Language variation and change in Hohhot, China
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Variation in L-words
The linguistic feature i'm interested in is a special set of lexemes called "l-words 分音词" They are used by speakers of different varieties in Hohhot, displaying variation in different linguistic levels, like vowels, tones, stress patterns. The two linguistic features examined in my PhD thesis are:
1) stress pattern; varies between a weak-strong pattern (Jìn feature) and a strong-weak pattern (Mandarin feature)
2) Initials /p, t, k, h/; whether or not an obstacle fricative (could be [ç] [x], or [χ]) is involved in these initials.
This video will give you an idea of how Jin dialect sounds. In this video, David Gulasi, who is an Australian living in Hohhot, is translating Mandarin sentences (spoken offscreen) into Jin (spoken by David), with English equivalents shown on paper.
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Hohhot and Hū Pǔ
My PhD project looks at a new urban dialect formed in Hohhot, an immigrant city in north China. The formation of this new dialect was induced by dialect contact between Mandarin, spoken by the migrant community, and Jìn (晋) dialect, spoken by the local community. Younger local residents refer to this new variety as Hū Pǔ (呼普), which means Hohhot Mandarin. Generally, Hū Pǔ is phonologically closer to Mandarin, while absorbing numerous lexical and grammatical elements from the local Jìn dialect. Hū Pǔ could be regarded as a continuum, because different speakers show variation in their degree of adopting Jìn features.
My research, from a variationist sociolinguistic point of view, examines how these linguistic variations are constrained by various social and linguistic factors.
*See Puthuval and Wang (2015) for more about linguistic situation in Hohhot
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Attitudes
The focus of this project is to explore how the outcome of the contact-induced mixed variety "Hū Pǔ" is influenced by speaker attitude.
The migrant community in Hohhot are mostly State-sponsored migrants who arrived in the 1950s and 1960s because of government policy. Most of them were well-educated cadres, intellectuals or skilled workers, who worked in the government, universities, or state-owned factories. In contrast, the local Jìn-speaking residents were mainly handicraft workers, shop assistants, street peddlers, or workers from collective-owned factories. Therefore, there was a clear social stratification between the migrant and the local communities, and many new urban migrants discriminated against the local dialect speakers.
I'm interested in how speakers with different attitudes towards the local community and dialect will behave differently in the two l-words linguistic features.
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Attitudes and awareness
Another question explored in this project is the effects of speaker attitude in relation to the level of awareness of the linguistic variables. The two linguistic features in this study are quite different in terms of their levels of awareness. So I'm also investigating how the attitude-language correlation could be affected by explicit awareness.
*See my 2016 ALS conference presentation and 2017 Methods in Dialectology conference presentation for this question.
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Attitudes and interaction
Exploring speaker attitudes is not easy. Apart from the complex nature of attitude itself, another challenge in studying attitude/linguistic behavior relation is teasing apart the relationship between attitudes and interaction.
In my study, I also collected quantitative data about participants' interaction with Jìn speakers, and investigated the interaction effect of speakers' attitudes and interaction on their linguistic behaviour.
*See my 2015 NWAV presentation and journal article Wang (under review) for this question.