The Phonetic Nature of the Entering Tones in Chaozhou Dialect

Abstract

One of the most important features of the entering tones (rusheng) of the Min dialect of Chaozhou is that yinru has a lower pitch than yangru. This project demonstrates the acoustic properties of 200 Chaozhou rusheng syllables by examining their spectrogram patterns, spectral tilt and HNR. Our findings show that the tonal flip-flop in Chaozhou dialect has resulted from changes in phonation type of the rusheng syllables. The yinru syllables drop their final glottal stop and have changed their phonation into creaky voice, which induced low pitch. Yangru syllables are more complicated. There are two variants of yangru, one having a final glottal stop, the other having a compound phonation called creaky-falsetto