L, Simon wrote:As a matter of fact, my mother tongue is a living example of a dialect continuum between Mandarin and Wu. The first thing to be clarified though is that the Mandarin group can be divided into 8 subgroups, and the Mandarin as most commonly known belongs to Beijing (北京) Mandarin subgroup, while my mother tongue is closer to Jianghuai (江淮, between downstream of Yangtze River and Huai River) Mandarin. I have been born and raised in Nanjing. The urban tongue of the city is one of Jianghuai Mandarin, while the tongues of peripheral rural areas belong to Wu. I grew up in the central rural area, where we speech with a tongue with features of both Jianghuai Mandarin and Wu. Usually, my mother tongue is considered a Jianghuai Mandarin, but we do have, for instance, most of the voiced onset consonants from Late Middle Chinese (although they are gradually lost among young speakers), preservation of many velar onset consonants which are now alveolo-palatal affricates in Jianghuai Mandarin, and complete reduction of the rime structures (in Pinyin) "<ian>" , "<uan>" and "<üan>" into "/iː /", "/uː /" and "/yː /", which are clearly features of Wu. This is due to the fact that Nanjing shifted from Wu-speaking area to contemporary Mandarin-speaking area during Ming Dynasty, being Ming's capital.
Interesting, thanks for sharing!
Gan, Yue, Min, Hakka and to some extend, even Wu, are closely related dialect groups, belonging to a historical ethnic family known as 越 (or 百越) lived in what is now South of China.
I've always understood Min to be quite divergent, with many (most?) linguists considering it to form its own first-level branch within Sinitic.
I am not sure if I understand this one correctly, but I gather that you have implied that different waves of migration has led to cultural diversity in the same region, bringing in different languages and creating language barrier (thus clear boundaries) between the old and new settlers. I would argue that migration merely brings different dialects rather than languages into contact, since you said migration of Han people (not other nationality), and by the time of first contact there surely were boundaries (until they began to merge with each other and the boundaries blurred), but it does not disprove the fact that those dialects derive from the same ancestor thus forming a continuum.
It's simply a fact that migration often leads to the breaking of continuums or the formation of hard linguistic borders, which you can see among the Romance languages of the Iberian Peninsula (in the north there is a gradual continuum; in the south there is almost none, except for some minor contact phenomena including some Murcian and Extremaduran varieties) or the Slavic speech of the western Balkans (there is no continuum between Shtokavian and the other languages, but there is between Slovene, Kajkavian and Chakavian).
It is also however true that there are two different kinds of continua: ones that arose out of a language group spreading out of a core area, and another that is the result of two previously distinct blocs ending up in contact with each other. Nanjing Mandarin seems to be an example of the latter, like Murcian.
There's also the fact that a continuum with regards to features does not necessarily reflect a continuum when it comes to intelligibility, as is again the case of Murcian, which is more readily intelligible with Standard Spanish than with Catalan, despite its clear Catalan substrate.
but it does not make them different languages
I don't take a position on whether any two varieties "are the same language" or not, as I consider this to be categorisation for the sake of categorisation. I use "language" and "dialect bloc" largely interchangeably.
