Abstract
Nanning Mandarin, the lingua franca of a multilingual city in China, presents a special case of lexical tone development arising from language contact between Nanning Cantonese and Standard Mandarin. Previous research has suggested that the realisation of Nanning Mandarin tones derives from the transfer of Nanning Cantonese to Standard Mandarin. However, this research was limited to auditory methods, differed in reports of the tone system, and lacked a direct acoustic comparison of all three language varieties. In the present study, we conducted an acoustic-phonetic analysis of Nanning Mandarin tones from 30 talkers, and directly compared the f0 contours of Nanning Mandarin with those in Nanning Cantonese (48 talkers) and Standard Mandarin (21 talkers). Though the four-tone Nanning Mandarin tone inventory shows a resemblance to Standard Mandarin, the phonetic realisation of Nanning Mandarin tones exhibits considerable similarity to that of the primary source language, Nanning Cantonese in f0 height and contours.