- published: 25 Jan 2014
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Pinghua (simplified Chinese: 平话; traditional Chinese: 平話 Pínghuà, sometimes disambiguated as 廣西平話/广西平话 Guǎngxī Pínghuà) is a variety of Chinese, spoken mainly in parts of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, with some speakers in Yunnan province. Pinghua is a trade language in some areas of Guangxi, where it is spoken as a second language by speakers of Zhuang languages. Some speakers of Pinghua are officially classified as Zhuang, and many are genetically distinct from the Han majority of Chinese speakers. The northern sub-dialect of Pinghua is centered around Guilin and the southern sub-dialect around Nanning. Pinghua has several notable features such as having four distinct checked tones, and using various loan words from Zhuang, such as the final particle "wei" for imperative sentences.
Language surveys in Guangxi during the 1950s noted a lect of Chinese different from those in Guangdong that was previously considered by default as a subdivision of Yue, or Cantonese. Pinghua was designated as a separate dialect from Cantonese by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in the 1980s and since then has been treated as a separate dialect in textbooks and surveys. Pinghua is not at present noted in Ethnologue.