Regional dialect leveling in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

This paper studies the variation that stems from language contact between the suffix ‑tou, a locative marker in the Chengdu dialect spoken in Southwest China, and its standard Chinese counterpart ‑mian. The data are drawn from sociolinguistic interviews with 40 native speakers of the Chengdu dialect. It is shown that the standard Chinese form ‑mian has outnumbered ‑tou in terms of occurrence, suggesting a change in progress over apparent time that essentially involves a dialect leveling that results from language standardization and contact-induced convergence. Meanwhile, the two variants undergo certain stylistic reallocation and begin to serve new socio-stylistic roles. To our knowledge, this is the first study that systematically investigates the variation of Chinese locatives.