Abstract
Lio-vai is one of the Southern Min dialects spoken on the island of Hainan. Most Southern Min dialects distinguish between literary and colloquial readings. In the case of Lio-vai, there are two strata in the literary reading, the older layer corresponds to the literary readings of the other Southern Min dialects outside Hainan, and the more recent layer contains some phonological features as found in Cantonese and Mandarin. Because of the introduction of the new literary reading, the old one either becomes obsolete or gets used colloquially. In the latter case, the original colloquial reading then disappears from the speech. This paper gives a detailed account of how these different readings coexist in the same dialect.
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