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Investigation Of The Consonant Endings Of The Chaoshan Dialect: A Result Of Language Contact And Horizontal Transmission, Jin Chen

Masters Theses

This thesis studies the inter-group variation of the consonant endings among five principal subgroups of the Chaoshan dialect, a branch of the South Min dialect in Eastern Guangdong Province, from the perspective of language contact and horizontal transmission. I conduct a quantitative study to present the synchronic variance of the consonant endings among five Chaoshan subgroups and the diachronic variance from Middle Chinese to modern Chaoshan dialect on a numerical scale.

The current literature tends to take the change of the consonant endings as a process of weakening governed by regular rules. My research findings challenge this conventional view. First, …