As a dialect of Eastern Min, Manjiang is very distant from major
Chinese varieties such as
Mandarin and
Cantonese, and displays very significant elements of a substratal indigenous language, perhaps belonging to the
Austroasiatic or
Tai–Kadai language families.
Notes
^Min is believed to have split from Old Chinese, rather than Middle Chinese like other varieties of Chinese.[2][3][4]
^Mei, Tsu-lin (1970), "Tones and prosody in Middle Chinese and the origin of the rising tone", Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 30: 86–110,
doi:
10.2307/2718766,
JSTOR2718766