Kunming Chinese, commonly regarded as lingua franca of Yunnan province, is a major variety of Yunnanese, a member of Southwestern Mandarin. Based primarily on the linguistic typology and geographic distribution, Kunming Chinese has been further classified in one of the four major subgroups of Yunnanese: Central Yunnan group. Kunming Chinese, as well as all the dialects in Yunnan province, has a long history of development, which can probably be traced back to Qin and Han dynasties. The languages of twenty-four ethnic groups inhabiting in the same speech community also play a very important role in the development of Kunming Chinese. Until now Kunming Chinese remains a less studied dialect and no complete work has been done on its major grammatical aspects, especially morphology and syntax.
This book is intended to provide a descriptive account for the grammar of Kunming Chinese as spoken in Kunming city and its vicinities. The major topics discussed are: phonetics and phonology; the phonological developments in the past sixty years; morpheme categories and word formation; grammatical categories, syntactic categories; sentence types and structures.
Special discussions are given to the idiosyncratic features of the dialect: fronting and deletion of nasal in nasal rhymes, loss of rhotic initial series, breathy phonation; infix, the function and loss of "-er” suffix, word blending, reduplication and its interaction with tone change; question words and question formation. The book also features an interlinear text with transcription and translation demonstrating the major features discussed.
The author Ming Chao Gui teaches Chinese and linguistics at the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Linguistics of the University of Oklahoma, Norman campus, U.S.A.. He has regular publication on this dialect in the past ten years.
ISBN 9783895866340. Languages of the World/Materials 340. 116 pp. 2000.