The foundation for the unification of Chinese has already come into being. It is none other than the standard form of Modern Chinese with the Beijing phonological system as its norm of pronunciation, Northern dialects as its base dialects, and looking to exemplary modern works in vernacular literary language for its grammatical norms.]
[...] This paper will also discuss the fate of the three speakers' nasal finals, as well as diphthong finals such as ou which, as Chen notes, is realized as monophthongal in certain Wu dialect-affected varieties of pǔtōnghuà, making it relevant to observation of Speaker C's speech (1999: 42). Results and Discussion For each feature of regional pǔtōnghuà that I decided to keep track of, I both counted all the possible instances that a speaker could use an innovative (regional) feature and recorded whether they used the feature or not, or, to measure use of neutral tone, took the frequency of neutral-tone syllables in the entire recording. [...]
[...] For that reason she studied in her room rather than traveling in the street, as she might have done had she chosen the latter option. My impression is that pǔtōnghuà has its own semi-independent standard, nominally based on Beijing speech but which sets out a range of pronunciations that excludes many quite “authentic” kinds of Beijing speech. Most speakers in Beijing are also quite aware of differences between pǔtōnghuà and Beijing speech. Despite speakers' intuitions however, the official definitions stand, without much explanation of just which Beijing speech (or speeches) is acceptable as the basis of pǔtōnghuà, much less why. [...]
[...] This paper discusses how the speech of non-Beijing pǔtōnghuà speakers living in Beijing reflects not only features of their regional variety but also changes made to approximate the standard. It makes some tentative observations about which features the observed speakers changed, and why. Investigation I use “regional variety” to describe the kind of pǔtōnghuà spoken by the people investigated. The term is meant to convey my intent to examine the way people from different geographic regions speak pǔtōnghuà. I asked three speakers, all women aged 20 and third-year undergraduate students at Peking University, to do a relatively simple language task: using a map to give directions in pǔtōnghuà. [...]
[...] Conclusion My basic method of simply examining the recordings I made was barely enough to test my more advanced hypothesis about accommodations made by the students to the speech they encountered in Beijing. I was hoping to hear retroflex endings or the Southerners using more neutral tone, but the fact that I did not shows that I was wrong to think that they would take on such salient features of Beijing speech after living at PKU. Nevertheless, when supplemented with interviews about language history, it became clearer what accommodations a speaker from outside the city makes when they first arrive. [...]
[...] If pǔtōnghuà sounds like Běijīng huà, but so-called “school- girl” dental realizations of palatal consonants, a phenomenon native to Beijing, are without question considered nonstandard, then clearly linguistic, social and/or political forces are at work to make such determinations. These are forces that should be investigated in much more depth and with great care. References Chen, Ping Modern Chinese: History and Sociolinguistics. New York: Cambridge University Press. Irvine, Judith T. & Susan Gal “Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation.” In Regimes of Langauge: Languages, Polities, and Identities. [...]
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