Dialect Island of Changzhou Dialect

Several villages west of Jintan and along the river are non-Wu immigrant islands.

During the Xianfeng period, the Qing army and the Xiang Yong Tuan fought fiercely with the Taiping Army in Wujin, Jintan and Liyang, and the local population dropped sharply. Because Changzhou is located at the dividing line between Wu dialect and northern mandarin area, immigrants from northern mandarin area have entered in large numbers. For example, the original old Jintan dialect in Jintan belongs to Wu dialect. In the tenth year of Xianfeng (1860), the Taiping Army attacked Jintan City for the second time, and fought bloody battles with the Qing army. 1 10 day, there were less than 3,000 people left in the city and less than 30,000 adherents in the county. Since then, due to immigration, the population has risen to 87,024 in Tongzhi four years (1865) and to176,500 in Guangxu ten years (1884). Due to this great change, there is a bilingual phenomenon in Jintan County today. Jintan dialect belonging to Wu dialect and immigrant dialect belonging to Jianghuai Mandarin coexist. In the early Qing Dynasty, the local people must have spoken the old Jintan dialect. Because the Jintan dialect quoted in Duan Yucai's Notes on Shuowen Jiezi in Qing Dynasty and recorded in Gong Zizhen's Notes on Jintan Dialect are the same as the old Jintan dialect now.

After the failure of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, in the west of Wujin (Zhangchenghuangli Xiaxi), there was a Suzhou Fuxi who took relief, land reclamation and land lease as his business, attracting a large number of immigrants from northern Jiangsu, Anhui, Hunan and Hubei to settle down (mostly). In some villages in the north (Xiaohe, Xiaodu, Weicun and Tang Wei), immigrants mainly from Su Beiren settled in Xiatan by the river to reclaim land. In Liyang, immigrants from Henan (Guangshan and Luoshan counties), northern Jiangsu (Xinghua and Gaoyou counties), Zhejiang (Wenzhou), Anhui and Hubei settled in Liyang. They live in hilly areas such as Pingqiao, Yonghe and Shangxing, and in Dangtan polder areas such as Yuqiao, Gudu and Ma Qian, respectively, and use Liyang dialect and local dialect. For example, the county belongs to Wu dialect, and it is said to be "don't" in Jianghuai Mandarin in the northwest countryside. This has formed some foreign dialect islands. They speak two dialects, both in their native languages at home and in the village, and speak Wu with the locals.

Some young people on these immigrant islands can speak Wu.