Talk:Northern Min

Requested move

Min Bei → Minbei – correct pinyin spelling rules. —  AjaxSmack  08:05, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

Please discuss at: Talk:Min Nan#Requested move.

Fuzhou?

The Min (linguistics) article says that Min Bei is centered on Fuzhou, but this articles doesn't mention it, and other articles classify the Fuzhou dialect as Min Dong, not Min Bei. Clarification? Badagnani 12:55, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

Minbei language template

If you are a native speaker of Minbei then you can help translate this template into your own language:

mnpIŏ̤ng-ciă ē̤ng-hū gâ̤ mǔ-ngṳ̌ sī Mâing-bă̤-ngṳ̌.
樣隻用戶嗰母語是閩北語。

Edit

For example, here is the template for Mindong:

cdoCī ciáh ê̤ṳng-hô gì mū-ngṳ̄ sê Mìng-dĕ̤ng-ngṳ̄.
茲隻用戶其母語是閩東語。

--Amazonien (talk) 02:53, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

Move discussion in progress

There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:Min Nan which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 18:29, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

Number of speakers

Ethnologue (19th ed.) gives the number of speakers as 10.9 million, and Nationalencyklopedin (2010) gives 11.1 million. However, the population of Nanping prefecture, which includes all the Northern Min area, as well as areas speaking other varieties, was 2.6 million in the 2010 census, so it seems likely that there are fewer than 2 million speakers. Perhaps Ethnologue and Nationalencyklopedin confused it with Eastern Min, which used to be called "Northern Min", or their figure conflates Northern and Eastern Min, even though they also give a separate figure for Eastern Min. Kanguole 19:53, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

Looking at the history in Ethnologue:

• The 12th edition (1992) had a 2-way division of Min:
  • Min Pei (mnp): northeast Fujian, 10,290,000 speakers in China (1984), 10,537,000 worldwide.
  • Min Nan (cfr): southern Fujian, eastern Guangdong, Taiwan, etc, 25,725,000 in China (1984), 49,000,000 worldwide.
• In the 13th edition (1996), they changed to a 5-way division. The above figures were still given in the Min Bei (mnp) entry, but were said to include Min Bei, Min Dong, Min Zhong, and Pu-Xian.
• In the 14th edition (2000), the same figures are still in the Min Bei (mnp) entry, but without the note on what was included. Min Dong (cdo) is described as having 247,000 or more speakers worldwide. (That's 10,537,000 minus 10,290,000, and obviously wrong, as Fuzhou alone has a population of over 4 million.)
• In the 15th edition (2005), the Min Bei (mnp) figures are unchanged, but Min Dong (cdo) is changed to 8,820,252 in China (2000), 9,103,157 worldwide.

So the 14th edition erred in dropping the note, leaving incorrect figures for both Northern Min (Min Bei, mnp) and Eastern Min (Min Dong, cdo). The Eastern Min figure was fixed in the 15th edition, but the Northern Min figure hasn't been. Presumably they were copied by Nationalencyklopedin.

According to this, the Language Atlas of China (1987) gives a figure of 2,191,000, which sounds much more plausible. (I don't have the Atlas to hand.) Kanguole 03:50, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

Checked the Atlas – the figure of 2,191,000 is in the notes to Map B12. Kanguole 11:33, 11 January 2017 (UTC)

The Ethnologue also indicates 15,200 overseas speakers of "Min Pei", in Singapore, speaking Hokchia (Fuqing) and Hokchew (Fuzhou) dialects. These should be part of Eastern Min. Kanguole 16:12, 18 November 2018 (UTC)

English-Min Bei dictionary

There is a dictionary for Min Bei called A Chinese-English Dictionary of the Kien-Ning Dialect: Arranged Alphabetically According to the Kien-Ning Romanized as far as I know there is no online copy, if there is can somebody notify me or add it to this page. Hĭ uông lìng (talk) 09:29, 15 October 2022 (UTC)