Wenzhounese romanisation

Romanisation of the Wenzhou dialect of Wu Chinese, part of the greater Ōu grouping^[1] of Wu dialects centred on the city, refers to the use of the Latin alphabet to represent the sounds of the dialect group.

Early romanisation

The first instance of Wenzhounese romanisation begins with the language documentation efforts of Christian missionaries who translated the bible into many varieties of Chinese in both Chinese characters and in phonetic romanisation systems based largely on the Wade-Giles system. The first romanised form of Wenzhounese can be seen in an 1892 Gospel of Matthew translation.^[2]

Contemporary

In 2004, father-and-son team Shen Kecheng^[3] and Shen Jia^[4] published the work Wenzhouhua,^[5] which outlines a systematic method for romanising each initial and rhyme of the dialect. Its primary orthographic innovation is its means of expressing the three-way distinction of Wu stops in an orthography that distinguishes only between voiced and unvoiced stops.

The Wade-Giles-based systems deal with this as k, k', and g to represent /k/, /kʰ/, and /ɡ/. Since voiced obstruents no longer exist in Standard Chinese, pinyin deals with /k/ and /kʰ/ as g and k respectively. The Sens use the basic method as well and transcribes voiced stops by duplicating the voiced series of letters so /ɡ/ is gg in the system. Likewise, /ɦ/ is transcribed as hh.

They adopt other pinyin conventions, such as x for what is normally transcribed in Chinese usage of the IPA as /ɕ/ and c for /tsʰ/. Vowels are transcribed with a number of digraphs, but few are innovations. The influence of Chinese IMEs is seen in their system as well since v denotes /y/ and ov denotes /œy/. Another way that it diverges from pinyin is in Wenzhounese's unrounded alveolar apical vowel /ɨ/, which is written as ii, since, unlike Mandarin, apical vowels are not in complimentary distribution with /i/ in Wenzhounese.

Tones, however, are marked not by diacritics or tone spelling but by simply placing superscript values of Chao's tone lettering system.^[6]

Rhymes

Initials

Native perspectives

There has mostly not been a significant effort or interest on the part of locals to have a standard romanisation of the dialect. However, along with a growing economy and increased leisure, there has also been a growing local pride in the dialect. Attention to romanisation or other dialect-based written communication systems will likely increase with time.

See also

• Wenzhounese
• Wu Chinese
• Shanghainese

References