UC Berkeley Dissertations, Department of Linguistics Title Cantonese Sociolinguistic Patterns: Correlating Social Characteristics of Speakers with Phonological Variables in Hong Kong Cantonese Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1sn2f75h Author Bauer, Robert Publication Date 1982 eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Cantonese Sociolinguistic Patterns: Correlating Social Characteristics of Speakers with Phonological Variables in Hong Kong Cantonese By Robert Stuart Bauer A.B. (Southwest Missouri State College) 1969 M.A. (University of California) 1975 C.Phil. (University of California) 1979 DISSERTATION Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OE PHILOSOPHY in Linguistics in the GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY Approved t-—\ Chairman , x? Date i J, 4 (A DOCTORAL DEGREE COiU JUNE 19, 1982 i ACKNOWLEDGMENT My first year of research in Hong Kong during which time I retooled my Cantonese, planned the design of this research project, and prepared the interview questions was supported by a U.S. Department of State Teaching Fellowship at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. In my second year in Hong Kong, a U.S. Department of Education Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship eliminated financial anxiety and made it possible to concentrate exclu­ sively on conducting the linguistic interviews and other phases of the research. It was in this second year that I lived on Lamma Island, a welcome refuge from the hustle and crush of Hong Kong and the closest thing to a pastoral paradise one could hope for in a place like Hong Kong. I now look back on that year as the happiest time in my life. I acknowledge a special intellectual debt to the work of Prof. William Labov, the pioneer who developed the metho­ dology of sociolinguistics. He turned me on to the field in 1973 when I participated in the workshop-seminar on sociolinguistics he taught at the 1973 Linguistics Institute in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Back then I had the idea of com­ bining Chinese and sociolinguistics, and I travelled two winding roads for some time before the two finally joined together. Among the individuals whose contribution to this dis­ sertation I gratefully acknowledge are the following: ii Dr. Edward K. Chen, Director of the Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong, and Mrs. Coonoor Kripalan-Thadani, Administrative Assistant at the Centre, for granting me the privilege to come to the Centre as a visiting scholar and providing me with a base of operations from which to conduct my research project; Mr. Lui Man-hou for patiently and enthusiastically tutoring me in Cantonese at Chinese University and helping me prepare the interview questions and story in Cantonese; Prof. Tony Marsh, School of Education, University of Hong Kong, for introducing me to two school principals who allowed me to distribute my questionnaires at their schools; Prof. Jack C. Richards, former colleague at Chinese University, for his generous weekend hospitality and exhor­ tations to finish this dissertation; Prof. Richard E. Haswell, my first linguistics teacher, for getting me started down the road of Chinese linguistics with his suggestion thirteen years ago that I study "an exotic language—like Chinese"; and Sun Chao-fen whose typing saved the day. Finally, to the men and women of Hong Kong who sat down with me and talked into this kwailou's tape recorder and gave this dissertation its linguistic foundation, I express my most heartfelt gratitude— ftf0!?]! ! iii To the Memory of Mayeda McCullough, 1903-1982 I'll always miss her TABLE OF CONTENTS 1.0 Introduction 1 1.1 Origin of the Problem 1 1.2 Theory and Methodology for the Sociolinguistic Study of Sound Change 5 1.3 Theory of Lexical Diffusion 5 1.4 Sociolinguistic Methodology 7 1.5 The Sociolinguistic Interview 11 1.6 The Sociolinguistic Sample 12 2.0 Research Design of the Hong Kong Study 16 2.1 Hong Kong and the Hong Kong Speech Community 16 2.1.1 Classification of Cantonese Dialects 24 2.1.2 Hong Kong Standard Cantonese 26 2.2 Phonological Variables 28 2.3 The Interview Questions 30 2.4 Research Instruments 35 2.5 Pilot-test of the Interview Questions and Instruments 38 2.6 Subject Data Sheet 38 2.7 Selecting the Sample 39 2.8 Composition of the Hong Kong Sample 46 2.9 Linguistic Background of the Sample Population... 57 3.0 SC /g/ /m/ 61 3.1 Introduction 61 3.2 Historical Origin of SC /^/ and SC /m/ 63 3.3 The Three Dimensions of /ij/ -> /m/ in Standard Cantonese 66 3.4 The Phonetic Origin of /m/ 66 3.5 The Lexical Dimension of /^/ ->• /m/ 91 3.6 The Social Dimension of /g/ -> /m/ 95 4.0 SC kw- -) k-/ o(C) 126 4.1 Introduction 126 4.2 The Phonetic Dimension of kw- -?• k-/ o(C) 131 4.2.1 The Historical Origin of SC /kwo(C)/ 131 4.2.2 Origin of the Change SC k&- -> k-/ (C) 135 4.2.3 The Inappropriate Use of the Labialized Velar Initial 138 4.3 The Lexical Dimension of SC kw- k-/ (C) 142 4.3.1 Distribution of SC /kwo(C)/ and /ko(C)/ in Spontaneous Speech 146 4.3.2 Distribution of SC /kwo(C)/ and /ko(C)/ in the Nursery Rhyme and Story 156 4.3.3 Distribution of SC /kwo(C)/ and /ko(C)/ in the Word Lists 161 4.3.4 Use of SC /kwo(C)/, /ko(C)/, and kwo(C)/ko(C) Variation as Three Categories of Subjects 170 4.4 The Social Dimension of SC kw- > k-/ o(C) 192 4.4.1 Comparison of This Study's Findings with Those of Yeung's Study 208 4.4.2 Age and Educational Level as Factors influencing /k-/ 213 5.0 Conclusion 230 ENDNOTES 233 BIBLIOGRAPHY 236 APPENDIX 1. Parent's Letter of Introduction 242 2. Parent's Letter of Notice of Selection 243 3. Parent's Thank-you Letter 244 4. Researcher's Name Card 245 5. Student's Subject Data Sheet 246 6. Parent's Subject Data Sheet 247 7. Subject Data Sheet 248 8. Cantonese Interview Questions 249 9. Hong Kong Money Card 255 10. Nursery Rhyme 256 11. Story 257 12. Word List I(Multi-character) 259 13. Word List II(Single-character) 260 14. Word List IlHMinimal Pair) 261 1 1.0 Introduction 1.1 Origin of the Problem My interest in sound change in Hong Kong Cantonese was initially aroused when I encountered the phenomenon of alternative pronunciations for saying the same thing the first time I went to Hong Kong to study Cantonese in 1975. A university student with whom I had become acquainted dropped the velar nasal initial and delabialized the labialized velar initial: he said /oi kok jan/ for iH A. "foreigner" instead of SC /i}6i kwok jan/, the standard, textbook pronunciation I had learned. As I was to discover later, these variant forms were just two of several sound changes now in progress in contem­ porary Hong Kong Cantonese. In January 1976 I began studying Cantonese in Hong Kong with a student who was renting a room in the same house I was. The first thing I noticed about his speech was that he too delabialized the labialized velar. I gave him a few minimal pair sets to confirm what I thought I was hearing. He said that the two members of each of the following pairs were homophones: ji![ SC /kwo/ "to cross over", /f|g] SC /ko/ "classifier"; SC /kwoi}/ "bright", /korj/ "river"; IM SC /kwoi}/ "broad", fflf SC /koi}/ "to speak." I asked him if he ever said the SC /kw-/ words with /kw-/ initial and contrasted them for him, but he didn't hear any difference and could not make the contrast either. 2 In fall 1976 I returned to UC-Berkeley and began exchanging English lessons for Cantonese lessons with a young woman from Hong Kong who was studying at a business school in Berkeley. In our first meeting my ear immediately caught three forms of phonological variation from Standard Cantonese. In addition to the delabialization of the labialized velar initial, there were two new variants which I had not noticed in Cantonese when I was in Hong Kong: for this speaker the Standard Cantonese syllabic nasal /t}/ was pronounced as a bilabial, i.e., SC /ij/ /m/. For example, she said S SC /ij/ as /in/. Some words be­ longing to rhymes with the velar nasal ending in Standard Cantonese were pronounced with alveolar nasal ending, SC /-i}/ -> /-n/. Becoming particularly intrigued with this problem of change in the finals with nasal endings, I spent several months with this subject eliciting words to find the underlying pattern of the change. In January 1979 the results of this work appeared in my article "Al- veolarization in Cantonese: A case of lexical diffusion" which was published in the Journal of Chinese Linguistics, Volume 7, Number 1. What I found was that for such finals as SC /-aai}/ and /-ar)./ my subject said /-aan/ and /-an/; for example, SC /sa'arj/ "to give birth" and iJJ SC /saan/ "mountain" were both /saan/, and "jsf SC /hai}/ "to be willing" and 48- SC /han/ "very" were both /han/. Further­ more, this change of alveolarization which had affected finals with low vowels was also spreading upwards to affect 3 the mid-front and mid-back vowels; for example,^ SC /ho"et}/ "fragrant" was sometimes pronounced /ho'en/, ZJS SC /p'erj/ "cheap" was most often /p'en/, and H$C SC /foi)/ "to put or place" was sometimes /fon/.