Sisyrinchium

The Haikou dialect is a topolect of Chinese and a subvariety of Hainanese spoken in Haikou, the capital of the Hainan province and island of China.

Phonology

The Haikou dialect has the following initials:^[4]

		Labial	Dental	Sibilant	Velar	Glottal
Stop / Affricate	voiceless		t	ts	k	ʔ
Stop / Affricate	voiced implosive	ɓ	ɗ
Nasal		m	n		ŋ
Fricative	voiceless	f		s	x	h
Fricative	voiced	v		z
Lateral			l

The finals are:^[5]

There are also two syllabic nasals, /m̩/ and /ŋ̍/.^[5]

The tone categories (described using Chao tone letters) are:^[5]^[6]

	level	rising	departing	entering
upper	24	213	35	5
lower	21	33		3
lower	21	55ʔ		3

^ Min is believed to have split from Old Chinese, rather than Middle Chinese like other varieties of Chinese.^[1]^[2]^[3]

^ 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, JSTOR 2718766
^ Pulleyblank, Edwin G. (1984), Middle Chinese: A study in Historical Phonology, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, p. 3, ISBN 978-0-7748-0192-8
^ Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin; Bank, Sebastian (2023-07-10). "Glottolog 4.8 - Min". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. doi:10.5281/zenodo.7398962. Archived from the original on 2023-10-13. Retrieved 2023-10-13.
^ Chen (1996), p. 4.
^ ^a ^b ^c Chen (1996), p. 5.
^ Yan (2006), p. 142.

Chen, Hongmai (1996), Hǎikǒu fāngyán cídiǎn 海口方言詞典 [Haikou dialect dictionary], Great Dictionary of Modern Chinese Dialects, vol. 16, Nanjing: Jiangsu Education Press, ISBN 978-7-5343-2886-2.
Yan, Margaret Mian (2006), Introduction to Chinese Dialectology, LINCOM Europa, ISBN 978-3-89586-629-6.