Intergenerational Phonetic Variation in Malaysian Mandarin: A Case Study of the Fuzhou Chinese Community
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54097/cetnn948Keywords:
Experimental Phonetics, Malaysian Mandarin, Intergenerational Phonetic Pattern, Chinese Language Education, Global ChineseAbstract
This study investigates the intergenerational phonetic pattern of Malaysian Mandarin spoken by the Fuzhou community in Sibu, focusing on the acoustic space of Experimental Phonetics. The analysis of 846 syllables produced by six speakers revealed that: (1) the vowel pattern exhibits the creaky voice, frequently accompanied by tone breaks, exhibiting significant differences from Beijing Mandarin; (2) the consonant pattern shows near-complete mergers in the three pairs “z/ts/-zh/ʈʂ/”, “c/tsʰ/-ch/ʈʂʰ/”, and “s/s/-x/ɕ/”, featured the regionally characteristic voiced glottal fricative /ɦ/; (3) Male speakers are less likely to have a creaky voice than female speakers, and the vowel system is more concentrated. The findings indicate that the phonetic patterns of the fourth-generation is more closely aligned with standard Mandarin. In contrast, the third-generation has regional characteristics under the influence of Foochow dialect, and these regional features have remained stable through intergenerational transmission. The paper can provide an empirical basis for exploring the regional characteristics of Global Chinese, and can further reveal the role of mandarin education in phonetic variation in a multilingual environment.
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