ABSTRACT
The territory in which Eastern Mandarin is spoken is very small compared to the ranges of the other three great Mandarin dialects, although the number of its speakers is about the same as that of North-western Mandarin—about 80 million persons. The Eastern Mandarin peoples inhabit an arc that encompasses most of south-central Anhui Province, a northern fragment of Jiangxi Province and the central half of Jiangsu Province. The golden age of Nanjing culture is often termed the Six Dynasties period. The city of Nanjing was often called Jiankang, but it bore other names as well. The language of the Nanjing area was not yet anything that could be specifically identified with present-day Eastern Mandarin. Both Jiangsu and Anhui provinces run somewhat northwest to southeast in a region that is geographically and sociolinguistically split along lines that run from southwest to northeast. Tong-Ru obviously represents a transitional form between Eastern Mandarin and Wu.
