Taihu Wu ( 吳語太湖片 ) or Northern Wu ( 北部吳語 ) is a Wu Chinese language spoken in much of the southern part of the province of Jiangsu , including Suzhou , Wuxi , Changzhou , the southern part of Nantong , Jingjiang and Danyang ; the municipality of Shanghai ; and the northern part of Zhejiang province, including Hangzhou , Shaoxing , Ningbo , Huzhou , and Jiaxing . A notable exception is the dialect of the town of Jinxiang, which is a linguistic exclave of Taihu Wu in Zhenan Min -speaking Cangnan county of Wenzhou prefecture in Zhejiang province. Speakers in regions around Taihu Lake and Hangzhou Bay , are the largest population among all Wu speakers. Taihu Wu dialects such as Shanghainese, Shaoxing and Ningbo are mutually intelligible even for L2 Taihu speakers.
4-541: Linguistic affinity has also been used as a tool for regional identity and politics in the Jiangbei and Jiangnan regions. While the city of Yangzhou was the center of trade, flourishing and prosperous, it was considered part of Jiangnan, which was known to be wealthy, even though Yangzhou was north of the Yangzi River . Once Yangzhou 's wealth and prosperity were gone, it was then considered to be part of Jiangbei,
8-871: Is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Jiangbei region Physiographic macroregions of China is a term suggested by an American anthropologist G. William Skinner as a subdivision of China Proper into nine areas according to the drainage basins of the major rivers and other travel-constraining geomorphological features. They are distinct in terms of environment, economic resources, culture and more or less interdependent histories with often unsynchronized developmental macrocycles. They were described in Skinner's landmark essays in The City in Late Imperial China . Skinner and his school maintain that prior to modernization, transportation
12-749: The "backwater". After Yangzhou was removed from Jiangnan, many of its residents switched from Jianghuai Mandarin , the dialect of Yangzhou, to Taihu Wu dialects. In Jiangnan itself, multiple subdialects of Wu competed for the position of prestige dialect. In 1984, around 85 million speakers are mutually intelligible with Shanghainese . Taihu Wu varieties tend to preserve historical voiced initials. The number of phonemic vowels can reach numbers higher than that of some Germanic languages . Taihu Wu varieties typically have phonemic 7-8 tones, though some can go as high as 12 or as low as 5, and they all have highly complex tone sandhi . Northwestern Wu Northern Zhejiang This Sino-Tibetan languages -related article
16-481: Was largely constrained by terrain and the physiographic macroregions are a close approximation for the socioeconomic macroregions of 19th-century China. The macroregions are defined by Skinner as follows: Modern provinces of Xinjiang , Tibet , Qinghai and a larger part of Inner Mongolia are not considered by Skinner's scheme. According to Skinner's analysis, the 20th century China excluding Inner Asia has 9 socioeconomic macroregions with cores not changed from
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