Goulou Yue

Goulou
	勾漏方言 Ngaulau Yut
Native to	Southern China
Region	Guangxi–Guangdong border
Native speakers	6.9 million (1998)[1]
Language family	Sino-Tibetan Sinitic Yue Goulou; ; ;
Language codes
ISO 639-3	None (mis)
ISO 639-6	gulu
Glottolog	None; guin1237 Goulou
Linguasphere	79-AAA-me
	Goulou, among other Yue and Pinghua groups in Guangxi and Guangdong

Goulou is one of the principal groups of Yue dialects. It is spoken around the Guangxi–Guangdong border, and includes the dialects of Yulin and Bobai.

Dialects

Yulin dialect is representative, though Bobai is better known.

Yulin dialect
- Bobai dialect
Guangning dialect
Huaiji dialect
Fengkai dialect
Deqing dialect
Yunan dialect
Shanglin dialect
Binyang dialect
Tengxian dialect

Tone

Bobai dialect is widely cited as having the most tones of any variety of Chinese, though it actually only has six, the same as most Yue dialects. The reason for the claim is that Bobai makes a four-way tonal distinction in checked syllables, whereas most other Yue dialects have three. In Yulin dialect just to the north of Bobai, however, neither entering tone is split: there are just two entering tones, 7 and 8. Lee (1993) believes that Bobai is innovative in having split 8, whereas Yulin (along with several neighboring interior Yue dialects) is innovative in having merged a former split in 7: proto-Yue probably had 7a, 7b, and 8.

Many Yue varieties exhibit a "changed tone" with some semantic content. Such tones occur in the Yulin dialect, in checked syllables only, marking diminutives. In such cases, the final stop -p, -t or -k is changed to a homorganic nasal -m, -n or -ŋ, respectively, and the pitch contour is also altered. This seems to be a trace of a now-lost suffix similar to ér (兒, Middle Chinese nye) in other Chinese varieties.[2]

References

Gina Lee, 1993. Comparative, diachronic and experimental perspectives on the interaction between tone and the vowel in Standard Cantonese
Ann Yue, 1979. The Teng-xian Dialect of Chinese: Its Phonology, Lexicon and Texts with Grammatical Notes. Computational Analysis of Asian and African Languages Monograph Series, No. 3

Olson, An Ethnohistorical Dictionary of China
Tan, Yutian (2011). "The origin and nature of high rising diminutive Tone Change in Siyi Dialect" (PDF). In Jing-Schmidt, Zhuo (ed.). Proceedings of the 23rd North American Conference on Chinese Lingusitics (NACCL-23), Volume 2. pp. 190–207.

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[1] Olson, An Ethnohistorical Dictionary of China

[2] Tan, Yutian (2011). "The origin and nature of high rising diminutive Tone Change in Siyi Dialect" (PDF). In Jing-Schmidt, Zhuo (ed.). Proceedings of the 23rd North American Conference on Chinese Lingusitics (NACCL-23), Volume 2. pp. 190–207.