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Article published In:
Asia-Pacific Language Variation
Vol. 4:2 (2018) ► pp.197–230

A large-scale smartphone-based sociophonetic study of Taiwan Mandarin

| Dartmouth College

This study aims to (i) identify patterns of sociophonetic variation in Taiwan Mandarin, and (ii) evaluate smartphone technologies as a tool for crowdsourcing sociophonetic data. Specifically, this study examines both phonological variables found in prior literature to be highly salient (deretroflexion, labiovelar glide deletion), and variables that are less likely to index social properties (merging of final /n, ŋ/, changes to Tones 2 and 3). Unlike past studies which have primarily relied on smaller sample sizes, I utilize a smartphone application to crowdsource audio recordings across Taiwan; subsequent Rbrul analysis of 292 recordings revealed robust patterns of sociolinguistic variation. Deretroflexion correlates strongly with gender and age, while glide deletion correlates with gender. Nasal final merging and tonal change exhibit less socio-indexical variation, but provide evidence of potential change in progress. These findings suggest that smartphone-based crowdsourcing can complement traditional sociolinguistic fieldwork, and reveal new knowledge about large-scale variation.

Keywords: sociophonetics, dialect variation, Taiwan Mandarin, crowdsourcing, smartphone, application
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Taiwan Mandarin
    • 1.2Variationist studies of TM
    • 1.3Crowdsourcing data for sociolinguistics
  • 2.Methods
    • 2.1App structure and technical development
    • 2.2Lexical-items quiz
    • 2.3Sentence-reading task
    • 2.4Collecting demographic information
      • 2.4.1First language
      • 2.4.2Geographic distribution
      • 2.4.3Age
    • 2.5Manual checking of each recorded sentence
    • 2.6Auditory analysis
    • 2.7Acoustic analysis
    • 2.8Multivariate analysis
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Deretroflexion
    • 3.2Labiovelar glide deletion
    • 3.3Nasal final merging
      • 3.3.1/əŋ/ → [ən] merger
      • 3.3.2/in/ → [iŋ] merger
      • 3.3.3/iŋ/ → [in] merger
    • 3.4Tonal change
  • 4.Discussion
    • 4.1Deretroflexion
    • 4.2Labiovelar glide deletion
    • 4.3Nasal final merging
    • 4.4Tone change
    • 4.5Hypercorrection
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 February 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/aplv.18005.kuo
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