Tone mergers in Cantonese

@article{Zhang2019ToneMI,  title={Tone mergers in Cantonese},  author={Jingwei Zhang},  journal={Regional Chinese in Contact},  year={2019},  url={https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:197998897}}
  • Jingwei Zhang
  • Published inRegional Chinese in Contact13 June 2019
  • Linguistics
  • Regional Chinese in Contact
This study investigates tone mergers in the Cantonese spoken in Hong Kong, Macao, and Zhuhai. From these three cities, 150 native Cantonese speakers were recruited, stratified by gender and age. Acoustic analyses show that Hong Kong Cantonese and Macao Cantonese are actively merging T2[25] and T5[23], T3[33] and T6[22], thus becoming similar to Zhuhai Cantonese in tonal inventory. The social motivations of the changes are attributed to contact among these Cantonese-speaking communities… 

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34 References

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Two male speakers of Hong Kong Cantonese varied the endpoints of High Rising and Mid-Low Rising tones and merged them in both directions under experimental conditions. The variation and merger of the…

A variationist approach to tone categorization in Cantonese

This study examines tone mergers in Hong Kong Cantonese from the perspective of variationist sociolinguistics. It approaches the issue of whether Cantonese has six or nine tones by focusing on two…

Production and perception of a sound change in progress: Tone merging in Hong Kong Cantonese

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Acoustic Analysis of the New Rising Tone in Hong Kong Cantonese

This study investigated the acoustic characteristics of the rising tones produced by three mergers and three non-mergers identified in the previous study, and characterized the mechanism of this tone merger.

Near-merger in Hong Kong Cantonese tones: a behavioural and ERP study

Near-merger is a recalcitrant phenomenon in sound change in which speakers are able to differentiate two sounds in production but consistently report that they are the same in perception. This…

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