Suzhounese has a large vowel inventory and it is relatively conservative in initials by preserving voiced consonants from Middle Chinese.
[citation needed] Suzhou dialect is spoken within the city itself and the surrounding area, including migrants living in nearby Shanghai.
It is also partially intelligible with dialects spoken in other areas of the Wu cultural sphere such as Hangzhou and Ningbo.
However, it is not mutually intelligible with Cantonese or Standard Chinese; but, as all public schools and most broadcast communication in Suzhou use Mandarin exclusively, nearly all speakers of the dialect are at least bilingual.
Owing to migration within China, many residents of the city cannot speak the local dialect but can usually understand it after a few months or years in the area.
geq8 can indicate referents appearing in a speech situation, which may be close to or far away from the deictic center, and under these conditions, geq8 is always used in combination with gestures.
In this sentence, "掰歇(弯歇)" cannot be replaced by "哀歇" because the Anti-Japanese War happened more than fifty years ago, so only the neutral or distal demonstrative can be used, not proximal.
"哀", "该", "掰", "弯" and "归" cannot be used as subjects or objects alone, but must be combined with the following quantifiers, locative words, etc.
As such, the Middle Chinese nasal codas *-m *-n *-ŋ have largely either merged or been lost depending on the vowel it follows.
Modern /ɛ/ also results from the monophthongization of the historical diphthong rime *-ɑi (-oj in Baxter's notation, corresponding to the 咍 final).
However, since the tone split dating from Middle Chinese still depends on the voicing of the initial consonant.
Suzhou dialect is used in innovative methods to demonstrate urban space and time, as well as the interrupted narrative aesthetics, making it an integral part of an effort, which is presented as a fundamental and self-conscious new thing.