Foreign influence on Cantonese new generation’s language production -- /tsh/ as an example Yizhou LAN, City University of Hong Kong Cantonese is a dialect of Chinese with remarkable recent changes brought by the younger generation (the 20s), born in roughly 1990-2000. Recent studies show that both segmental (e.g., the merge between /n/ and /l/ (Yang, 2013)) and supra-segmental (e.g., tone merging between tone 2 and tone 4 (Zhang et al., 2011, Mok, er al, 2013)) changes had taken place in Cantonese. Apart from the sound change within Cantonese itself, could it be probable that this dialect can accommodate foreign influences as well? In this study, we found that the new generation (young college students in around their 20s) has been using a different variety of alveolar affricate /tsh/, producing it as the post-alveolar laminal affricate [tʃ]. Participants were thirty speakers in three age groups, namely 20s, 30s and 40s (mean age=25.5, 37.4 and 41.6, std<3.506). They were asked to read aloud 150 character tokens with /tsh/ sound in a carrier sentence. Tokens were analyzed for spectral data using Praat and were judged by three phonetically-trained Cantonese speakers of their phonetic quality. It was found that only the 20s showed significantly more /tʃ/ sound tokens. Interestingly, such sounds only occur after vowels of /ɔ/ and /u/, which are all back vowels (see Table 1). However, the /tsh/sound remains less changed or even unchanged in vowels of /i/, /y/, /ɛ/, and /a/.
Table 1. Percentage of full /tsh/ tokens pronounced by three age groups, perceived by three phonetically-trained persons.
The phonetic reality of the newly found realization of the /tsh/ phoneme is a post-alveolar sound, as seen in the spectrogram where the noise frequency is significantly lower than the control sounds' /s/. The results have shown that the new sound is an allophone in the Cantonese inventory for the 20s generation. It is argued that this may be driven by speakers’ gestural economic strategy to approximate these two sounds. The backward movement of Tongue Body in the alveolar post-alveolar change is in accordance with the backward movement of Tongue Body in back vowels, hence the biological inclination of this change. Since the Cantonese phonological inventory contains no post-alveolar sounds in
general, and that the Chinese dialectal system is rare of laminal post-alveolar affricates, at least we could say that there is no ground for this sound to evolve upon existing Cantonese sounds. Therefore it is reasonable to assume that this sound has entered Cantonese by foreign influence. The finding is remarkable because there are few, if any, cases where a foreign language can influence a native language purely in phonology, not only simply borrowed lexical items such as loan words. One reason might be the social drive for the younger generation to acculturate to the west may had hoisted this sound as a more socially accepted norm in the peer group than the conventional /tsh/. References Pavlenko, A. (2000). L2 Influence on L1 in Late Bilingualism. Issues in Applied Linguistics, 11(2), 175-205. Zhang, C., Peng, G., & Wang, W. S. (2011). Inter-talker Variation as a Source of Confusion in Cantonese Tone Perception. Proceedings of ICPhS XVII, 2276-2279. Yang, C. (2013). Predicting language change, paper presented at the CUHK linguistic seminar. Mo, P. P., Zuo, D., & Wong, P. W. (2013). Production and perception of a sound change in progress: Tone merging in Hong Kong Cantonese. Language Variation and Change, 25(03), 341-370.