ABSTRACT
With a history spanning over 1,500 years, Nantong Chinese embodies a rich culture and a long tradition of oral literature, including nursery rhymes, fairy tales, folk songs, epic poems and a local opera. There are present-day television programs in Nantong Chinese as well. When this oral literature is committed to a written form, many of the phonetic, lexical and syntactic features of Nantong Chinese that have been discussed in previous chapters become more evident. For this reason, and to provide a more vivid and tangible picture of Nantong Chinese in folk literature, this chapter offers an assortment of several genres of oral literature in Nantong Chinese. Each piece is presented using the Nantong pinyin system with English translation. A glossary is provided at the end of the chapter for all the pieces.
