Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 July 2022
Hefei Mandarin is a Chinese dialect spoken in Hefei, the capital city of Anhui Province, China, as illustrated in Figure 1. According to The Language Atlas of China (1987), Hefei Mandarin is a sub-branch of Jianghuai Mandarin, i.e. the varieties of Mandarin dialects distributed between the Yangtze River and the Huai River. While its syllable structure is relatively simple, Hefei Mandarin has a rich vowel inventory and various types of rimes, including three contrastive high back vowels /ɯ o ɤ/, non-nasalized vs. nasalized vowels as syllable rimes such as /i/ vs. /ĩ/, and three syllabic consonants [ɹ̩ ɹ̩ʷ ɻ̩] (Li 1936; Meng 1962, 1997; Li 1994, 1997; Wang 1996; Kong 2003, 2004, 2006; Kong & Zhang 2006; Kong, Wu & Li 2019).