Pinghua Chinese
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Pinghua 平話 |
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|---|---|---|
| Spoken in: | China | |
| Region: | Guangxi | |
| Total speakers: | 2,300,000 | |
| Language family: | Sino-Tibetan Chinese Pinghua |
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| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | zh | |
| ISO 639-2: | chi (B) | zho (T) |
| ISO 639-3: | yue | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. | ||
Pínghuà (traditional Chinese: 平話; simplified Chinese: 平话), is a subdivision of spoken Chinese. It is spoken in parts of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region and some in Hunan province. It has traditionally been classified as a Yue dialect.
Pinghua is a formerly unclassified dialect spoken by about 2 million people. When Chinese is grouped into 7 languages rather than 10, Pinghua is grouped together with Yue, and there is some debate about considering it a separate language. Many local people in Nanning consider there to be four "dialects" spoken in the area, namely Yue, Pinghua, Mandarin and Zhuang, which are not mutually intelligible. According to Wu Wei in 2001, "Pinghua is only a branch of Cantonese [Yue] rather than an independent dialect group."
Pinghua retains all four entering tones of Chinese, and therefore has one more tone category than Cantonese which only has three entering tones. Genetically speaking Pinghua speakers have more in common with non-Han ethnic minorities in southern China than with other Han groups, a result underlined by a recent article entitled "Pinghua population as an exception of Han Chinese’s coherent genetic structure" .
Like all other varieties of Chinese, there is plenty of dispute as to whether Pinghua is a language or a dialect. See Identification of the varieties of Chinese for the issues surrounding this dispute.
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