The Qingdao dialect is the local dialect of the city of Qingdao and nearby towns, in China's Shandong Province.

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Chinese. (June 2011) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the Chinese article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 338 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Chinese Wikipedia article at [[:zh:青島話]]; see its history for attribution. You should also add the template {{Translated|zh|青島話}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

This article needs additional citations for verification. (March 2018)

Often characterized as requiring a "fat tongue", the Qingdao dialect often adds a /θ/ (English "th") sound to Mandarin's /ʂ/ (Pinyin "sh"), /ɕ/ (Pinyin "x"), and /s/ (Pinyin "s"). It also obliterates many Mandarin tones.

The basic, though not at all universal rule for converting Putonghua to the Qingdao dialect in the pinyin system is that a Mandarin 1 tone will become a Qingdao 3, 2 becomes a 4, 3 becomes 1 and 4 remains four. The Qingdao dialect's 1 tone (Mandarin's 3) also has a drawl to it. (the pinyin tones are: 1ˉ 2ˊ 3ˇ 4ˋ)

There are other phonetic changes from Mandarin to the Qingdao dialect:

• "gá •la" (蛤蜊), the local spicy clam dish, known in Mandarin as "gé •li"
• "hā pì jiū" (喝啤酒), drink beer
• "bài dào •dao" (别叨叨), meaning "no need to say more", but better understood to mean "shut up". Literally translated as "don't blather on".
• "Zhei Ba (窄巴), narrow (窄 is pronounced as Zhei in Qingdao dialect, different from Zhai in Putonghua)
• "Biao (彪)/ Chao (嘲)/ Ban Xian (半仙)/ Yu (愚), stupid ^[1]

Nearly all Qingdao natives can understand Mandarin, but they will often respond in the Qingdao dialect without realizing they are doing so. The Qingdao dialect is not necessarily standardized throughout Qingdao. Different neighbourhoods, from Zhanshan to Xinjiazhuang to Maidao, will have their own variations.

Qingdao's urban dialect words originated between the 1940s and the 1960s. It has slowly developed its own "-isms" and slang over the years.

• Jiaoliao Mandarin