The influence of Mandarin Chinese on minority languages in rural southwest China: a sociolinguistic study of tones in contact

Abstract

Language change is often traced to language contact, but the specific socio­ linguistic processes are not fully understood. This article reports on our field research of contact between Chinese and two minority languages in rural southwest China: Sui and Qiang. The study shows how lexical tone, an under­ represented variable in sociolinguistics, can be valuable as an empirical mea­ sure of language contact and change. Furthermore, we find that it is the same Chinese tone, a high tone in Southwest Mandarin, which is affecting the pho­ nologies of both of these disparate minority languages. We use a social con­ structionist approach to model these changes: the “Structure” of a language is dialectically constructed by individual moments of speech — “Events” — which are in turn influenced by Structure. From this perspective, each indi­ vidual use of a high­tone Chinese word is constructing and changing Sui and Qiang. Tone therefore provides an audible gauge of cross­cultural contact, reflecting and constructing the rapidly changing sociolinguistic landscape of rural southwest China.