Linguistic Atlas of Chinese Dialects

The Linguistic Atlas of Chinese Dialects (Chinese: 汉语方言地图集; pinyin: Hànyǔ Fāngyán Dìtú Jí) is a special book edited by Cao Zhiyun and published in 2008. It comes in three volumes and shows how different people speak Chinese in many places across China. This book is called a dialect atlas and it helps us understand the geography of different ways people speak Chinese.

Unlike another book called the Language Atlas of China from 1987, which looked at both minority languages and groups of Chinese dialects, this new atlas focuses on showing many features of Chinese dialects through maps. It follows the style of famous books like the Atlas linguistique de la France and others, helping us see how language changes from place to place.

Methods

The project took eight years, from 2001 to 2007. It began with a year of planning in December 2001, which included choosing locations and setting up rules for the surveys.

The team selected 930 locations across China and Taiwan. They picked one spot for every county in southeast China and one spot for every three or four counties in the Mandarin and Jin areas. Big cities like Suzhou, Xiamen, and Meizhou were also included. Most of the other locations were in rural areas to show local dialects.

The team asked people in these locations about how they said certain words and phrases. They also looked at how sounds change in certain situations. The data collected was entered into a special computer system. The team used older people who had lived most of their lives in these areas, as they were thought to best represent the traditional ways of speaking.

The maps were made and put together during 2007.

Contents

The Linguistic Atlas of Chinese Dialects is a big book with 510 maps spread across three volumes. It helps us see how different Chinese dialects vary.

The first volume, called Yǔyīn juǎn, focuses on sounds. It has 205 maps showing how sounds changed from older forms of Chinese, like tones and certain beginning sounds of words.

The second volume, Cíhuì juǎn, looks at words. It has 203 maps showing the special words people use in different places for the same idea, shown in Chinese characters.

The third volume, Yǔfǎ juǎn, covers grammar. It includes 102 maps that display how different grammar rules or small parts of words are used in various dialects.

Each map in the atlas shows different forms, but it does not explain the classifications; readers need to figure them out themselves. A digital version of the atlas is being made, which will have even more maps and all the survey data.