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Article published In:
Language Contact with Chinese
Edited by Zhiming Bao
[Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 38:1] 2023
► pp. 62–82

Uyghur speakers’ acquisition of Mandarin tones

| Qufu Normal University , China
| Peking University , China

This paper, based on Chinese and Uyghur language contact data collected through fieldwork, discusses in detail Uyghur speakers’ acquisition of Mandarin tones. Uyghur speakers map the three native pitch accents from the Uyghur prosodic system, i.e. level, rise, and fall, to the four Mandarin tones. Initially, this mapping is random. As Chinese proficiency improves, the accent-tone mapping becomes stable. The pace, however, is not uniform for the four tones, due to competition among the three accents to map unto a given Mandarin tone. After accent-tone mapping becomes stable, the mapped accents will gradually approximate towards their target tones in pitch value, again at an uneven pace. This quantitative study reveals a two-step process in the emergence of Uyghur Chinese tones: (1) the phonological step of accent-tone mapping involving tonal categories, (2) the phonetic approximation to tonal target. A Uyghur accent does not map directly to a superficially similar tone based on pitch value.

Keywords: language contact, acquisition of Mandarin tones, Uyghur Chinese, accent-tone mapping, tone approximation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Chinese and Uyghur prosodic systems
    • 2.1A comparison of tone systems in Mandarin and Turpan Chinese
    • 2.2Overview of the prosodic system of Uyghur language
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Materials
    • 3.3Procedure
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1The influence of exposure to competing languages
    • 5.2The stabilization of accent-tone mapping
    • 5.3The approximation of tone value in Uyghur Chinese
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 5 May 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jpcl.00104.du
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