From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Xiāng (traditional Chinese: 湘語; simplified Chinese: 湘语), also known as Hunan, Hunanese (Chinese: 湖南话), or Hsiang is a Chinese language spoken mainly in the Hunan province, but also in a few other provinces such as Sichuan and Guangxi. It is a group of languages of immense interest to Chinese dialectologists and historical phonologists because some of its languages still exhibit the three-way distinction of Middle Chinese obstruents, preserving the voiced stops, fricatives and affricates as in the modern Wu languages. However, it is surrounded by Mandarin in the north, west and south, thus exhibits heavy Mandarin influences. New Xiang, which has lost the voiced obstruents, (as opposed to Old Xiang, which has preserved them) is to a certain extent intelligible to speakers of Southwestern Mandarin. One of the most well-known native speakers of the Xiang language was Mao Zedong, a native of Xiangtan, who was not fluent in Mandarin.
[edit] ClassificationXiāng is one of the Sinitic language families, which in turn forms part of the larger Sino-Tibetan language family. Despite being a distinct language family, the Xiang languages at large are close to the Wu languages because of the voiced obstruents and to Mandarin because of the grammatical and lexical influence it has on the Xiang languages, notably the new Xiang languages, which is reminiscent of a similar linguistic situation of the Hangzhou dialect. [edit] Geographic distributionXiang is spoken by over 36 million people in China, primarily in the central and southwestern parts of the Hunan province, over 20 counties in Sichuan, the 4 counties of Quánzhōu (全州), Guànyáng (灌陽), Zīyuán (資源) and Xīngān (興安) in northern Guangxi and parts of Guangdong. Apart from being surrounded by Mandarin speaking areas in the north, west and south, Xiang also borders Gan in the eastern part of Hunan and Jiangxi. Geographically, Xiang is also in contact with the Tujia and Hmong languages in the northwest. [edit] DialectsAs mentioned above, linguists distinguish two sub-families within the Xiang family, namely the Old and New Xiang languages. Old Xiang, aside from having preserved the Middle Chinese obstruents, is also spoken in the southern regions and New Xiang in the north, therefore more heavily influenced by Mandarin than the Old Xiang languages. According to Bao & Chen (2005), three main dialect groups have been identified, amongst other unclassified dialects:
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