Languages In the World (55 page)
Read Languages In the World Online
Authors: Julie Tetel Andresen,Phillip M. Carter
The last 3000 years of Chinese government-encouraged migrations of the Han people were outlined at the beginning of Chapter 8. Because the Han migrated into already-inhabited areas, language contact was inevitable. Because the prestige of the Han culture was so great, Chinese became the donor language, and language shift was invariably to Chinese. We saw in Chapter 5 the importance of Chinese logograms in the early writing systems of Korean, Vietnamese, and Malay, and their continuing influence in Japanese. Here, in Chapter 11, we note the kinds of historic substratal influences the migrating Han encountered leading to the many, not-mutually intelligible varieties of Chinese. Next, we look at what variationist sociolinguists
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are able to tell us about two contemporary varieties of Chinese.
Overall, it can be said that, although the Chinese varieties from north to south do not precisely constitute a dialect chain, they do exhibit a continuum of features that reflect the features of the languages of the various peoples they encountered. Those who came to rule also left their linguistic marks. In the middle of the last millennium, the Yuan dynasty rulers spoke Mongolian, while the rulers who came both before and after the Yuan, such as the Manchus, spoke Tungusic languages. In northern varieties of Chinese, more Altaic (Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic) features are found, such as
fewer tones, more SOV sentences, and less complex classifier systems. For instance, Mandarin, spoken in the north, has only four tones, which is considered on the low end. Following the end of the Qing Dynasty at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Manchu-speaking population in the north shifted to Mandarin. They brought with them the distinction between inclusive/exclusive âwe,' namely
zánmen
and
wÅmen
, respectively, where other, more southern varieties of Chinese have only
wÅmen
. It can also happen that, in the north, Altaic case endings have been borrowed along with SOV order, which represents a typological change of Chinese from isolating SVO to agglutinating SOV (Matthews 2010:761).
As one moves south, Chinese varieties have more tones, more SVO constructions, and more complex classifier systems. For instance, Cantonese, spoken in the south, has six tones (or nine, always depending on how one counts), while southern Min varieties such as Hokkien and Chaozhou have seven to eight. Among the many structural features in Cantonese that can be attributed to contact with languages to the south is the position of the adverb. In Cantonese, the adverb follows the verb, whereas in Mandarin, the adverb precedes the verb. Compare the following:
Cantonese:
| ngo 5 | zau 2 | sin 1 |
| âI' | âgo' | â first ' |
and Thai:
| phon | pai | koon |
| âI' | âgo' | â first ' |
as well as Cantonese:
| zung 6 | jau 5 | seoi 2 -zam 6 | tim 1 |
| âstill' | âhave' | âwater-flood' | â too ' |
| âThere was flooding too ' |
and Thai:
| ko | naam-thuam | duay |
| âalso' | âwater-flood' | â too ' |
| âThere was flooding too' |
(Matthews 2007:229). Just as there has been a kind of Altaicization in the north, so there has been Taicization in the south. The features that result have been several thousand years in the making, and historical linguists show us the cases where the changes have been established.
Variationist sociolinguists tell us of changes in progress, and we review here two studies, one of contemporary Beijing speech and one of contemporary Taiwanese Mandarin. The first study by sociolinguist Qing Zhang (2005) bears an
attention-getting title: “A Chinese yuppie in Beijing: Phonological variation and the construction of a new professional identity.” The Chinese word for âyuppies' is, by the way,
yÄpÃshì
and includes, in addition to the English meaning of the word, connotations of global orientation, trendiness, and sophistication. Part of this global orientation involves Western pop music, particularly American pop, Hollywood movies, and TV serials. Particularly big hits are
Friends
and
The Big Bang Theory
, which show independent young adults living together rather than with their parents, in addition to more recent series such as
Criminal Minds
,
Homeland
, and
House of Cards
. However, the bulk of the global orientation is toward cultural production in varieties of Chinese beyond the mainland border, namely movies and music made in Hong Kong and Taiwan, which are jointly referred to in Mandarin as
GÄngtái
.
In her study, Zhang investigates four phonetic variables found in Beijing speech, only three of which we will mention here:
- the rhotacizing of final syllables called
érhuÃ
, which involves the addition of a subsyllabic -r [ɹ] to the final; - the change of the retroflex
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initials /Å/, /tÅ/, and /tÅ
h
/ called
ruòhuÃ
, which âsoftens' or âmakes sonorous' consonants so that they sound more like [ɹ]; and - the realization of a neutral tone, as a full tone is a weakly stressed syllable.
The first two variables, both involving [ɹ], are highly characteristic of Beijing speech, so much so that Beijing locals have the phrase
jÄ«ngqiÄng
r
jīngdià o
r
â note the final
r
s â that means âBeijing tune.' Beijing speech is equated with heavy-r speech, and people outside of Beijing notice it and are apt to comment on it. Because of the national importance of Beijing and a rich tradition of writing in Beijing vernaculars, this
heavy-r speech comes with its own cultural persona for Beijingers, namely that of the
jīng yóuzi
âBeijing smooth operator.'
The third variable involving tone is not found in Beijing speech at all but is associated with
GÄngtái
pop music stars and business people. Zhang (2005:444) dubs it “the cosmopolitan variable” because it is identified as both nonlocal and nonmainland. The variable can commonly be heard in telephone interactions with professionals in foreign business. They are likely to say
xiÄnshÄng
âmister' and
xiÄojiÄ
âmiss' using the full tone in the second syllable of both address terms, while Beijingers would normally use a neutral tone, as in
xiÄnsheng
and
xiÄojie
.
So now what are young, upwardly mobile professionals to do, linguistically speaking? They will want to capture some of the âsmooth operator' coolness for themselves by adopting the [ɹ] Beijing style, but not too heavily to be mistaken for a strict local, and they will be interested in exploiting the full tone variants for the cosmopolitan touch. Indeed, Zhang found that young professionals working in foreign-owned companies in Beijing employed both these linguistic resources to create a new cosmopolitan version of Mandarin, while young professionals working in state-owned companies favored the use of local features only.
The study of variation in contemporary Taiwanese Mandarin also provides understanding into how and why people choose to speak the way they do. The official language of Taiwan is Mandarin and was declared so in 1946 after the KMT
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government of the Republic of China took control of the island. An aggressive ideological and
language teaching campaign ensued and was coupled with suppression of local Chinese varieties including Hoklo (=Taiwanese, a Hokkien variety of the Min Nan branch of Sinitic) as well as aboriginal languages from the Austronesian language family. By the late 1980s, the KMT regime had succeeded in establishing Mandarin as the prestige variety and the ideology that speaking Standard Mandarin was a sign of loyalty to the Republic and the regime. However, the Mandarin spoken in Taiwan today is not the Beijing-based standard taught in elementary schools. Taiwanese Mandarin (TM) has regional features. For instance, it participates in the general southern pattern, also found in Cantonese, of using the verb âsay' as a complementizer. A translated TM sentence such as âshe with me talk
say
not available' has the grammatical effect of: âshe told me
that
she wasn't free' where âsay' functions as âthat.' However, large-scale language contact accompanying the intensive spread of Mandarin has also produced a set of local features that form the new TM variety.
Owing to continued reinforcement of the Beijing standard in Taiwan through education and the media and no effort to standardize TM as such, several unofficially sanctioned local TM features are in considerable variation. They are of particular interest to the sociolinguist, because they have become resources for individuals speaking the variety to position themselves in relation to socially available identity categories and the ideologies surrounding them. Sociolinguist Dominika Baran's (2014) variationist study brings us inside the dynamic world of two variables in particular, namely the de-retroflection of [Å] and a labial glide deletion where [wo] becomes [o]. Both of these features have a high degree of salience as stigmatized variants, and speakers use them or avoid them for various effects. TM speakers are aware of the retroflex feature and even have a name for it:
juÄnshé
, literally âcurled tongue.' They use this term to describe Standard Mandarin, and we have just seen that Beijing Mandarin is, indeed, known for its r-heaviness.
Baran conducted fieldwork in a high school outside of Taipei, the capital. In this high school, the students are placed into one of three tracks, based on entrance exam scores: (i) college preparatory; (ii) office administration and computer technology; and (iii) electronics and car mechanics, a track that school administrators say is made up of âtroublemakers.' A first categorization is predictable: girls will use the features of TM less than boys, because both TM and Hoklo (the source of the variations) are associated with masculinity, since they are perceived as lacking in refinement. Furthermore, it turns out that Taiwanese speakers in general find de-retroflection relatively acceptable, and this is because it is a symbol of local pride. The glide deletion is more stigmatized, partly because it is associated with the south and is perceived as unsophisticated and backward.
In sum, students in the college prep track have a lower degree of de-retroflection and glide deletion, while the students in the electronic and car mechanic group have a higher degree of these TM features. A higher degree of glide deletion signals a local orientation and is a resource for performing masculinity, while those students with higher professional aspirations show a higher degree of conforming to the features of Standard Mandarin, which include the retroflexed [Å] and the presence of the glide. When asked to reflect on their linguistic choices, some students were explicit that their choice of using the TM features were in direct challenge to the idea that TM was unrefined and insisted that speaking TM was the best variety to choose when
establishing friendship and intimacy. The main idea here is that students actively use these features to challenge dominant ideologies and the rigid institutional structures that dictate how the school treats them and what it expects of their futures (Baran 2014).
It may strike some readers that much ideological weight is being said to hang from the slender threads of heavy-r speech, full tones, de-retroflection, and a vowel cluster. This is, however, the point of much of current variationism, namely that speakers create, detect, and act upon the speech variables (in these two cases, phonetic) available to them. To take an example of a phonetic variable very close to home for the authors of this book, namely the American college campus, for some years now the mid round back vowel [o] has had a slightly fronted variant, resembling a French or German [Å], especially before a nasal, making
phone
[fon] into [fÅn]. The variant is found in the speech of young women, and one can hear it at Duke University. It is correlated with higher education and then, likely, socioeconomic class.
A recent study of the speech of sorority girls at neighboring University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill showed a higher presence of this fronted vowel when the girls were talking among themselves, which is not surprising. What is of interest, however, is that the vowel showed up in individual interviews more often when informants were speaking of sorority matters, suggesting that the vowel is indexing a sense of identity. At this point, unlike the feature
juÄnshé
âcurled tongue' in TM speakers' consciousness, the fronted round vowel variants in American English seem to fall below the threshold of awareness and are unnamed by those who use it. Only linguists interested in such matters have taken note of it.
Postcolonial consequences in Africa have not always necessarily been violent. However, they have always been
linguistic
. After the seventh century, the Arabs spread Islam to this part of the world. Beginning in the sixteenth century, European colonizers came to the continent. In this section, we look more closely at the processes of pidginization and creolization, first in terms of Arabic and next in terms of English.
In the Sudan, diverse language groups in various socioeconomic and political forms â traders and merchants, nomads, herders, refugees, colonialists, militiamen â have been on the move for millennia. At the end of the nineteenth century and since the Egyptian military campaigns, a pidginized variety of Arabic has been spoken in what is now South Sudan. It likely arose in the military camps (Versteegh 1984:117), and it is variably known as Mongallese, Bimbashi Arabic, or Juba Arabic, this last in reference to the linguistically diverse city of Juba, also located in South Sudan, where it was spoken. Pidgin Juba Arabic eventually became the creolized variety known as (Ki-)Nubi.
In Sudan, the prestige variety of Arabic is based on the speech of Khartoum, the capital. Patterns of movement bringing speakers of Khartoum Arabic into contact with Juba Arabic speakers in the South likely resulted in two related developments. First, as is common with creole languages, speakers of Juba Arabic could adjust their speech along what linguists refer to as the creole continuum, which encompasses the range of varieties between the most creole form, the basilect, and the form closest to the standard form, the acrolect. An exchange in a Juba market may occur in a basilectal form, while a person from Juba speaking with someone who lives in Khartoum may speak with an acrolectal form. Second, as more and more speakers of Juba Arabic spent time on the acrolectal side of the continuum in Khartoum, the next generations of Pidgin Juba speakers made it a native language, Nubi, which over time seems to be decreolizing, that is, losing its creole features and developing features associated with standardized national varieties.
Nubi is the best known of the Arabic creoles. In terms of phonological features alone, it is almost unrecognizable as a variety of Arabic:
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- There has been a loss of distinction between the emphatic and nonemphatic consonants, as well as the merger or disappearance of most velars and pharygeals;
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there has also occurred the loss of final consonants (somewhat like the loss of final consonants in French) of the type:
bayt
âhouse' >
bée
and
ṣandūq
âbox' >
sondú
. - The definite article
al-
has been reinterpreted as part of the (indefinite) word, and thus:
al-âaáºm
âthe bone' >
láádum
âbone';
al-fil
âthe elephant' >
lifÃli
, âelephant';
an-nÄs
âthe people' >
áánas
âpeople'; the reinterpretation of morpheme boundaries is common in pidginized and creolized varieties, and even in noncreolized varieties such as Spanish, which borrowed the definite article
al-
from Arabic as part of the indefinite word, as in
alfombra
âpillow,'
almacen
âstore,'
almuerzo
âlunch,'
arroz
ârice,' etc. - Nubi has developed a pluralizer for collective nouns, from the Classical
nÄs
âpeople,' as in
nas-babá
âthe group of father, fathers as a whole' and
nas-yalá
âthe group of children, children as a whole.' - The comparative may be expressed by means of a form of the Classical
min
, such as
rági dé kebÃr
min
Ãta
(man that old
than
you) âthat man is older than you,' or
kél dé kebÃr
fút(u)
búra
(dog that big
pass
cat) âa dog is bigger than a cat,' where the de-verbal particle
fútu
âto pass' is used for comparative purposes; again, such a construction is common in the world's creoles â for instance, Kreyòl Ayisyen, discussed in the final note of Chapter 8, has the construction
li lèd
pase
u
(she ugly
pass
you) âshe is uglier than you.' - The probable ancestors of Juba Arabic and then Nubi are likely some form of a Sudanese or Egyptian colloquial, which has aspectual prefixes attached to beginnings of verb forms. These were mostly lost when the pidgin came into being and had to be rebuilt, again as preverbal markers. For instance, in Juba Arabic, the marker
b
Ç
is found to indicate present/future:
ána
b
Ç rówa fi súg
âI will go to the market.' What is interesting to consider are the ways that Nubi has now expanded what was a rather simple, perhaps four-way tense/aspect distinction into 10 or more possibilities, which include, among others, nonpunctual, future progressive, past progressive, and counterfactual.
Here, we mull over some of the points made at the end of Chapter 10 and note that complexity tends to arise over time in highly unstable, dynamic systems such as language, and as is the case from the development of Juba Pidgin into Nubi. An analogy can be made to card games. If a group of beginners takes up a new game with one another, they are likely not only to become more skillful at that game but also to elaborate it in certain ways and/or to create new, more complicated games. They do not necessarily have to, of course. Some of us still get pleasure out of playing Go Fish.
The dual realities of Africa's inherent multilingualism and its history of colonialism mean that a large number of the world's creole languages are located on this continent. As a result of European colonialism, English-based creoles are present in Sierra Leone (Krio), Liberia (Kreyol) and Nigeria (Pidgin); Portuguese-based creoles are found in Cape Verde (Cape Verdean Creole) and Guinea-Bissau (Guinea-Bissau Creole); and a French-based creole exists in Seychelles (Seychellois Creole). Throughout West Africa can be found West African Pidgin English (WAPE), which is a dialect chain made up of both pidgins and now creoles. WAPE has been around long enough for some features to have become stabilized.
The Nigerian variety, for instance, has several well-developed structural features. First, it has an intensifier particle, a low-tone
o
, used thus:
| mek una kom | o |
| âhelp' | âplease' |
It also has the particle
na
, which has developed three uses, first as a rhematizer:
| na | di kasava | wi plant |
| âit was' | âthe cassava' [that] | âwe planted/were planting' |
second as a focus marker:
| i bi | na grup | âwe pipul dzoin |
| âit is' | âa group' [that] | âpeople joined' |
and third as a copula (be):
| mi papa | na | fara |
| âmy father' | âis' | [a] âfarmer' |
| mi family | na | katolik |
| âmy family' | âis' | âCatholic.' |
Finally, it has postpositional
dem
as a plural marker:
| di | pikin- dem |
| âthe' | âchildren' |
| dis | woman- dem |
| âthese' | âwomen.' |
Like all pidgins and creoles, Nigerian Pidgin builds vocabulary through reduplication (doubling of syllables), which is necessary because pidgins tend to reduce consonant clusters. Thus,
was
is âwash,' while
waswas
is âwasp,' and
san
is âsun,' while
sansan
is âsand.' Creoles were once stigmatized for the liberal use of reduplication for vocabulary enhancement and grammatical structures, because it was deemed so-called baby talk.
While it is true that baby talk is made up of reduplication forms such as
mama
,
papa
,
wawa
, and so forth, it is also the case that the process is found in languages around the world for various purposes:
- In English, it is used for intensification in phrases such as âthat's a big big dog' and âhe's a boy boy.'
- In French, it has an âas such' meaning:
ce n'est pas mon métier métier
âit isn't my job/profession as such, it isn't really my job/profession.' - PIE leveraged reduplication to make some past tenses, whose remnants can be found in the Latin forms
do
-
dedi
-
datus
âI give' âI gave' and âgiven.' - In Yélîdnye, an Indo-Pacific language spoken in Papua New Guinea,
kpêdekpêde
âblack' reduplicates a nominal root denoting a tree species,
kpaapîkpaapî
âwhite' reduplicates the nominal root denoting a pure white cockatoo, and
mtyemtye
âred' reduplicates a nominal root denoting a startling crimson parrot; in Walpiri, an Australian language,
walyawalya
from
walya
âearth' denotes deep browns, reddish browns, lighter (yellowish) browns and oranges, yellowish salmons, pinkish purples, and other light purples, that is, just about the range of colors the earth takes on in the central Australian desert; in addition, Kuku-Yalanji, another Australian language, has the color term
ngala-ngala
from
ngala
âblood,' denoting a red that does not include yellow. All of these color terms could be thought of as instances of the âas such' example from French.