Foreign Influence and Sound Change: A Case Study of Cantonese Alveolar Affricates

31st Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation (PACLIC 31), pages 155–160 Cebu City, Philippines, November 16-18, 2017 Copyright c⃝2017 Yizhou Lan Foreign Influence and Sound Change: A Case Study of Cantonese Alveolar Affricates Yizhou Lan Nagoya University of Commerce and Business 4-4 Komenoki, Nisshin, Aichi Prefecture, Japan anthonylan@nucba.ac.jp Abstract Language contact is one major factor for language change. In some cases such changes are brought from a language of higher status. The present study examines a systematic phonological change among current young Hong Kong Cantonese speakers. L1 Cantonese Speakers of both genders in three age groups were tested for production of Cantonese alveolar affricates /ts/ and /tsh/ phonemes in a carrier sentence. English and Cantonese control sounds were also added to the reading list. Results show that speakers of the younger generation have a larger tendency in substituting /tsh/ and /ts/ with the English sound /ʧ/ in the back-vowel context. Two probable reasons to such change, language contact and gestural proximity, were identified. The findings clearly acknowledge a sociolinguistic change of /tsh/ > [ʧ] for the younger generation in contrast to the elder, and suggest that foreign influence that could be possibly traced back to the influence of the English language. 1 Introduction Language change through languages contact has been recorded in ways including lexical or structural borrowing [1]. However, structural borrowing, especially that of sound change, is less commonly documented. This study explores a sound change occurring in Cantonese by a probable language contact from English. The sound change under investigation is usually found among Cantonese speakers of younger generation. Recent studies have exemplified that many segmental (e.g., the merge between /n/ and /l/ [2]) and supra-segmental (e.g., tone merging between Cantonese tone 2 and tone 4 [3] [4]) sound changes had taken place in Cantonese. However, apart from the sound change within Cantonese itself, as has illustrated above, could it be probable that this dialect can accommodate foreign influences as well? The present study intends to test whether young speakers in their 20s will produce the Cantonese alveolar affricates /ts/ /tsh/ with an “English touch” as the post-alveolar laminal affricate [tʃ]. It attempts to tackle language change not from an evolutionary point view but from one of foreign contact: i.e., the language under investigation borrowing some new features from another language. To investigate this question, a production experiment sampling speakers from different age groups producing Cantonese and English sounds was performed. 2 Literature Review Hong Kong Cantonese, a variant from the canonical Cantonese language or the Yue dialect, has a rich consonantal inventory including alveolar affricates (/ts/ and /tsh/) but without post-alveolar laminal affricates (/ʧ/ and /ʤ/). On the other hand, standard British and American English have a three-way distinction of /ts/, /ʧ/ and /ʤ/. 155 Descriptive and pedagogical literature has shown the phonetic similarity of these alveolar and post-alveolar affricates [5] [6] [7]. For example, investigations from AHSA [6] show that the English /tʃ/ & /dʒ/ are acoustically similar to the Cantonese sounds [tsh] & …

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