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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1168

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

Sound Change and Indexicality: Loss of Onset Velar Nasal in Shanghainese

Authors: Zhou, Yiwen
Submitted by: Zhou, Yiwen (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, United States of America)

In an era of greater population mobility and mass media, urban dialects are subject to the influence of languages and dialects of varied degrees of prestige, the result of which is that new variants emerge and are embedded with social meanings (Eckert 2008, Labov 2001).  The indexicality of the new variants, however, does not always predict their adoption by individual speakers. In this case, while the lower variety provided the sources of variation, it is the contact with the standard variety that spread the new variants.

Shanghainese (the Shanghai dialect) has been in contact with neighboring dialects with an inflow of migrants for more than a century, as well as with Standard Mandarin Chinese through media and other institutions since the 1950s. Sound change in Shanghainese has been examined in a number of studies (Chen 2005, Qian 2003, Wang 2005). My paper looks at a sound change in progress and attempts to analyze the semiotic processes it went through (Irvine and Gal 2000). The loss of the onset velar nasal, i.e. deleting the onset or replacing it by a voiced fricative: e.g. [ŋø] “river bank” (the old variant) pronounced as [ø] or [ɦø] (the new variants), has been reported (Shen 1996) but not examined in detail, especially its use and acceptance among diverse groups of native speakers.

The study is based on interviews conducted in the summer of 2011 with 55 native Shanghainese speakers of both genders in three age groups: young (aged 20-39), middle-aged (40-59), and old (60 and above). The production data agree with the classic sociolinguistic conclusions in both age and gender effects that young speakers and female speakers are more likely to have the new variants and use them more often. In the meta-linguistic discussion, a large proportion of the speakers who had the new variants denied ever using them in their own speech; those who never use the new variants, however, attributed the sound change to the notorious influence of certain low prestigious migrant dialects, considering the new variants as deterioration of Shanghainese.

I argue that the new variants were introduced by the Subei people, the largest group of migrants to the city before the 1950s (Honig 1992), whose native dialect does not allow the velar nasal as syllable onsets. Due to native dialect transfer, first generation Subei migrants spoke a variety of Shanghainese without the onset velar nasal (Ruan 1988). The new variants were associated with these people, who were predominantly of lower social status. Their variety of Shanghainese was therefore rejected by old native speakers. However, I propose in this paper that the spread of the new variant among younger speakers is the result of recent intense contact with Standard Mandarin Chinese, in which the velar nasal as onset is also illegal.