A Study of Phonology of Haiyuan Dialect

Abstract: Haiyuan County is situated at the northwest foothill of Liupanshan ,is belonged to the south of the Ningxia Hui autonomous region the mountainous area, which connects Tongxin & Guyuan in the east, joins Xiji & Huining of Gansu province in the south, is closed to Jingyuan of Gansu province in the west and is neighbored Zhongwei in the north. Which language is attached to the border of Lanyin Mandarin dialects, Longzhong & Qinlong class of Zhongyuan Mandarin dialects. Within the boundaries altogether has 5 nationalities of Hui, Han, Dongxiang, Man and Meng. Hui tribe accounts for 70%. Language between nationality' s affects mutually, contacts mutually much, therefore, the Haiyuan dialect has some mixed characteristics. The language of Han people in Haiyuan have many kinds of differences between so-called "the Gansu voice", "the Shaanxi voice","the Zhongwei voice","the Guyuan voice","the Xiji voice'Ythe Tongxin voice" and so on. This article discusses only the speech sound evolution situation of Han people in Haiyuan County.The characters in this article are based on the "Character Table of Dialect Investigation" edited by the Linguistics Institute of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.In field investigation foundation, this article describes the Haiyuan dialect pronunciation system by meantime description primarily and historical comparison for auxiliary. The haiyuan dialect has 24 initial consonants (including zero initial), 32 finals (not including rhymy), 4 single tones. At the same time this article compares meanwhile Haiyuan dialect with the phonetic system of "Cut Rhyme" respectively from 3 aspects of the initial consonant, the final and the intonation, has discussed the sound origin which the Haiyuan dialect sound moved, induced the evolution type of the initial consonant of Zhi Zhuang Zhang group(知庄章)in the Haiyuan dialect, analyzed the variation process of the initial Yi&Ying(疑&影)in Haiyuan dialect, inspected the concreete evolution of the ancient voiced plosives initial consonant in the Haiyuan dialect,Crosswise compares the dialect of Haiyuan with Guyuan & Xiji in Ningxia Hui autonomous 4 region, Xi' an & fufeng in Shaanxi province which belonged to Zhongyuan Mandarin dialects and with the dialect of Yinchuan, Tongxin & Zhongning in Ningxia which belonged to Lanyin Mandrin dialects in the meantime average. The result is there are mainly 3 sound characteristics of Haiyuan dialect: 1st ,initial consonant: The closure of Wei,Yi,Ying,Yun&Ti(微,疑,影, 云&以) initial meets i…
Key words: Haiyuan dialect; phonology; history evolution