Chinese (Mandarin), Phonology of（中文(普通话),音系学）.pdf

1 Chinese (Mandarin), Phonology of (For Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd edition, Elsevier Publishing House) San Duanmu, University of Michigan, MI USA February 2005 Chinese is the first language of over 1,000 million speakers. There are several dialect families of Chinese (each in turn consisting of many dialects), which are often mutually unintelligible. However, there are systematic correspondences among the dialects and it is easy for speakers of one dialect to pick up another dialect rather quickly. The largest dialect family is the Northern family (also called the Mandarin family), which consists of over 70% of all Chinese speakers. Standard Chinese (also called Mandarin Chinese) is a member of the Northern family; it is based on the pronunciation of the Beijing dialect. There are, therefore, two meanings of Mandarin Chinese, one referring to the Northern dialect family and one referring to the standard dialect. To avoid the ambiguity, I shall use Standard Chinese (SC) for the latter meaning. SC is spoken by most of those whose first tongue is another dialect. In principle, over 1,000 million people speak SC, but in fact less than 1% of them do so without some accent. This is because even Beijing natives do not all speak SC. SC has five vowels, shown in Table 1 in IPA symbols (Chao 1968, Cheng 1973, Lin 1989, Duanmu 2002). [y] is a front rounded vowel. When the high vowels occur before another vowel, they behave as glides [j, , w]. [i] and [u] can also follow a non-high vowel to form a diphthong. The mid vowel can change frontness and rounding depending on the environment. The low vowel can change frontness but not rounding. Table 1 Standard Chinese Vowels High i