Academic status
Wenzhou dialect is a representative dialect of southern Wu dialect, belonging to the "fossil" of orthodox ancient Chinese, retaining a large number of ancient sayings and sounds, which is very close to the language of Chinese ancestors. Mandarin is influenced by ancient nomadic people in the north, Wu dialect in the north is influenced by Yayin Mandarin, and Wu dialect in the south is the successor of ancient Wu dialect for geographical reasons.
Wenzhou dialect is closely related to ancient Min dialect, ancient Chu dialect and ancient Jiangdong dialect, which is of special significance to the study of Chinese phonetic history and language history.
Wenzhou is the birthplace of Southern Opera, and all the Southern Opera works handed down contain many Wenzhou dialects. Because of the far-reaching influence of Southern Opera on Yuan Qu and Yuan Ming novels, scholars need to quote a lot of Wenzhou dialect when annotating and textual researching these works.
Evolutionary history
Ou Yue belonged to Yue in the pre-Qin period, with Baiyue as the main body, and spoke the ancient Yue language (belonging to Dongtai language) which was connected with wuyue, and could not communicate with the Chinese of Qi and Chu. But it is homologous to today's Dong language, Zhuang language, Burmese language, Vietnamese language, Jing language and Thai language. In the common spoken language of modern Wenzhou dialect, there are still many traces of Dong-Tai dialect.
In 333 BC, the State of Chu destroyed Yue and strengthened its rule over wuyue. Until 22 1 year BC, Qin unified China, which lasted 1 12 years. Due to the influence and function of Chu people in wuyue, Dongchu dialect and ancient wuyue dialect merged to form a new Chinese-"Jiangdong dialect", which is the direct ancestor of Wu dialect. In the Tang Dynasty, "Hui Lin Yi Yin" collectively called the dialects spoken in Jiangdong as "the Voice of Wu Chu". Most of the old words in Wenzhou dialect can be traced back to Jiangdong dialect, which is also the main source of Wenzhou dialect white reading system.
During the Qin and Han Dynasties, Han people formally explored wuyue, but southern Zhejiang and Fujian were still under the control of the Yue people, and Dong 'ou and Fujian, which were established by the Yue people, were always in an independent state. Although during the reign of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, Dong 'ou "moved to all parts of China, but it was noted that it was between the Jianghuai area", only the royal families and strongmen of Ou and Yue moved away. During this period, there were more and more Chinese loanwords, but the main vocabulary of Ouyue dialect was still Dong-Tai.
During the Six Dynasties, Jiangdong dialect began to be divided into Wu dialect and Min dialect. Wenzhou belonged to Huiji County from the Eastern Han Dynasty to the founding of the county in 323 AD. According to the records of Guo Pu in the Eastern Jin Dynasty, Ouyue people should have spoken the ancient Wu language since the Six Dynasties. Because of its border with the Min dialect area, Wenzhou dialect still retains many of the same features as the ancient Min dialect.
During the Tang and Song Dynasties, there were several large-scale immigration waves, especially after the capital was moved in the Southern Song Dynasty, the number of Han people in Wenzhou increased greatly. The orthodox Chinese culture brought by the Han people from the Central Plains to Ouyue assimilated the local Chinese dialect, and the Central Plains dialect left the characteristics of different pronunciations in Wenzhou dialect. Wenzhou dialect in Song Dynasty is very close to modern Chinese. After several changes in northern Chinese, Wenzhou dialect still maintains many ancient phonetic features of Chinese, so reading Tang poetry and Song poetry in Wenzhou dialect is more fluent than Mandarin.