Although traditionally called a dialect, Foochowese is actually a separate language according to linguistic standards, because it is not mutually intelligible with other , let alone other Chinese languages. Therefore, whether Foochowese is a ''dialect'' or a ''language'' is highly disputable.
Centered in Fuzhou City, Foochowese mainly covers eleven cities and counties, viz.: Fuzhou , , , , , , , Changle , , Fuqing and . Foochowese is also the second local language in northern and middle Fujian cities and counties, like Nanping , Shaowu , , Sanming and .
Foochowese is also widely spoken in some regions abroad, especially in Southeastern Asian countries like Malaysia and Indonesia. The city of Sibu in Malaysia is called "New Fuzhou" due to the influx of immigrants there in the early 1900s. Similarly, the language has spread to the USA, UK and Japan as a result of immigration in recent decades.
History
Formation
After Han China's occupation of Minyue in 110 BC, Han people began its reign in what is Fujian Province today. Having lost their nationalities, the aboriginal Minyue people, a branch of , were gradually assimilated into Chinese culture. The and Ancient Chu language brought by the mass influx of Han immigrants from Northern area gradually mixed with the local Minyue language and finally developed into the Ancient Min language, from which Foochowese evolved.
Foochowese came into being during the period somewhere between late Tang Dynasty and "Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms", and has been considered by most as a Chinese dialect ever since. However, it is also worth noting that its substratum is constituted by large quantities of well-preserved Minyue vocabulary. In this sense, Foochowese is a ''de facto'' mixed language of Ancient Chinese and Minyue language.
The famous book Qī Lín Bāyīn , which was compiled in the 17th century, is the first and the most full-scale rime book that provides a systematic guide to character reading for people speaking or learning Foochowese. It once served to standardize the language and is still widely quoted as an authoritative reference book in modern academic research in Chinese phonology.
Studies by early Western missionaries
In 1842, Fuzhou was open to Westerners as a treaty port after the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing. But due to the language barrier, however, the first Christian missionary base in this city did not take place without difficulties. In order to convert Fuzhou people, those missionaries found it very necessary to make a careful study of the Foochowese. Their most notable works are listed below:
:* 1856, M. C. White:
:* 1870, R. S. Maclay & C. C. Baldwin: An alphabetic dictionary of the Chinese language in the Foochow dialect
:* 1871, C. C. Baldwin: Manual of the Foochow dialect
:* 1891, T. B. Adam: An English-Chinese dictionary of the Foochow dialect
:* 1893, Charles Hartwell:
:* 1898, R. S. Maclay & C. C. Baldwin: An alphabetic dictionary of the Chinese language of the Foochow dialect, 2nd edition
:* 1906, The Foochow translation of the complete Bible
:* 1923, T. B. Adam & L. P. Peet: An English-Chinese dictionary of the Foochow dialect, 2nd edition
:* 1929, R. S. Maclay & C. C. Baldwin :
Status quo
By the end of the Qing Dynasty, Fuzhou society had been largely . But for decades the Chinese government has discouraged the use of the colloquial in school education and in media, so the number of speakers has been greatly boosted. It is reported that merely less than half of the children and youngsters in Fuzhou are able to speak this language.
Nevertheless, it should be noted that Foochowese is currently widely spoken among some native speakers as an "endearing" language. Speaking Foochowese in Fuzhou often allows mutual speakers a certain level of familiarity. Even though Mandarin Chinese is more often heard in casual conversations on the city streets, the careful observer will notice that in more communal settings, such as small neighborhoods in the city or the surrounding countryside, Foochowese is often the dominant language.
In Mainland China, Foochowese has been officially listed as Intangible Cultural Heritage and its promotion work is being systematically carried out. In Matsu, Taiwan, the teaching of Foochowese has been successfully introduced into elementary schools, alongside the Taiwanese localization movement.
Grammar
:''This section is about Standard Foochowese only. See for a discussion of other dialects.''
Phonetics
, Foochowese is a tonal language, which has extremely extensive sandhi rules in the , , and the . These over-complicated rules make Foochowese one of the most difficult Chinese languages.
Tones
There are seven original in Foochowese, which reserves the tonal system of Ancient Chinese:
The sample characters are taken from the Qī Lín Bāyīn.
In ''Qī Lín Bāyīn'', the Foochowese is described as having eight tones, which explains how the book got its title . That name, however, is somewhat misleading, because ?ng-siōng and Iòng-siōng are identical in tone contour; therefore, only seven tones exist.
?ng-?k and Iòng-?k characters are ended with either or Glottal stop .
Besides those seven tones listed above, two new tonal values, "21" and "35" also occur in connected speech .
Tonal sandhi
The rules of tonal sandhi in Foochowese are complicated, even compared with those of other Chinese dialects. When two or more than two characters combine into a word, the tonal value of the last character remains stable but those of its preceding characters change in most cases. For example, "獨", "立" and "日" are characters of Iòng-?k with the same tonal value "5", and are pronounced as , and , respectively. When combined together as the phrase "獨立日" , "獨" changes its tonal value to "21", and "立" changes its to "33", therefore the pronunciation as a whole is .
The two-character tonal sandhi rules are shown in the table below:
?ng-?k-gák are ?ng-?k characters with glottal stop and ?ng-?k-ék with .
However, the tonal sandhi rules of more than two characters are much more complicated than can be conveniently displayed in a single table.
Initials
There are seventeen in all:
The Chinese characters in the brackets are also sample characters from ''Qī Lín Bāyīn''.
Most Chinese linguists argue that Foochowese should be described as possessing a null onset. In fact, any character that has a null onset begins with a glottal stop .
Some speakers find it difficult to distinguish between the initials and ].
No such as or exist in Foochowese, which is one of the most conspicuous characteristics shared by all branches in the , as well as and .
and exist in connected speech only.
Initial assimilation
In Foochowese, there are various kinds of initial , all of which are progressive. When two or more than two characters combine into a phrase, the initial of the first character stays unchanged while those of the following characters, in most cases, change to match its preceding phoneme, i.e., the of its preceding character.
Rimes
The table below shows the eleven of Foochowese.
In Foochowese codas , , and have all merged as ; and , , have all merged as . Eleven vowel phonemes, together with the codas and , are organized into forty-six .
As has been mentioned above, there are theoretically two different entering tonal codas in Foochowese: and . But for most Foochowese speakers, those two codas are only distinguishable when in the or . Therefore, most Chinese linguists think that the codas and has merged together.
Close/Open rimes
All rimes come in pairs in the above table: the one to the left represents a close rime , while the other represents an open rime . The close/open rimes are closely related with the tones. As single characters, the tones of ?ng-bìng , Siōng-si?ng , Iòng-bìng and Iòng-?k have close rimes while ?ng-ké?? , ?ng-?k and Iòng-ké?? have the open rimes. In connected speech, an open rime shifts to its close counterpart in the .
For instance, "福" is a ?ng-?k character and is pronounced as and "州" a ?ng-bìng character with the pronunciation of . When these two characters combine into the word "福州" , "福" changes its tonal value from "24" to "21" and, simultaneously, shifts its rime from to , so the phrase is pronounced as . While in the word "中國" , "中" is a ?ng-bìng character and therefore its close rime never changes, though it does change its tonal value from "55" to "53" in the tonal sandhi.
The phenomenon of close/open rimes is unique to Foochowese and this feature makes it especially intricate and hardly intelligible even to other .
Phonological features
Vocabulary
Most words in Foochowese have cognates in other Chinese languages, so a non-Fuzhou speaker would find it much easier to understand Foochowese written in Chinese characters than spoken in conversation. But it should also be noted, however, that false friends do exist: for example, "莫細膩" means "don't be too polite" or "make yourself at home", "我對手汝洗碗" means "I help you wash dishes", "伊共伊老媽嚟冤家" means "he and his wife are quarreling ", etc. Sheer knowledge of Mandarin vocabulary does not help one catch the meaning of these sentences.
The majority of Foochowese vocabulary dates back to more than 1,200 years ago. Some daily-used words are even preserved as they were in Tang Dynasty, which can be illustrated by a poem of a famous Chinese poet Gu Kuang . In his poem ''Jiǎn'' , Gu Kuang explicitly noted:
In Foochowese, "囝" and "郎罷" are still in use today, without any slightest change.
Words from Ancient Chinese
Quite a few words from Ancient Chinese have retained the original meanings for thousands of years, while their counterparts in Mandarin Chinese have either fallen out of daily use or varied to different meanings.
This table shows some Foochowese words from Classical Chinese, as contrasted to Mandarin Chinese:
:1 "看" is also used as the verb "to look" in Foochowese.
:2 "養" in Foochowese means "give birth to ".
And this table shows some words that are both used in Foochowese and Mandarin Chinese, while the meanings in Mandarin Chinese have altered:
Words from Minyue language
Some daily used words, shared by all Min languages, came from the ancient Minyue language. Such as follows:
The literary and colloquial readings
The literary and colloquial readings is a feature commonly found in all Chinese dialects throughout China. The literary readings are mainly used in formal phrases and written language, while the colloquial ones are basically used in vulgar phrases and spoken language.
This table displays some widely used characters in Foochowese which have both literary and colloquial readings:
江
|
|-
| 百
| báik
| 百科 báik-ku?
| encyclopedical
| báh
| 百姓 báh-sáng
| common people
|-
| 飛
| h?
| 飛機 h?-g?
| aeroplane
| bu?i
| 飛鳥 bu?i-cēu
| flying birds
|-
| 寒
| hàng
| 寒食 Hàng-s?k
| Cold Food Festival
| gàng
| 天寒 ti?ng gàng
| cold, freezing
|-
| 廈
| h?
| 大廈 d?i-h?
| mansion
| ?
| 廈門
| Amoy
|}
Loan words from English
The First Opium War, also known as the First Anglo-Chinese War, was ended in 1842 with the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing, which forced the Qing government to open Fuzhou to all traders and missionaries. Since then, quite a number of churches and Western-style schools have been established. Consequently, some words Foochowese, but without fixed written forms in Chinese characters. The most frequently used words are listed below:
* , , noun, meaning "an article of dress", is from the word "coat";
* , , noun, meaning "a meshwork barrier in tennis or badminton", is from the word "net";
* , , noun, meaning "oil paint", is from the word "paint";
* , , noun, meaning "a small sum of money", is from the word "penny";
* , , noun, meaning "money", is from the word "take";
* , , noun, meaning "girl" in a humorous way, is from the word "girl";
* , , verb, meaning "to shoot ", is from the word "shoot";
* , , verb, meaning "to pause ", is from the word "again".
* , , meaning "Southeastern Asian ", is from the word "Malacca".
Other features of Foochowese grammar
Examples
Some common phrases in Foochowese:
* Foochowese : 福州話 / /
* Hello: 汝好 / /
* Good-bye: 再見 / /
* Please: 請 / / ; 起動 / /
* Thank you: 謝謝 / / ; 起動 / Kī-d?e?ng /
* Sorry: 對不住 / /
* This: 嚽 / / ; 啫 / / ; 茲 / /
* That: 噲 / / ; 嘻 / / ; 許 / /
* How much?: 偌 / /
* Yes: 正是 / / ; 無綻 / / ; 著 / /
* No: 伓是 / / ; 綻 / / ; 賣著 / /
* I don't understand: 我賣會意 / /
* What's his name?: 伊名什乇？ / /
* Where's the hotel?: 賓館洽底所？ / /
* How can I go to the school?: 去學校怎樣行？ / /
* Do you speak Foochowese?: 汝會講福州話賣？ / /
* Do you speak English?: 汝會講英語賣？ / /
Regional variations
Writing system
Chinese characters
Most of the characters of Foochowese stem from Ancient Chinese and can therefore be written in Chinese characters. Many books published in Qing Dynasty have been written in this traditional way, such as Mǐndū Biéjì and the Bible in Foochowese. However, Chinese characters as the writing system for Foochowese do have many shortcomings.
Firstly, a great number of characters are unique to Foochowese, so that they can only be written in informal ways. For instance, the character "", a negative word, has no common form. Some write it as "" or "", both of which share with it an identical pronunciation but has a totally irrelevant meaning; and others prefer to use a newly-created character combining "" and "", but this character is not included in most fonts.
Secondly, Foochowese has been excluded from the educational system for many decades. As a result, many if not all take for granted that Foochowese does not have a formal writing system and when they have to write it, they tend to misuse characters with a similar Mandarin Chinese enunciation. For example, " ", meaning "okay", are frequently written as "" because they are uttered almost in the same way.
Foochow Romanized
Foochow Romanized, also known as or , is a orthography for Foochowese adopted in the middle of 19th century by and missionaries. It had varied at different times, and became standardized several decades later. Foochow Romanized was mainly used inside of Church circles, and was taught in some Mission Schools in Fuzhou.
Mǐnqiāng Kuàizì
Mǐnqiāng Kuàizì , literally meaning "Fujian Colloquial Fast Characters", is a Qieyin System for Foochowese designed by Chinese scholar and calligrapher Li Jiesan in 1896.
Literary and art forms
Books and other sources
* Cathryn Donohue: , University of Nevada, Reno
* Chen, Leo & Norman, Jerry: ''An Introduction to the Foochow Dialect'', San Francisco State Coll., CA, 1965.
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