Dialect and Putonghua in Xi’an city Li, Qiong; Wang, Yuying
Journal of Asian Pacific communication,
06/2020, Volume:
30, Issue:
1-2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Abstract
As one of the industrial centers of Western China, Xi’an is undergoing a process in which surrounding “urban villages” are incorporated into the urban area. This paper reports on the
contact ...situation between the Xi’an dialect of Beishan Menkou “urban village” and Mandarin Chinese. Data collection started with
traditional dialect survey methodology which assumes the dialect to be homogeneous and shared across village members. It requires
respondents to read a standard list of Chinese characters. The assumption that the dialect is homogeneous is generally agreed upon
for older generations but is doubtful for the younger generation who are exposed to modern education and modern
life. We therefore stratified the survey across three generations with six informants, a male and female informants for each
generation. The results show that the dialect among the two older generations was still homogeneous and shared, whereas the
youngest generations showed influence of Putonghua on the dialect. This resulted in a new dialect variant “Dialect with Putonghua
features”, which is recognized by urban village members as such. Female respondents generally were conceived of as speaking the
New Dialect more clearly than their male counterparts. We also investigated the impact of the dialect on Putonghua and concluded
that among the younger generation, a form of “Local Putonghua” developed, whereas the accented forms used by older generations are
a variety of intermediate forms of this “Local Putonghua”. The paper further provides details of the changes taking place in the
New Dialect in terms of tones, initials and finals, vocabulary and grammar. Words in local Putonghua were also listed.
In this paper, an automatic dialect identification (ADI) system is proposed by extracting spectral and prosodic features for Kannada language. A new dialect dataset is collected from native speakers ...of Kannada language (A Dravidian language). This dataset includes five distinct dialects of Kannada language representing five geographical regions of Karnataka state. Investigation of the significance of spectral and prosodic variations on five Kannada dialects is carried out. Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs), spectral flux, and entropy are used as representatives of spectral features. Besides, pitch and energy features are extracted as representatives of prosodic parameters for identification of dialects. These raw feature vectors are further processed to get a new derived feature vectors by using statistical processing. In this paper, a single classifier based multi-class support vector machine (SVM) and multiple classifier based ensemble SVM (ESVM) techniques are employed for classification of dialects. The effectiveness and performance evaluation of the explored features are carried out on newly collected Kannada speech corpus, with five Kannada dialects and internationally known standard Intonation Variation in English (IViE) dataset with nine British English dialects. Experimental results have demonstrated that the derived feature vectors performs better when compared to raw feature vectors. However, ESVM technique has demonstrated better performance over a single SVM. Spectral and prosodic features have resulted individually with the dialect recognition performance of 83.12% and 44.52% respectively. Further, the complementary nature of both spectral and prosodic features is evaluated by combining both feature vectors for dialect recognition. However, an increase in dialect recognition performance of about 86.25% is observed. This indicates the existence of complementary dialect specific evidence with spectral and prosodic features. The experiments conducted on standard IViE corpus have shown a higher recognition rate of 91.38% using ESVM. Proposed ADI systems with derived features have shown better performance over the state-of-the-art i-vector feature based systems on both datasets.
What is involved in acquiring a new dialect - for example, when Canadian English speakers move to Australia or African American English-speaking children go to school? How is such learning different ...from second language acquisition (SLA), and why is it in some ways more difficult? These are some of the questions Jeff Siegel examines in this book, which focuses specifically on second dialect acquisition (SDA). Siegel surveys a wide range of studies that throw light on SDA. These concern dialects of English as well as those of other languages, including Dutch, German, Greek, Norwegian, Portuguese and Spanish. He also describes the individual and linguistic factors that affect SDA, such as age, social identity and language complexity. The book discusses problems faced by students who have to acquire the standard dialect without any special teaching, and presents some educational approaches that have been successful in promoting SDA in the classroom.
The disambiguation of similarly-worded alternative questions (altqs) and disjunctive yes-no questions (dynqs) has sparked a debate in English. The debate revolves around which prosodic feature can ...disambiguate them. In Arabic, little attention has been dedicated to how these two types of disjunction question are disambiguated. What adds to the complexity of the disambiguation in Arabic is that Arabic dialects, unlike English, use two disjunctive elements, equivalent to the English or, in altqs and dynqs. In order to replicate Pruitt and Roelofsen’s (2013) English perception study on Arabic, the disambiguating cues pertinent to Arabic need to be used in such a perception study. Hence, a thorough investigation of the general behaviour of disjunctive elements in the literature and in a corpus of eight Arabic dialects is run; based on this investigation, four dialects are selected for further investigation of the prosodic details of their disjunctive questions (Jordanian (JA), Egyptian (EA), Kuwaiti (KA), and Syrian (SA) Arabic) in two production studies. One is analysis of corpus production data in the four dialects, and the other is a production study dedicated to JA. The results of the two production studies indicate that both choice of disjunctive element (ʔaw vs. willa) and choice of contour (late-rise vs. rise-fall) seem to play a role in the disambiguation. So, two perception studies are run to investigate the relative role of each of the cues: one on JA, and one on all four dialects. The results reveal that the choice of contour contributes significantly to a dynq reading in all dialects, and the choice of disjunctive element contributes significantly to the disambiguation in three dialects (JA, EA, and KA). This finding shows that Arabic is ‘like English’ in employing choice of contour in the disambiguation, but it is also different from English in employing another disambiguating cue.
Tafxiːm defines a post-velar place of articulation, under which it may subsume consonantal (C) and vocalic (V) Place features for consonantal and vocalic elements that are the correlates of tafxi:m ...in sounds specified as underlyingly mufaxxama (heavy or dark) sounds in auditory terms (Jackobson,1957), also called post-velars (PVs). A considerable amount of research on tafxi:m in vowels is done on dialects of Arabic of different linguistic backgrounds (Herzallah, 1990; Zawaydeh, 1999; Shahin 2003). However, not much has been done on tafxi:m in the vowels of Mesopotamian Arabic (MA) dialects, the Muslawi Qəltu (MQ) and Baghdadi Gilit (BG) of two different linguistic backgrounds where tafxi:m in vowels is thought to be driven by the dialect background. In the dialects of Arabic including the Mesopotamian sedentary Muslawi Qəltu and Bedouin Baghdadi Gilit dialects under investigation, the post-velars (PVs) represent sounds with two locations for two manners of articulation: the pharyngeals which include the /ʕ/ and the /ħ/, and the uvulars which include the /q/, the /χ/ and /ʁ/. The third group of sounds are the pharyngealised coronals, the so-called emphatics (i.e. heavy or dark). They are represented with two places of articulation. The coronal place as their primary articulation and the pharyngeal place as their secondary articulation. The pharyngealised coronals include sounds with two manners of articulations; that is the stops /tˤ/, and the fricatives /ðˤ/and /sˤ/. They represent the dark or heavy counterparts of the plain stops /t/, /d/, and the plain fricatives /ð/, /s/ respectively (ibid). Tafxi:m in vowels as driven by PV mufaxxama sounds is defined as lowering, retraction, centralisation or as rounding being conditioned by the nature of articulatory feature (constriction) in the trigger PV mufaxxama and is being conditioned by the presence of particular lexemes identified as secondary mufaxxama. However, the featural manifestations of PVs in vowels, and the presence of secondary mufaxxama is phonologically governed by vowel quality and is specific to a particular language or dialect. In this research, it is found that the featural manifestation of tafxi:m are presented both locally and in long domain as backing and backing and rounding in the /i/ and /a/ vowels in Baghdadi Gilit of Bedouin origin with a significant drop in F2 onset in a uvular and pharyngealised PV context conditioned by lexemes identified as secondary PVs (mufaxxama) and are phonologically driven by the dialect background. III On the other hand, tafxi:m is featured as lowering in the /a/ vowel in Muslawi Qəltu of sedentary origin with a significant rise in F1 onset in a uvular context. In MQ, a sedentary vowel feature known as ʔima:la (vowel fronting) of /u/ and centralisation of /i/ vowels occur in domains where it is present as lowering or retraction of /u/ in Gilit. In long / i:, a:, u:/ vowels, tafxi:m is represented as lowering and centralisation with significant lowering of /i:/ and /u:/ in a uvular context in Muslawi Qəltu compared to /a:/ lowering and centralisation in a pharyngeal and pharyngealized context in Baghdadi Gilit. Tafxi:m is also represented as a feature of harmony which is introduced in non-local vowels as /u/ vowel colouring or /a/ backing in Baghdadi Gilit when secondary mufaxxama sounds are present in the same phonological domain.
What is the explanation for the nature, character and evolution of the many different varieties of English in the world today? Which changes in the English language are the legacy of its origins and ...which are the product of novel influences in the places to which it was transported? Roots of English is a groundbreaking investigation into four dialects from parts of northern Britain out of which came the founding populations of many regions in other parts of the world. Sali Tagliamonte comprehensively describes and analyses the key features of the dialects and their implications for subsequent developments of English. Her examination of dialect features contributes substantive evidence for assessing and understanding bigger issues in sociolinguistic theory. Based on exciting new findings, the book will appeal to those interested in dialects, from the Anglophile to the syntactician.
Bilingual speakers are normally aware of what language they are speaking or hearing; there is, however, no widely accepted consensus on the degree of lexical and morphosyntactic similarity that ...defines the psycholinguistic threshold of distinct languages. This book focuses on the Afro-Colombian creole language Palenquero, spoken in bilingual contact with its historical lexifier, Spanish. Although sharing largely cognate lexicons, the languages are in general not mutually intelligible. For example, Palenquero exhibits no adjective-noun or verb-subject agreement, uses pre-verbal tense-mood-aspect particles, and exhibits unbounded clause-final negation. The present study represents a first attempt at mapping the psycholinguistic boundaries between Spanish and Palenquero from the speakers' own perspective, including traditional native Palenquero speakers, adult heritage speakers, and young native Spanish speakers who are acquiring Palenquero as a second language. The latter group also provides insights into the possible cognitive cost of "de-activating" Spanish morphological agreement as well as the relative efficiency of pre-verbal vs. clause-final negation. In this study, corpus-based analyses are combined with an array of interactive experimental techniques, demonstrating that externally-imposed classifications do not always correspond to speakers' own partitioning of language usage in their communities.
