1. Background Information about Wuhan Dialect
During the upcoming 14 weeks, I decided to work on an archetype of Wuhan Dialect which is a typical branch of Guan dialects in mid-west China. Before I start, I’d like to briefly introduce the classification of dialects in China in general. As many linguists ascribe Chinese as Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family, we actually have a more detailed variation of regional dialects.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_sinitic_dialect_-_English_version.svg
Geographic distribution of Sinitic language families
In traditional classification, we have seven subgroups of regional dialects, including Guan (Mandarin or Beifanghua), Gan (Jiangxinese), Kejia (Hakka), Min (Kokkien and Taiwanese),Wu (e.g. Shanghai variants), Xiang (Hunanese), Yue (Cantonese and Taishanese variants). Among the seven subgroups, Mandarin is widely accepted by foreigners as “Putonghua” or standard Chinese. However, there are still very unique lexical and phonological features in the wide “Mandarin” concepts. According to Wurm et al.（1987），there are eight subgroups in Mandarin Chinese which can be identified based on the Middle Chinese entering tone:
Ø Northeastern variants (closely related to Standard Chinese),
Ø Beijing and environs (The phonological basis of Mandarin standard Chinese),
Ø Ji-lu (Little intelligibility with Beijing Mandarin), Jiao-Liao (not fully intelligibility),
Ø Zhongyuan (Partial intellgibility with Beijing Mandarin),
Ø Lan-yin (Partial intelligibility),
Ø Jiang-Huai (Significant phonological and lexical differences and the intelligibility is limited, largely influences by Wu Dialect),.
Ø Jiang-Huai (Significantly influenced by Wu Chinese)
Ø Southwester (The target dialect I will focus on. Wuhan dialect is one subtype of Southwestern Guan Dialect, which showed obvious phonological, lexical, and tonal changes with very limited intelligibility with Beijing Mandarin.
2. Archetype and its brief intro
Archetype：Wuhan Dialect Sample
As I introduced in section one, the Wuhan Dialect is a unique representative of Mandarin Chinese dialects which have shown limited intelligibility and sharp changes on phonological, lexical and tonal changes. Since it is a pronunciation-based project, I will mainly focus on the phonological and tonal aspects. I record the archetype of Wuhan Dialect from a female native speaker of Wuhan Dialect area who has been living in Wuhan for 24 years. To control the lexical aspect, I asked her to read a poem written in Mandarin Chinese and encourage her to use both original vocabulary, pronunciation and tones in her dialect. (Please refer to Link One).
I choose this archetype for the following reasons. First, since Wuhan Dialect has limited intelligibility to Mandarin, Standard Chinese, I’d like to know the phonological and tonal features which might lead to the intelligibility. Although I learned some of its interesting features from previous textbooks, I still want to confirm and see if there are individual changes due to the change of time and the effect of the Mandarin effects. Second, since I can alway tell that the archetype provider have some difficulty pronouncing some consonants and vowels in Mandarin standard Chinese, I’d like to know how much of the influence is from her dialect. So learning and understanding more of her dialect’s pronunciation will help me to solve this problem. Third, I also like to know some of the prominent differences between my dialect (Jiang-huai) and Wuhan dialect.
Imitation: Take One
3. Differences between the two Samples & Tutorial Plan
As I imitated the archetype, I found it very difficult to catch the tonal changes and consonant features.
3.1 Tones
Both Mandarin Chinese and Wuhan dialect have four tones. Chao (1956) invented a method to describe the distinctive tonal feature with notes. If we figured out the highest pitch as 5 (sol) and the lowest pitch as 1(do), then we can always annotated the tonal feature of certain dialects. In Mandarin Chinese, the four tones can be expressed as 1st tone (55), 2nd tone (35), 3rd tone (214), 4th (51); however in Wuhan dialect, the four tones are 1st tone (55/44), 2nd tone (313). 3rd tone (42) and 4th tone (35). Even though I can mark the differences, I still cannot catch the flow of tones in a spoken form, since actually even the same Chinese character may have difference tones in these two dialects, I still need to find the corresponding pairs via practicing and research.
3.2 Consonants
It is easy to find that there is no retroflex or post-alveolar fricatives in Wuhan dialect, and all its counterparts in Mandarin Chinese/my archetype are assigned to alveolar fricatives. But it is a very preliminary finding, and I think even I tried to pronounce the correct consonant, I can still notice that the target consonant may need more complex transcription or get influenced by its surrounding sounds.
E.g /ʃ、ʂ/—>/s/ /ʒ\ ʐ/—> /z/
In addition, I also find that there is no distinction between phoneme /n/ and /l/. To be more specific, in the archetype, the speaker made a nasalized /l/ in all the phonemes which should be either /n/ or /l/. It took me some time to get used to the nasalized approximant and the disappearance of /n/ in the pronunciation system.
E.g /n、l/—> /l̃/
3.3 Vowels
By comparing my sample and the archetype, I did not find too many differences in vowels. However, I noticed that the archetype don’t distinguish aveolar nasal /n/ and velar nasal /ŋ/ in some nasal vowels, such as /ən/ and /əŋ/, but in some cases, there are still distinction. So I will try to find out the underlying rules for this minimal pairs in the archetype.
3.4 Tutorial Plan
First Stage: 6 weeks
Seen from the comparison, I decide to work on tones, consonants in general and also pay some attention to the nasal vowels and its feature of distribution in the sample. In the following 1-2 weeks, I’d like to first work on the unique tonal changes in the archetype to ascribe certain Chinese characters to corresponding tone sets, since tones are very pivotal variable in Wuhan dialect. Then, I would like to work on voice quality setting to figure our the overall feature of the archetype. In the 4th and 5th week, I will work on the consonants by imitating the archetype, find more academic studies on the retroflex disappearance and their counterparts in Mandarin Chinese to find if there are more accurate transcription. I will also spend 1 week on the vowel section.
Second Stage: 5 weeks
To make my work more oral-like and fluent, I’d like to work on suprasegmental aspect. First, I will learn more about the connected speech in the archetype where there are obvious vowel-drop or retroflection. Then, I will focus on the stress and rhythm in the archetype. Since it is a poem reading, the stress and rhythm may be a little bit different from daily conversation, so I will ask my archetype provider to give another natural speech sample as a reference.
4. To-do List for Week Two
Ø Listen to the archetype and try to transcribe the sample along with tones;
Ø Do some research on the tonal changes in Wuhan dialect by listening to more online samples;
Ø Read some field work on Wuhan Dialect to help my understanding of the tonal features.
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Other References:
Wurm, Stephen Adolphe; Li, Rong; Baumann, Theo; Lee, Mei W. (1987), Language Atlas of China, Longman, ISBN 978-962-359-085-3.
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