ABSTRACT
As narrated in Chapter 7, Chinese languages fall into seven distinct groups, and of these seven, we will only choose one of them to discuss in depth—the Mǐn, spoken in Fújiàn province on the southeast coast of the People's Republic of China. While every language tradition has its own story, the choice of studying one in the Fújiàn province may be ideal for our purposes since it shows a different, less known kind of Chinese tradition far from the center. The area possesses many little-known minority races as well as a long and colorful history of small kingdoms that were different but no less impressive than those of the North (CIESIN 2008). For example, one little known fact is that Southern Mǐn, or Mǐnnánhuà, is totally unintelligible to Standard Mandarin or Pǔtōnghuà and contains under its wing a larger array of languages and cultures. As previously recounted (Chapter 7), although the Fujianese speak different languages, which are more different than the romance languages of Europe, for the idea of “unity” they are considered as part of the deceptively simple and monolithic term hànrén, 漢人 (literally, the Han Chinese) of China. 2
