Min
Min is a geographic short term for Fujian Province in China. It has been used as a linguistic term by Chinese dialectologists to refer to the Min dialects for decades. Among the seven major Chinese languages (Mandarin, Wu, Yue, Gan, Hakka, Min, and Xiang), the Min dialect group is the most complicated and divergent of all. Fujian is a mountainous province with very few navigable rivers and not much arable land. The topography has contributed both to the heterogeneity of the dialects and also to migration to other parts of China and overseas.
Prior to the 1960s, when dialect data was scant, the Min dialect group was divided roughly into two subgroups: Minbei (Northern Min) and Minnan (Southern Min). Studies in the 1990s have shown that there are at least six Min subdialect groups: Mindong (Eastern Min), Minbei (Northern Min), Minzhong (Central Min), Minnan (Southern Min), Puxian, and Shaoning. (See Table 1.) Most of these subdialects are mutually unintelligible.
A Mindong Dialect: Fuzhou
The Fuzhou dialect is a characteristic Mindong dialect whose speakers number over 1 million and are found not only in Fuzhou, but also in Southeast Asian communities.
Fuzhou has fourteen initial consonants (p, p', m, t, t', n, l, ts, ts', s, k, k', ng, x), seven vowels (i, u, y, a, Ε, œ, o), seven tones, and just one paired-consonant ending: -ng/-q.
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