Jin Chinese

Jin or Jinyu (Chinese晋 语/晋 语, Pinyin jìnyǔ ) belongs to the group of Chinese languages. While some linguists Jin regarded as separate dialect or her own language, it is allocated from other northern Chinese dialects.

The distribution of Jin extends over large parts of the Chinese province of Shanxi and Inner Mongolia, as well as some regions of the provinces of Hebei, Shaanxi and Henan. Overall, Jin is spoken by about 45 million people, making it one of the 30 most spoken languages ​​in the world.

The Language Monument Eintrittston

A special feature of Jin is the preservation of Eintrittstons. Jin is one of the tonal languages ​​at the same syllables with different tones (eg ascending tone, falling and then aufsteigenderTon, high tone ) are pronounced and then mean completely different words. While these tones are obtained in standard Chinese only 4, so that a syllable can express 5 different words with the unchanged form, there used to be in several northern Chinese dialects a fifth tone called Eintrittston, so that with the central uniform pitch the same syllable for 6 phonetically clearly distinct words could be used.

The " Eintrittston " is (Chinese入声/入声, Pinyin Ru Sheng ) called. This Eintrittston is a sound of very short duration and ends in a consonant or glottal stop. His sound is described as " like an arrow strikes in a wooden board ."

For more information, see: tones of standard Chinese