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Plastic Mandarin tones: regional identity in prosody
1Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics, 6396 University of Oxford , Oxford, OX1 2HG, UK.
Phonetica
|October 27, 2025
Summary
Plastic Mandarin, a new urban dialect in Changsha, exhibits unique lexical tone patterns. These tones, while sharing categories with Standard Mandarin, show regional influence from Changsha Xiang, illustrating language contact dynamics.
Area of Science:
- Linguistics
- Sociolinguistics
- Phonetics
Background:
- Standard Mandarin (SM) promotion accelerates local dialect innovation in Chinese metropolises.
- Changsha Xiang has been the dominant regional variety in Changsha.
- Plastic Mandarin (PM) is a new urban Mandarin dialect emerging in Changsha.
Purpose of the Study:
- To establish the lexical tone system of Plastic Mandarin.
- To explore the tonal development of Plastic Mandarin by comparing it with Changsha Xiang.
- To investigate the factors influencing the distinctive f0 patterns in Plastic Mandarin.
Main Methods:
- Growth Curve Analysis (GCA) to establish the PM lexical tone system.
- Generalised Additive Mixed Modelling (GAMM) to compare PM tones with Changsha tones.
- Analysis of f0 patterns in multilingual speakers of PM and Changsha Xiang.
Main Results:
- Plastic Mandarin shares tone categories with Standard Mandarin but has distinct f0 patterns.
- Some PM f0 patterns resemble those of Changsha Xiang.
- Tonal features are influenced by phonetic variation, systemic constraints, social biases, and language contact.
Conclusions:
- Plastic Mandarin's tonal system reflects a blend of Standard Mandarin and regional Changsha influences.
- The study provides evidence for contact-induced tonal contour changes in new Mandarin varieties.
- Plastic Mandarin serves as a case study for understanding dialectal innovation in urban China.
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