A Sociophonetic Study on Tonal Variation of the Wúxī and Shànghǎi Dialects

This study describes the role of social, stylistic and linguistic factors in tonal variation and change in the Wú dialects, in the context of rapid urbanization in China. The study is conducted in the framework of urban language studies, combining insights and techniques from sociolinguistics, phonetics and dialectology and is one of the first sociophonetic studies that focus on tonal variables.

80 native speakers of the Shànghǎi dialects (from the urban and three suburban areas) and 40 native speakers of the Wúxī dialects (form the urban and one suburban area) participated in our study. Speakers were stratified for gender and age (young: 18-23; old: 60+). Four types of speech data were elicited (all reading tasks): (1) monosyllablic morphemes, (2) bisyllabic words, (3) a short text and (4) minimal pairs. Of these data, all monosyllables originally carrying a lax tone of the Yáng register in Middle Chinese, i.e., T2, T4 or T6, and bisyllables initialed with T2, T4 or T6 were investigated for their actual tonal realizations in relation with internal, external and extra-linguistic factors. Mixed-effects models were used to identify the significant factors constraining tonal variations.

In citation tones, four relevant variation patterns were detected: (1) the merger of lax tones in the Yáng register, (2) contour loss, (3) DelayRising and (4) the borrowing of PTH tone. In sandhi tones, two variation patterns were identified: (1) contour loss of the sandhi pattern and (2) the borrowing of /55.31/ pattern from the Yīn register. The merger of lax tones in the Yáng register and DelayRising were found to be internally triggered, while contour loss and tone borrowings in both citation tone and tone sandhi were found to be the externally triggered variation. Suburban dialects are more likely to show the convergence towards urban dialects in the internally triggered variation, while they show divergence with the urban dialects in the externally triggered variation. Two internal motivations for tonal variation are also identified: the principle of economic effort causes the phonetic reduction of tonal shapes, while the tonal convergence causes the phonemic reduction.

Besides the findings from sociolinguistics and Chinese dialectology, this study also resolved two methodological issues in tonal acoustic analyses: (1) the domain of tone in the Wú dialects includes three portions: the (optional) prenuclear onglide, the nucleus and the (optional) final nasal consonant (2) the best tone normalization procedure is a semitone transformation relative to each speaker’s average pitch in Hz.