圣经 晋语 — Jinyu Chinese Scripture Portions (China)
Overview
圣经 晋语 ("Holy Scripture in Jinyu") is the Gospel of Luke in Jinyu Chinese (Shanxi dialect group), published by Beyond Translation under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license and available via YouVersion/Bible.com (ID 4334; abbreviation: CJY). A second Jinyu Chinese version (ID 4436) containing Mark and Luke is also available via YouVersion, published by Dhamma Mate Swe. Beyond Translation's edition follows their Church-Centric Bible Translation model, positioning the local church community as the custodian of the text. Jinyu is notable among Chinese "dialect" groups for its preservation of the medieval entering tone (rùshēng, 入声) — a feature shared with classical Chinese poetry but lost in standard Mandarin.
Language and People
Jinyu Chinese (ISO 639-3: cjy; Chinese: 晋语 Jìnyǔ; also called Jin, Shanxi dialect, or North Mandarin) is a Sino-Tibetan language in the Sinitic branch. Its linguistic status is contested: some scholars classify it as a Chinese dialect, while Ethnologue and most Western linguists treat it as a distinct language due to its preserved entering tone (入声) and significant phonological divergence from standard Mandarin (Putonghua). Jinyu is not mutually intelligible with standard Mandarin for rapid conversational speech.
Jinyu is spoken primarily in:
- Shanxi Province (核心区 core area — virtually the entire province)
- Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (central-southern area, Hohhot region)
- Parts of Hebei, Shaanxi, and Henan provinces (border areas)
Estimated speakers: approximately 45–63 million (Ethnologue: ~47 million L1; some estimates reach 63 million including L2 speakers). This makes Jinyu one of the largest speech communities without a complete Bible translation.
Historical Context
The name "Jinyu" derives from Jìn (晋), the historical name of Shanxi Province — one of China's cradles of civilization and the center of Chinese iron production, coal mining, and merchant culture (Shanxi merchants, jìnshāng 晋商, dominated Chinese trade from the Ming through Qing dynasties). The region's geographic isolation — surrounded by the Taihang Mountains to the east, the Yellow River to the south and west, and the Great Wall to the north — contributed to the preservation of archaic phonological features including the entering tone.
Publishing and Organizations
Published by Beyond Translation (beyondtranslation.org, Arlington, Texas) under the CC-BY-SA 4.0 license. A second Jinyu NT version (YouVersion 4436, Mark + Luke) is published by Dhamma Mate Swe.