Min Chinese

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Lore & Background

The Min homeland of Fujian was opened to Han Chinese settlement by the defeat of the Minyue state by the armies of Emperor Wu of Han in 110 BC. The area features rugged mountainous terrain, with short rivers that flow into the South China Sea. Most subsequent migration from north to south China passed through the valleys of the Xiang and Gan rivers to the west, so that Min varieties have experienced less northern influence than other southern groups. As a result, whereas most varieties of Chinese can be treated as derived from Middle Chinese, the language that is described by rhyme dictionaries such as the Qieyun (601 AD), Min varieties contain traces of older distinctions. Linguists estimate that the oldest layers of the Min dialects diverged from the rest of Chinese around the time of the Han dynasty. Significant waves of migration from the North China Plain occurred: the Upheaval of the Five Barbarians during the Jin dynasty, particularly the Disaster of Yongjia in 311 AD, caused a tide of immigration to the south. In 669, Chen Zheng and his son Chen Yuanguang from Gushi County in Henan set up a regional administration in Fujian to suppress an insurrection by the She people. Wang Chao was appointed governor of Fujian in 893, near the end of the Tang dynasty, and brought tens of thousands of troops from Henan. In 909, following the fall of the Tang dynasty, his son Wang Shenzhi founded the Min Kingdom, one of the Ten Kingdoms in the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period. Jerry Norman identifies four main layers in the vocabulary of modern Min varieties: a non-Chinese substratum from the original languages of Minyue, which Norman and Mei Tsu-lin hypothesize were Austroasiatic; the earliest Chinese layer, brought to Fujian by settlers from Zhejiang to the north during the Han dynasty; a layer from the Northern and Southern dynasties period, which is largely consistent with the phonology of the Qieyun dictionary (Early Middle Chinese); and a literary layer based on the koiné of Chang'an, the capital of the Tang dynasty (Late Middle Chinese). Laurent Sagart (2008) disagrees with Norman and Mei Tsu-lin's analysis of an Austroasiatic substratum in Min. The hypothesis proposed by Jerry Norman and Mei Tsu-lin arguing for an Austroasiatic homeland along the middle Yangtze has been largely abandoned in most circles and left unsupported by the majority of Austroasiatic specialists. Rather, recent movements of analyzing archeological evidence, posit an Austronesian layer, rather than an Austroasiatic one.

Reader's Guide

Min is usually described as one of seven or ten groups of varieties of Chinese but has greater dialectal diversity than any of the other groups. The varieties used in neighbouring counties, and in the mountains of western Fujian even in adjacent villages, are often mutually unintelligible. Early classifications, such as those of Li Fang-Kuei in 1937 and Yuan Jiahua in 1960, divided Min into Northern and Southern subgroups. However, in a 1963 report on a survey of Fujian, Pan Maoding and colleagues argued that the primary split was between inland and coastal groups. A key discriminator between the two groups is a group of words that have a lateral initial /l/ in coastal varieties, and a voiceless fricative /s/ or /ʃ/ in inland varieties, contrasting with another group having /l/ in both areas. Norman reconstructs these initials in Proto-Min as voiceless and voiced laterals that merged in coastal varieties. The coastal varieties have the vast majority of speakers, and have spread from their homeland in Fujian and eastern Guangdong to the islands of Taiwan and Hainan, to other coastal areas of southern China, and to Southeast Asia. Pan and colleagues divided them into three groups: Eastern Min (Min Dong), centered around the city of Fuzhou; Pu-Xian Min, spoken in the city of Putian and the county of Xianyou County; and Southern Min (Min Nan), originating from the south of Fujian and the eastern corner of Guangdong. In popular usage, Southern Min usually refers to dialects of the Quanzhang type, which originated in southern Fujian (around Quanzhou, Zhangzhou and Xiamen) and spread to Southeast Asia, where they are known as Hokkien, and Taiwan, where they are known as Taiwanese. The dialects of the Teoswa / Chaoshan region of eastern Guangdong, including Teochew and Swatow dialects, have difficult mutual intelligibility with the Amoy dialect of Hokkien. The Language Atlas of China (1987) distinguished two further groups previously included in Southern Min: Leizhou Min, spoken on the Leizhou Peninsula in southwestern Guangdong, and Hainanese, spoken on the island of Hainan. Coastal varieties feature some uniquely Min vocabulary, including pronouns and negatives. All but the Hainan dialects have complex tone sandhi systems. Although they have far fewer speakers, the inland varieties show much greater variation than the coastal ones. Pan and colleagues divided the inland varieties into two groups: Northern Min (Min Bei), spoken in Nanping prefecture in Fujian, with Jian'ou dialect taken as typical, and Central Min (Min Zhong), spoken in Sanming prefecture. The Language Atlas of China (1987) included a further group: Shao-Jiang Min, spoken in the northwestern Fujian counties of Shaowu and Jiangle, which were classified as Hakka by Pan and his associates, but Jerry Norman suggested they were inland varieties of Min that had been subject to heavy Gan or Hakka influence. Inland varieties have little or no tone sandhi.

Did You Know?

• The Min languages are not mutually intelligible with one another or with other varieties of Chinese.
• Linguists estimate that the oldest layers of the Min dialects diverged from the rest of Chinese around the time of the Han dynasty.
• Jerry Norman identifies four main layers in the vocabulary of modern Min varieties, including a non-Chinese substratum hypothesized to be Austroasiatic.
• The Min homeland of Fujian was opened to Han Chinese settlement by the defeat of the Minyue state by the armies of Emperor Wu of Han in 110 BC.
• In 909, Wang Shenzhi founded the Min Kingdom, one of the Ten Kingdoms in the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period.