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- Volume 5, Issue 1, 2019
Asia-Pacific Language Variation - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2019
Volume 5, Issue 1, 2019
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On intergenerational differences in code-switching among Cantonese people
Author(s): Yunming Shanpp.: 9–27 (19)More LessAbstractAs part of a Chinese government project to document and protect the country’s language resources, this research examines variation in Cantonese spoken in the city of Guangzhou. Over 100 speakers were recorded and the 44 hours of natural discourse were searched for occurrences of code-switching (CS) between Cantonese and Mandarin (C-M) or English (C-E). This paper describes the differences between age-groups in terms of the distribution of different types of CS and its communicative functions. More frequent CS is observed among younger people due to increasing degrees of language contact with Mandarin and English, challenging the maintenance of Cantonese in younger generations.
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Tone mergers in Cantonese
Author(s): Jingwei Zhangpp.: 28–49 (22)More LessAbstractThis study investigates tone mergers in the Cantonese spoken in Hong Kong, Macao, and Zhuhai. From these three cities, 150 native Cantonese speakers were recruited, stratified by gender and age. Acoustic analyses show that Hong Kong Cantonese and Macao Cantonese are actively merging T2[25] and T5[23], T3[33] and T6[22], thus becoming similar to Zhuhai Cantonese in tonal inventory. The social motivations of the changes are attributed to contact among these Cantonese-speaking communities as well as their contact with Putonghua. Responses to a questionnaire on language use in different domains shows the spread of Putonghua in Hong Kong and Macao and seems to correlate with the advance of the tone mergers. More specifically, the spread of Putonghua in Hong Kong seems to be rolling back the effects of Cantonese standardization, as shown by the tone mergers in the youngest generation in Hong Kong.
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A Chinese Australian family’s language use and attitudes
Author(s): Bo Hupp.: 50–66 (17)More LessAbstractThis paper presents a qualitative case study of a Chinese Australian family’s multilingual experiences in Melbourne. Couched in the framework of family language policy, I examine language shift patterns and mother tongue attitudes and analyse reasons and consequences. The findings show that the first generation uses Mandarin for general family communication, while relegating regional Chinese to functions that are, typically, private and familial and for use with older generations. The second generation uses English the most. While their Mandarin use is enhanced through community-based schooling and can be activated depending on the communicative environment, regional Chinese does not play an active role. This nested, hierarchical ecology of language shift with two dominant language constellations causes parental confusion about the children’s mother tongue and problematises grandparent-grandchild communication with a possible decrease of family intimacy.
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Vowel shifts in Cantonese?
Author(s): Holman Tsepp.: 67–83 (17)More LessAbstractThis paper addresses Labov’s principles of vowel chain shifting in Toronto and Hong Kong Cantonese based on sociolinguistic interviews from the Heritage Language Variation and Change in Toronto Project. The analysis is based on normalized F1 and F2 values of 33,179 vowel tokens from 11 monophthongs produced by 32 speakers (8 from Hong Kong, 24 from Toronto). In Toronto, results show retraction of [y] by generation but fronting of [i] by age. In Hong Kong, age is a significant predictor for the lowering of [ɪ], [ʊ], [ɔ], and for the fronting of [ɔ] and [i]. Overall, there is more vowel shifting in Hong Kong than in Toronto and the shifting is consistent with Labov’s Principles.
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Classifier use in Heritage and Hong Kong Cantonese
Author(s): Naomi Nagy and Samuel Lopp.: 84–108 (25)More LessAbstractHeritage language speakers have frequently been reported to have language skills weaker than homeland (monolingual) speakers. For example, Wei and Lee (2001, p. 359), a study of British-born Chinese-English bilingual children’s morphosyntactic patterns (including classifier use), report “evidence of delayed and stagnated L1 development.” However, many studies compare heritage speaker performance to a prescriptive standard rather than to spontaneous speech from homeland speakers. We compare spontaneous speech data from two generations of Heritage Cantonese speakers in Toronto, Canada, and from Homeland Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong. Both groups are similar in a strong preference for general and mass classifiers, and classifier choice being primarily governed by the noun’s number. We observe specialization of go3個 to singular nouns, a grammaticalization process increasing with each generation. The similarity between homeland and heritage patterns replicates previous studies utilizing the same corpus.
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The discovery of the unexpected
Author(s): William Labov
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Tone mergers in Cantonese
Author(s): Jingwei Zhang
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Lexical frequency and syntactic variation
Author(s): Xiaoshi Li and Robert Bayley
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