.
