Central China as a Sprachbund – Area-specific Features and Clustering

The Sinitic or Chinese language family comprises ten phylogenetically affiliated groups, namely Mandain/Guanhua, Jin, Wu, Hui, Gan, Xiang, Min, Hakka, Yue, Ping groups, according to the second edition of Language Atlas of China (Zhang 2012). Among these ten varieties, some varieties share more typological features in common than the others, therefore scholars have proposed several linguistic areas within Chinese languages. Hashimoto (1976, 1986), for instance, proposed a north-south divide among Chinese languages by the geographic Qinling-huaihe Line. Later Norman (1988) added a ‘transitional’ zone, which was further elaborated by Chappell (2015) and Szeto (2019) with a five-zone and four-zone analysis. Compared with Northern Sinitic languages, mainly Mandarin varieties, and the Southern Sinitic languages such as Yue, Min, Hakka, Central Sinitic languages have received little attention neither as individual languages nor as a linguistic area, despite the significant divergence and complexity between themselves, which in turn causes the discrepancy among the forementioned analyses.
To address this research gap, we carried out a mixed-method study in both qualitative and quantitative analysis. We dealt with a sample of 31 Central Sinitic languages with both first-hand field work and secondary data collection in the literature, comprising 5 Wu, 7 Hui, 7 Gan, 6 Xiang, 2 Jianghuai Mandarin and 3 Southwestern Mandarin varieties, on 20 typological features, including (1) Number of tones, (2) If Tone *7&8 maintain their difference with tone *1-6 in tonal category, (3) Presence of glottalized final stop, (4) Disposal pretransitive marker, (5) Colexification of Eat Drink and SMOKE, (6) Average number of syllables per chosen lexicon, (7) Colexification of classifier and subordinate marker, (8) Relative order of animal names and its gender, (9) Relative order of adverbs and verbs, (10) Order of IO and DO, (11) Type of comparative, (12) Passive marker, (13) Third person singular form, (14) bu4 不or its cognates as general negative marker, (15) If register distinction only in the ping tonal category, (16) If velars and Alveolars merged before i/y, (17) Forms of STAND, (18) Forms of WALK, (19) Number of syllables for ‘son’, and (20) Number of syllables for ‘house’.
In conclusion, qualitative data demonstrate that Central Sinitic languages share some area-specific features such as an average number of 6 tones, colexification and EAT, DRINK and SMOKE, a head-initial tendency in the relative word order of the verb and adverb, and animal names and gender, and merged velars and alveolars before i/y, whereas quantitative data via clustering analysis (NCSS 2023, v23.0.2) shows significant internal divergence among Central Sinitic languages, in which five clusters can be observed (Figure 1).