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Variation in Second and Heritage Languages: Crosslinguistic perspectives
Edited by Robert Bayley, Dennis R. Preston and Xiaoshi Li
[Studies in Language Variation 28] 2022
► pp. 97–126

Chapter 5
What can Cantonese heritage speakers tell us about age of acquisition, linguistic dominance, and sociophonetic variation?

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For many individuals, the first acquired language is also the linguistically dominant language, but what are the implications for sociophonetic variation if the linguistically dominant language is a second acquired childhood language, as is the case for many heritage speakers? This chapter addresses two correlates of linguistic dominance on the production of L2-influenced vowels in heritage Cantonese sociolinguistic interview data. Results show that Cantonese Production Score (CPS), an externally measured proficiency proxy, is consistently a better predictor than Ethnic Orientation (a self-reported identity metric) in accounting for speakers who are most likely to produce English influenced vowels. While a distinction between child vs. adult language acquisition remains important, these results highlight linguistic dominance as an interacting factor in sociophonetic variation.

Keywords: sociophonetics, sound change, language contact, Chinese – Yue, bilingualism
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Acquisition and the study of contact-induced sound change
    • Frameworks based on child vs. adult acquisition
    • A framework based on linguistic dominance
  • Background on Toronto heritage Cantonese
    • The social context
    • The Cantonese vowel system
    • Research question
  • Methodology
    • Data and analysis procedures
    • Ethnic orientation (EO) group
    • Cantonese production score (CPS)
  • Results
    • The vowel /y/
    • The vowel /u/
    • R2 for the fixed effects
    • Summary
  • Discussion
  • Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 14 July 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.28.05tse
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