10 Facts About Jin Chinese

Jin is a proposed group of varieties of Chinese spoken by roughly 63 million people in northern China, including most of Shanxi province, much of central Inner Mongolia, and adjoining areas in Hebei, Henan, and Shaanxi provinces.

The status of Jin is disputed among linguists; some prefer to include it within Mandarin, but others set it apart as a closely related, but separate sister-group.

Until the 1980s, the Jin dialects were universally included within Mandarin Chinese.

However, in 1985, Li Rong proposed that Jin Chinese should be considered a separate top-level dialect group, similar to Yue or Wu.

However, others disagree that Jin Chinese should be considered a separate dialect group for these reasons:.

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Unlike most varieties of Mandarin, Jin Chinese has preserved a final glottal stop, which is the remnant of a final stop consonant.

In Middle Jin Chinese, syllables closed with a stop consonant had no tone.

However, Jin Chinese linguists prefer to categorize such syllables as belonging to a separate tone class, traditionally called the "entering tone".

Syllables closed with a glottal stop in Jin Chinese are still toneless, or alternatively, Jin Chinese can be said to still maintain the entering tone.

Jin Chinese employs extremely complex tone sandhi, or tone changes that occur when words are put together into phrases.