Review: Diachronic Change and Language Contact: Dialects in South East China
书评: 《历时演变与语言接触  中国东南方言》
Ying Fan, Yongxian Luo 罗永现

Abstract 摘要
Book review: This collection of papers is the product of a conference on historical change and language contact of languages and dialects of Southeast China, held in late 2008 at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, organized by the two editors. The conference brought together some 70 scholars from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan. Twenty papers are included in this volume, with a forward by William Wang, editor of JCL, and a preface by Sameul Cheung outlining the rationale of the volume. The 20 papers deal with a wide range of issues on diachronic change and language contact of languages and dialects of this region. Particular emphasis is laid on the Wu dialect (5 papers) and Cantonese (6 papers); trailed by Min (3 papers) and Hakka (2 papers). There is a paper discussing the genetic affiliation of Shehua (畲話), followed by one on the Hui dialect. A rime change in Wuhan dialect is the subject of the penultimate paper, and the volume concludes with a paper on nasalization of zero-onsets in Chinese dialects. Below we discuss each subtopic in turn.