Gangou (Chinese:甘沟话;pinyin:Gāngōuhuà) is a variety ofMandarin Chinese that has been strongly influenced byMonguor (Mongol) andAmdo (Tibetan). It is representative ofChinese varieties spoken in ruralQinghai that have been influenced by neighboring minority languages.^[1]

Gangou Mandarin is spoken inMinhe Hui and Tu Autonomous County, at the very eastern tip of Qinghai, an area of theGansu–Qinghai Sprachbund with a large minority population, and where even today Han Chinese were a minority in close contact with their neighbors. Many of the local Han may actually have little Chinese ancestry. The dialect has a number of common words borrowed from Monguor, as well as kinship terms from Monguor and Tibetan. Some syntactic structures, such as anSOV word order and direct objects marked by apostposition, have parallels in Monguor and to a lesser extent Tibetan.

There are also phonological differences fromStandard Mandarin, though it is not clear whether these are shared by local Mandarin dialects not so strongly influenced by minority languages. For example, Standardy andw are pronounced[z] and[v], soyi 'one' is[zi] whilewu 'five' andwang 'king' are[vu] and[vã]. There is no distinction between final-n and-ng: both are replaced by a nasal vowel. The consonants represented byj, q, x in pinyin do not exist; they are replaced byz, c, s beforei^[2] and byg, k, h elsewhere, at least in some cases reflecting their historical origin. Thus 解jiě 'untie' is pronouncedgai, likeCantonesegaai², and 鞋xié 'shoe' is pronouncedhai, like Cantonesehaai⁴.^[3]

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