Binary semantics of coconut-banging patterns

There are palm trees everywhere, so I am very happy. I saw some water buffalo and 黄牛 (yellow cows?). It's hot out but not scorching.

I just arrived in Haikou, Hainan to do some fieldwork on some of the hottest topics in linguistic science today. How do jellyfish communicate? How does the growing tourism industry affect the production of the velar approximants of third generation west Hainan banana farmers? How many ways can you say "Gimme a beer, you stupid coconut head!" in Hainanese? And most importantly: is there a "Hanianese"?

I've only been here for about an hour, but so far I've found out a few things.

The guy who picked us up at the airport said that there are six dialects on the island, one of which is thought of as "standard". He found a radio program broadcasting a local opera in the local language, which he said was related to the Southern Min family of languages and dialects. He said he was a native speaker of this language (I didn't ask which dialect). I could tell from the opera that it is a tonal language, like Chinese, but I couldn't catch how many tones there are. It seems to have a more limited set of consonants than Mandarin.

That's all so far.

Science CAB #1

Gabcast! Science CAB #1

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