Abstract

Research on dialect contact often frames lexical shifts under pressure from dominant standard or prestige varieties as unidirectional replacement: supra-local forms spread and inherited local vocabulary recedes. This article re-examines that model through Northern Shaanxi Jin, a group of Jin varieties in long-term vertical contact with Standard Mandarin. The analysis draws on structured wordlists, contextual elicitation, an 810 min corpus of spontaneous speech, and a supplementary apparent-time response task with 38 younger speakers. Four domains are examined in detail: weather expressions, the hou (猴) diminutive network, the leng (冷)/liang (凉) temperature contrast, and the generalized classifier ge (个). The corpus and elicited data show that Mandarin-aligned forms have expanded, especially in reportive, institutional, cross-dialectal, and younger-peer settings. These forms, however, do not displace inherited lexical resources along a single trajectory. Local forms remain active in fixed weather and customary expressions, tactile distinctions, address and idiomatic uses, and routine nominal quantification. This pattern is analyzed as lexical stratification supported by semantic reallocation: sustained contact redistributes overlapping forms across semantic ranges, constructional environments, and interactional settings rather than producing uniform lexical replacement.

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