The Harbin dialect is a variety of Mandarin Chinese spoken in and around the city of Harbin

Harbin

Harbin ; Manchu language: , Harbin; Russian: Харби́н Kharbin ), is the capital and largest city of Heilongjiang Province in Northeast China, lying on the southern bank of the Songhua River...

, the capital of Heilongjiang

Heilongjiang

For the river known in Mandarin as Heilong Jiang, see Amur River' is a province of the People's Republic of China located in the northeastern part of the country. "Heilongjiang" literally means Black Dragon River, which is the Chinese name for the Amur. The one-character abbreviation is 黑...

 province.

Characteristics

Harbin dialect is phonologically close to the Standard Mandarin

Standard Mandarin

Standard Chinese or Modern Standard Chinese, also known as Mandarin or Putonghua, is the official language of the People's Republic of China and Republic of China , and is one of the four official languages of Singapore....

 language, but the dialect itself carries with it strong cultural and regional connotations.

Vocabulary

The vocabulary of Harbin Dialect is different from Standard Mandarin for two reasons. One of the sources of the distinct lexical features of the Harbin dialect is the area's colonial Russia

Russia

Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...

n influence. The Russian colonial period started in the 1900s, which marked the start of the influx of large amounts of Russian vocabulary, especially neologisms created in Europe and Russia that had never existed in Mandarin. The second source of lexical difference, which is common to all Northeastern Mandarin dialects, is the influence of the area's Manchuria

Manchuria

Manchuria is a historical name given to a large geographic region in northeast Asia. Depending on the definition of its extent, Manchuria usually falls entirely within the People's Republic of China, or is sometimes divided between China and Russia. The region is commonly referred to as Northeast...

n heritage and ancestry. For exact details about the distinctive traits of Northeastern Mandarin, refer to Northeastern Mandarin

Northeastern Mandarin

Northeastern Mandarin is the dialect of Mandarin Chinese spoken in what historically was Manchuria. It is very similar to the Beijing dialect upon which Standard Chinese is based.-Geographical spread:...

.