Note: This is an update of a post from May 2010 that never saw the light of day. It originally included audio, but with the recent passing of my computer, that’s been lost. Still, it’s an interesting topic (to me at least) so I thought better to post than to delete.

I’ve had the fortune these past few weeks while working on a few small projects, mostly for Sinoglot, to come into contact with some languages I’d previously given little thought to. One of those is Gan.

The Gan language 贛語 (Mandarin: Gàn, Gan: Gon) is spoken by around 30 million people, mostly in Jiangxi. It’s also called Jiangxihua 江西话, that is, Jiangxi dialect. It just so happens that I have a friend staying with me, one of my oldest friends in China in fact, who is a native speaker. Being the only one in the apartment willing to talk to me about language any more, we got to talking about 贛語. Anyway she was nice enough to let me record some phrases (unfortunately now lost).

Gan as a language/dialect has an interesting history. It came about after half a million troops were sent to Jiangxi around 220BCE. It’s a creole that mixed Wu, Cantonese and the language of the then Kingdom of Chu. My friend incidentally moved to Guangzhou where she found a good number of words nearly identical in Cantonese. Now, spending the summer here in Shanghai, she’s having a similar experience with a whole new set of words, giving her a fair advantage over some of the other ‘YP’ in the area.

I’m not sure if Gan was ever looked at by Kalgren or Norman or anyone else who worked with earlier Chinese phonetics. It seems to me at least that there might be some value in it.

As I said above, my audio was lost. But, fortunately, there are some rather annoying Youku videos to give you an idea of how it sounds. Or if you’re not into annoying you can try this one. And one more.

Gotta say, sounds much better from an actual person. I’ll try to be better about backups in the future.