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Article published In:
Asia-Pacific Language Variation
Vol. 8:1 (2022) ► pp.32–71

Regional dialect leveling in Mandarin Chinese

The case of locative variation in the Chengdu dialect

| University of Pennsylvania

This paper studies the variation that stems from language contact between the suffix ‑tou, a locative marker in the Chengdu dialect spoken in Southwest China, and its standard Chinese counterpart ‑mian. The data are drawn from sociolinguistic interviews with 40 native speakers of the Chengdu dialect. It is shown that the standard Chinese form ‑mian has outnumbered ‑tou in terms of occurrence, suggesting a change in progress over apparent time that essentially involves a dialect leveling that results from language standardization and contact-induced convergence. Meanwhile, the two variants undergo certain stylistic reallocation and begin to serve new socio-stylistic roles. To our knowledge, this is the first study that systematically investigates the variation of Chinese locatives.

Keywords: Chengdu Mandarin, locative markers, dialect leveling, reallocation, morphosyntactic variation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Chengdu and its language: The social and linguistic background
  • 3.The envelope of variation: Chinese locative markers ‑tou and ‑mian
  • 4.An apparent-time study of (-tou, -mian) variation
    • 4.1Speakers
    • 4.2Data collection
      • 4.2.1Sociolinguistic interview
      • 4.2.2Picture description
      • 4.2.3Question-answering pairs
      • 4.2.4Questionnaire on language attitude
    • 4.3Coding and data analysis
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Change over time and the effects of gender and grammatical function on the change of ‑tou rate
    • 5.2Change of contextual style effect over time
    • 5.3Educational effect on the change of ‑tou rate
    • 5.4The role of language attitude
  • 6.Discussion
    • 6.1Change in progress vs. age-grading
    • 6.2Dialect-to-standard convergence
    • 6.3Morphological reallocation as a result of dialect contact
    • 6.4Gender dynamics in grammatical function
    • 6.5Gender dynamics in language attitude
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 14 February 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/aplv.20004.li
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