1887
Volume 2, Issue 2
  • ISSN 2215-1354
  • E-ISSN: 2215-1362
USD
Buy:$35.00 + Taxes

This paper presents the first sociophonetic study of Cantonese vowels using sociolinguistic interview data from the Heritage Language Variation and Change in Toronto Corpus. It focuses on four allophones [iː], [ɪk/ɪŋ], [uː], and [ʊk/ʊŋ] of two contrastive vowels /iː/ and /uː/ across two generations of speakers. The F1 and F2 of 30 vowel tokens were analyzed for these four allophones from each of 20 speakers ( = 600 vowel tokens). Results show inter-generational maintenance of allophonic conditioning for /iː/ and /uː/ as well as an interaction between generation and sex such that second-generation female speakers have the most retracted variants of [ɪk/ɪŋ] and the most fronted variants of [iː]. This paper will discuss three possible explanations based on internal motivation, phonetic assimilation, and phonological influence. This will illustrate the importance of multiple comparisons (including inter-generational, cross-linguistic, and cross-community) in the relatively new field of heritage language phonology research.

Loading

Article metrics loading...

/content/journals/10.1075/aplv.2.2.02tse
2017-03-24
2026-07-12
Loading full text...

Full text loading...

References

  1. Bauer, Robert S. , & Benedict, Paul K.
    (1997) Modern Cantonese phonology. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
    [Google Scholar]
  2. Bauer, Robert S. , Cheung, Kwan-hin , & Cheung, Pak-man
    (2003) Variation and merger of the rising tones in Hong Kong Cantonese. Language Variation and Change, 15(2), 211–225.
    [Google Scholar]
  3. Boersma, Paul , & Weenink, David
    (2014) Praat: Doing phonetics by computer (Version 5.4.02) [Computer program]. RetrievedDecember 14, 2014fromwww.praat.org/
  4. Chang, Charles B. , Yao, Yao , Haynes, Erin F. , & Rhodes, Russell
    (2011) Production of phonetic and phonological contrast by heritage speakers of Mandarin. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 129(6), 3964–3980. doi: 10.1121/1.3569736
    https://doi.org/10.1121/1.3569736 [Google Scholar]
  5. Clarke, Sandra , Elms, Ford , & Youssef, Amani
    (1995) The third dialect of English: Some Canadian evidence. Language Variation and Change, 7(2), 209–228. doi: 10.1017/S0954394500000995
    https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954394500000995 [Google Scholar]
  6. Godson, Linda
    (2004) Vowel production in the speech of western Armenian heritage speakers. Heritage Language Journal, 2(1), 1–26.
    [Google Scholar]
  7. Hoffman, Michol F.
    (2010) The role of social factors in the Canadian vowel shift: Evidence from Toronto. American Speech, 85(2), 121–140. doi: 10.1215/00031283‑2010‑007
    https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-2010-007 [Google Scholar]
  8. Hoffman, Michol F. , & Walker, James A.
    (2010) Ethnolects and the city: Ethnic orientation and linguistic variation in Toronto English. Language Variation and Change, 22(1), 37–67. doi: 10.1017/S0954394509990238
    https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954394509990238 [Google Scholar]
  9. Hsu, Madeline Y.
    (2000) Dreaming of gold, dreaming of home: Transnationalism and migration between the United States and South China, 1882–1943. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  10. Johnson, Daniel E.
    (2009) Getting off the GoldVarb standard: Introducing Rbrul for mixed-effects variable rule analysis. Language and Linguistics Compass, 3(1), 359–383.
    [Google Scholar]
  11. Kang, Yoonjung , & Nagy, Naomi
    (2012) VOT merger in heritage Korean in Toronto. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Linguistic Association. Available fromwww.yoonjungkang.com/uploads/1/1/6/2/11625099/kangnagy_2012_vot_cla.pdf
    [Google Scholar]
  12. Labov, William
    (1994) Principles of linguistic change, volume 1: Internal factors. Oxford, UK; Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
    [Google Scholar]
  13. Labov, William , Ash, Sharon , & Boberg, Charles
    (2006) The atlas of North American English: Phonetics, phonology and sound change. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
    [Google Scholar]
  14. Lau, Chun-fat
    (2003) Labovian principles of vowel shifting revisited: The short vowel shift in New Zealand English and Southern Chinese. InBarry J. Blake & Kate Burridge (Eds.), Historical Linguistics 2001: Selected Papers from the 15th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Melbourne, 13–17 August 2001 (pp.293–301). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi: 10.1075/cilt.237
    https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.237 [Google Scholar]
  15. Lee, Thomas
    (1983) The vowel system in two varieties of Cantonese. UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics, 57, 97–114.
    [Google Scholar]
  16. Li, Peter S.
    (2005) The rise and fall of Chinese immigration to Canada: Newcomers from Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of China and mainland China, 1980–2000. International Migration, 43(3), 9–32.
    [Google Scholar]
  17. Man, Evelyn Y.
    (2006) First language use and language behavior of Chinese students in Toronto, Canada. InKimi Kondo-Brown (Ed.), Heritage language development: Focus on East Asian immigrants (pp.209–241). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
    [Google Scholar]
  18. Matthews, Stephen , & Yip, Virginia
    (2011) Cantonese: A comprehensive grammar. London: Routledge.
    [Google Scholar]
  19. Mok, Peggy K. , Zuo, Donghui , & Wong, Peggy W. Y.
    (2013) Production and perception of a sound change in progress: Tone merging in Hong Kong Cantonese. Language Variation and Change, 25(3), 341–370.
    [Google Scholar]
  20. Montrul, Silvina A.
    (2008) Incomplete acquisition in bilingualism: Re-examining the age factor. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
    [Google Scholar]
  21. Nagy, Naomi
    (2011) A multilingual corpus to explore variation in language contact situations. Rassegna Italiana Di Linguistica Applicata, 43(1–2), 65–84.
    [Google Scholar]
  22. Polinsky, Maria
    (2011) Heritage languages. InMark Aronoff (Ed.), Oxford bibliographies in linguistics [online resource]. doi: 10.1093/obo/9780199772810‑0067
    https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780199772810-0067 [Google Scholar]
  23. Polinsky, Maria , & Kagan, Olga
    (2007) Heritage languages: In the “Wild” and in the classroom. Language and Linguistics Compass, 1(5), 368–395. doi: 10.1111/j.1749‑818X.2007.00022.x
    https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-818X.2007.00022.x [Google Scholar]
  24. Roeder, Rebecca , & Jarmasz, Lidia-Gabriela
    (2010) The Canadian shift in Toronto. The Canadian Journal of Linguistics, 55(3), 387–404. doi: 10.1353/cjl.2010.0013
    https://doi.org/10.1353/cjl.2010.0013 [Google Scholar]
  25. Ronquest, Rebecca E.
    (2013) An acoustic examination of unstressed vowel reduction in Heritage Spanish. InChad Howe, Sarah E. Blackwell, & Margaret Lubbers Quesada (Eds.), Selected proceedings of the 15th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium (pp.157–171). Available fromwww.lingref.com/cpp/hls/15/paper2882.pdf
    [Google Scholar]
  26. Siemiatycki, Myer , Rees, Tim , Ng, Roxana , & Rahi, Khan
    (2003) Integrating community diversity in Toronto: On whose terms?InPaul Anisef & C. Michael Lanphier (Eds.), The world in a city (pp.373–456). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  27. Sloetjes, Han , & Wittenburg, Peter
    (2008) Annotation by category – ELAN and ISO DCR. InProceedings of the sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2008), 816–820. Available fromwww.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/
    [Google Scholar]
  28. Statistics Canada
    (2012) Visual Census 2011, Ottawa. RetrievedJanuary 1, 2015, fromwww12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2011/dp-pd/vc-rv/index.cfm?Lang=eng
  29. Stevens, Kenneth N. , & House, Arthur S.
    (1963) Perturbation of vowel articulations by consonantal context: An acoustical study. Journal of Speech & Hearing Research, 6(2), 111–128.
    [Google Scholar]
  30. Taylor, Bill
    (2007, December30). The language quilt: From irregular stitching, an ongoing work of art. The Toronto Star, p. ID06.
    [Google Scholar]
  31. Thomas, Erik , & Kendall, Tyler
    (2007) NORM: The vowel normalization and plotting suite (Version 1.1) [Computer program]. RetrievedDecember 14, 2014fromncslaap.lib.ncsu.edu/tools/norm/
  32. Thompson, Richard H.
    (1989) Toronto’s Chinatown: The changing social organization of an ethnic community. New York: AMS Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  33. Yue-Hashimoto, Oi-kan
    (1972) Phonology of Cantonese. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  34. Zee, Eric
    (2003) Frequency analysis of the vowels in Cantonese from 50 male and 50 female speakers. InM. J. Solé, D. Recasens, & J. Romero (Eds.), Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (pp.1117–1120). Available fromhttps://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/icphsproceedings/ICPhS2003/papers/p15_1117.pdf
    [Google Scholar]
/content/journals/10.1075/aplv.2.2.02tse
Loading
/content/journals/10.1075/aplv.2.2.02tse
Loading

Data & Media loading...

This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was successful
Invalid data
An Error Occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error