As a dialect of Eastern Min, Manjiang is very distant from major Chinese varieties such as Mandarin and Cantonese, and displays very significant elements of a substratal indigenous language, perhaps belonging to the Austroasiatic or Tai–Kadai language families.
^Mei, Tsu-lin (1970), "Tones and prosody in Middle Chinese and the origin of the rising tone", Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 30: 86–110, doi:10.2307/2718766, JSTOR2718766