| Also Known As: Hunanese,Xiang,Hunan,Hsiang
Description:
Xiāng (Hsiang, traditional Chinese: 湘語; simplified Chinese: 湘语), also known as Hunanese (Chinese: 湖南话), is a Chinese language spoken mainly in the Hunan province, but also in a few other provinces such as Sichuan and Guangxi. It is a group of languages of immense interest to Chinese dialectologists and historical phonologists because some of its languages still exhibit the three-way distinction of Middle Chinese obstruents, preserving the voiced stops, fricatives and affricates as in the modern Wu languages. However, it is surrounded by Mandarin in the north, west and south, thus exhibits heavy Mandarin influences. New Xiang, which has lost the voiced obstruents, (as opposed to Old Xiang, which has preserved them) is to a certain extent intelligible to speakers of Southwestern Mandarin.
One of the most well-known native speakers of the Xiang language was Mao Zedong, a native of Xiangtan, who was not fluent in Mandarin.
Xiāng is one of the Sinitic language families, which in turn forms part of the larger Sino-Tibetan language family. Despite being a distinct language family, the Xiang languages at large are close to the Wu languages because of the voiced obstruents and to Mandarin..... full article at Wikipedia |
Location of Chinese, Xiang Language Speakers
<googlemap zoom="1" width=400 height=300 lat="41.371138" lon="108.144011" type="map">
32.904293, 110.467709, China
49.837982, 105.820313, Asia</googlemap>
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