Old Xiang, also known as Lou-Shao (娄邵片 / 婁邵片), is a conservative Xiang Chinese language. It is spoken in the central areas of Hunan where it has been to some extent isolated from the neighboring Chinese languages, Southwestern Mandarin and Gan languages, and it retains the voiced plosives of Middle Chinese, which are otherwise only preserved in Wu languages like Shanghainese. See Shuangfeng dialect for details. Mao Zedong was a speaker of Old Xiang with his native Shaoshan dialect.

Old Xiang
Lou-Shao
Native to	People's Republic of China
Region	Hunan
Language family	Sino-Tibetan Sinitic Xiang Old Xiang
Language codes
ISO 639-3	None (mis)
ISO 639-6	louo
Glottolog	luos1238
Linguasphere	79-AAA-eab
Old Xiang is in blue. It is in contact with New Xiang (red), Ji-Xu Xiang (pink), Southwestern Mandarin, Gan, and Yong-Quan Xiang (dark green, south).

Dialects and regions

The Shuangfeng dialect is representative.

References

Further reading

• Zeng, Ting (2020). "The Xiangxiang dialect of Chinese". Illustrations of the IPA. Journal of the International Phonetic Association. 50 (2): 258–281. doi:10.1017/S002510031800035X, with supplementary sound recordings.

This Sino-Tibetan languages-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

• v
• t
• e