Qiyang dialect is a dialect of Xiang Chinese spoken in Qiyang County

Qiyang County

Qiyang County is a county of Hunan, China. It is under the administration of Yongzhou city.-References:Missing...

, Hunan

Hunan

' is a province of South-Central China, located to the south of the middle reaches of the Yangtze River and south of Lake Dongting...

 province.

Tones

Qiyang dialect is quite unusual in that it is reported to have two "double contour" tone

Tone (linguistics)

Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called...

s, high and low fall–rise–fall, or perhaps high fall – low fall and low fall – high fall: the entering tone

Entering tone

A checked tone, commonly known by its Chinese calque entering tone , is one of four syllable types in the phonology in Middle Chinese which are commonly translated as tone. However, it is not a tone in the phonetic sense, but rather describes a syllable that ends in a stop consonant, such as p, t,...

s yin qu (陰去) ˦˨˧˨ (4232) and yang qu (陽去) ˨˩˦˨ (2142). However, phonetically the pitch of a syllable depends on the voicing of the initial consonant, so these are phonemically a single tone. Moreover, the final fall of the yin qu tone is "not perceptually relevant", so it may be that 'dipping' (for yin qu) and 'peaking' (for yang qu) are a sufficient categorization.