Hangzhou dialect

Hangzhounese, or Hangzhou dialect (simplified Chinese: 杭州话; traditional Chinese: 杭州話; pinyin: hángzhōuhuà; Rhangzei Rhwa), is spoken in the city of Hangzhou and its immediate suburbs, but excluding areas further away from Hangzhou such as Xiāoshān (蕭山) and Yúháng (余杭) (both originally county-level cities and now the districts within Hangzhou City). The number of speakers of the Hangzhounese has been estimated to be about 1.2 to 1.5 million. It is a dialect of Wu, one of the Chinese varieties. Hangzhounese is of immense interest to Chinese historical phonologists and dialectologists because phonologically, it exhibits extensive similarities with the other Wu dialects; however, grammatically and lexically, it shows many Mandarin tendencies.

Classification

Hangzhounese is classified as a dialect of Wu Chinese, although some western linguists claim Hangzhou is a Mandarin Chinese dialect.

Richard Vanness Simmons, a professor of Chinese at Rutgers University in New Jersey, USA, claims that the Hangzhou dialect, rather than being Wu as it was classified by Yuen Ren Chao, is a Mandarin dialect closely related to Jianghuai Mandarin. Hangzhou dialect is still classified under Wu. Chao had developed a "Common Wu Syllabry" for the Wu dialects. Simmons claimed that had Chao compared Hangzhou dialect to the Wu syllabary and Jianghuai Mandarin, he would have found more similarities to Jianghuai. Jianghuai Mandarin shares an "old literary layer" as a stratum with southern dialects like Minnan, Hakka, Gan, and Hangzhou dialects, which it does not share with Northern Mandarin. Sino Vietnamese also shares some of these characteristics. The stratum in Minnan specifically consist of Zeng group and Geng group's "n" and "t" finals when an "i" initial is present.

Hangzhou

Hangzhou ([xǎŋʈʂóʊ]), formerly romanised as Hangchow, is the capital and largest city of Zhejiang Province in Eastern China. It sits at the head of Hangzhou Bay, which separates Shanghai and Ningbo. Hangzhou grew to prominence as the southern terminus of the Grand Canal and has been one of the most renowned and prosperous cities in China for much of the last millennium, due in part to its beautiful natural scenery. The city's West Lake is its best-known attraction.

Hangzhou is classified as a sub-provincial city and forms the core of the Hangzhou Metropolitan Area, the fourth-largest metropolitan area in China. During the 2010 Chinese census, the metropolitan area held 21.102 million people over an area of 34,585 km² (13,353 sq mi). Hangzhou prefecture had a registered population of 8,892,000 and the built-up area (including the 9 urban districts and the Keqiao and Yuecheng districts of Shaoxing) held 8,874,348.

In September 2015, Hangzhou was awarded the 2022 Asian Games. It will be the third Chinese city to play host to the Asian Games after Beijing 1990 and Guangzhou 2010. On November 16, 2015, President Xi Jinping announced that Hangzhou would host the eleventh G-20 summit on September 4–5, 2016.