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I have encountered a group of tourists recently and I had a chance to listen them speak.
They spoke some chinese dialect as I can conclude. I don't know what it was exectly but I'm really interested in knowing.

Ok. They used a lot of sha, shy and shu sounds, almost NONE explosive consonants, and their speach was flowing very smoothly, kinda sounded to me like a drunk person would talk - one sound flowing into another without stops.

I can't tell anything more, but maybe someone can guess what dialect or language it is? I know there's _too_ little information, but there's no harm in asking, right?

Far too little information. That description fits something akin to 3/4 chineses!

What do you mean by explosive consonants? Do you mean aspirated stops, or what

We could perhaps figure it out by elimination.

I'll start with the easiest one: did you hear any retroflexes and/or sounds curiously similar to an American /r/?

Wattmann wrote:Far too little information. That description fits something akin to 3/4 chineses!

Yes... I understand that, but as I said there's no harm in asking, so maybe someone has an idea, or at least could point me into right direction.
As I said I found this dialect very interesting and I would like to learn more about it, but the only way to do it is to first - understand what dialect it is

Theta wrote:What do you mean by explosive consonants? Do you mean aspirated stops, or what

Yeah, basically stops. But now that you mentioned aspiration I don't remember hearing it, but I could be wrong here as I didn't pay much attention to aspiration at the moment. But there were almost no stops, and they were not very strong.

Ars Lande wrote:We could perhaps figure it out by elimination.
I'll start with the easiest one: did you hear any retroflexes and/or sounds curiously similar to an American /r/?

Not sure about the rest of retroflexes, but there was no /ɽ/ that's 100% certain, also I don't remember hearing /ɻ/. But there was something similar to /ɭ/.


Also, sorry that I'm being too vague...

Just by probability it was most likely Mandarin, Cantonese, Min Nan or Hakka...

Serafín wrote:Just by probability it was most likely Mandarin, Cantonese, Min Nan or Hakka...

It was not mandarin, that's for sure, as I can easily distinguish mandarin. But for the rest... Do you know any places where I can find samples of these dialects. I tried to search youtube for some videos, but found nothing that has just normal speech, mostly songs or some bs

Try wikipedia.
Also, it's Youtube !

Karutoshika wrote:They used a lot of sha, shy and shu sounds, almost NONE explosive consonants, and their speach was flowing very smoothly, kinda sounded to me like a drunk person would talk - one sound flowing into another without stops.

Maybe it's the northeastern dialect(s) of Mandarin.

And Cantonese, Min Nan and Hakka are probably more stop-heavy than Mandarin.

"flowing very smoothly, kinda sounded to me like a drunk person would talk - one sound flowing into another without stops" is definitely not a description of Cantonese, anyway.

Lots of 'sha shy shu' definitely sounds like it could be a dialect of Mandarin.

Here are some youtube clips of different dialects:

Mandarin north eastern (Dalian dialect): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ph68cJgz7ek

Mandarin south western (Sichuan dialect): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8MpfN2W1JE

Mandarin central-ish (Shaanxi dialect): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njUKb95F_bg

Jin (Fengyang): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZbnSLFIqC4

Hakka: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbTmXkNX5L4

Min-nan (Fujian dialect): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULv1iCCR9vQ

Wu (Shanghai dialect): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dD0yEUx-QfE

Xiang (Changsha dialect): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuKaDEzaxSY

Cantonese: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npWlZzSl ... re=related

Taishanese (dialect of Cantonese): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4kwadCilXI

Karutoshika wrote:

Serafín wrote:Just by probability it was most likely Mandarin, Cantonese, Min Nan or Hakka...

It was not mandarin, that's for sure, as I can easily distinguish mandarin.

I've heard Chinese tourists speak Mandarin with all kinds of accents. Standard Mandarin isn't the only one!

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clawgrip wrote:"flowing very smoothly, kinda sounded to me like a drunk person would talk - one sound flowing into another without stops" is definitely not a description of Cantonese, anyway.

Then you study Cantonese and find out all those unreleased stops are actually nearly impossible to hear, even if they seem obvious when speaking English. Was that [saːt̚] or [saː]? [/story of my life...]

Serafín wrote:

clawgrip wrote:"flowing very smoothly, kinda sounded to me like a drunk person would talk - one sound flowing into another without stops" is definitely not a description of Cantonese, anyway.

Then you study Cantonese and find out all those unreleased stops are actually nearly impossible to hear, even if they seem obvious when speaking English. Was that [saːt̚] or [saː]? [/story of my life...]

The thing is, while I have studied very little Cantonese, a lot of my friends in high school spoke Cantonese, and in fact most of the Chinese-speaking people in Toronto spoke Cantonese...I am not familiar with the intricacies of the language, but I certainly know that it is not a smooth-sounding language, especially when compared to Mandarin Chinese, which I hear frequently in Japan. The stops being unreleased may make them hard to differentiate, but they are still quite apparent in the flow of the language.

Nevertheless, I know what you mean. When I studied Khmer, I had trouble differentiating the unreleased final stops as well.

yeah canto is very VERY choppy. downright staccato at times.

aaaachetlapbutlapbatlapbutlapneiaaaaaaaaaah

Kereb wrote:aaaachetlapbutlapbatlapbutlapneiaaaaaaaaaah

Maybe that should be meiaaaaaaaaaah (未啊)

Davoush wrote:Lots of 'sha shy shu' definitely sounds like it could be a dialect of Mandarin.
Here are some youtube clips of different dialects:
...

Oh. Thank you
Now I can tell that it was most likely Dalian dialect. All other seem totally off. But still the way they spoke were slighly different. Maybe it is just because of the topic they were discussing, so some particular words were more prevalent thus creating different feel. Of maybe they were drunk afteral
But from all links that you provided this one fits the best. I'm gonna find some more stuff to compare.

off: ROFLMAO http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npWlZzSldd8 I don't know what they are talking about but it is fun

Asahi wrote:I know quite a number of Chinese Mainlanders who speak Mandarin extremely smoothly, almost without any breaks. It's very possible the dialect you heard was some form of Mandarin.

Yes, it could have been mandarin in that case. But well, I wrote what I heard, and what my impression was at that time. It could have been mandarin, yes. But not "normal" that's for sure.

And mostly the reason why I decided to find out what dialect it was because I was VERY surprised at the way they spoke. It was so smooth that I never heard any chinese dialect even remotely like that. Because it is supposed to be comprised of more or less isolated word-syllables.

Karutoshika wrote: Yes, it could have been mandarin in that case. But well, I wrote what I heard, and what my impression was at that time. It could have been mandarin, yes. But not "normal" that's for sure.

And mostly the reason why I decided to find out what dialect it was because I was VERY surprised at the way they spoke. It was so smooth that I never heard any chinese dialect even remotely like that. Because it is supposed to be comprised of more or less isolated word-syllables.

North-eastern Mandarin dialects do sound a bit more 'flowing' - I think this is because there is a lot of elision going on and they use the neutral tone a lot, but really, north-eastern Mandarin isn't *that* different from Standard Mandarin, after all North-easterners are supposed to speak the closest to standard Mandarin.

Karutoshika wrote:And mostly the reason why I decided to find out what dialect it was because I was VERY surprised at the way they spoke. It was so smooth that I never heard any chinese dialect even remotely like that. Because it is supposed to be comprised of more or less isolated word-syllables.

What? Most Mandarin words are polysyllabic.