Sociolinguistic Analysis Of The Sound Change In Tianjin Dialect

Everything in the space is developing, or changing, at any time. Language, a system of sounds, words, patterns, etc. used by humans to communicate thoughts and feelings, is also changing as time goes by, which is called linguistic change. As an important branch of linguistic change, sound change has always been paid great attention to by western linguists.Tianjin dialect, a language variety of Chinese, has also experienced changes in the past decades. Along with the popularization of standard Chinese, the speech sounds in Tianjin dialect has been developing towards those in standard Chinese. A sound change research on the peculiar consonants in Tianjin dialect is designed to find to which degree have the sounds changed, and to analyze such change by using the sociolinguistic method put forward by William Labov, who advocates the relation between language and society, so as to discover the possible relationship between the speakers' sound change and their social background.According to the previous phonetic researches on Tianjin dialect, we summarize the peculiar consonants in Tianjin dialect and then divided them into five groups. Through collecting and analyzing the 100 informants' pronunciation of the peculiar consonants in a formal contextual style, wordlist reading, we find that none of the informants strictly keeps all the peculiar consonants, and about a quarter of them have totally got rid of all the peculiar consonants and pronounce absolutely in the same way as standard Chinese.Meanwhile, the five groups of peculiar consonants have not changed at the same speed. The initial alveolar nasal [n] before vowels like [ai], [an], [an], [au], [ou], [an], [Y], and the traditional pronunciation of "饿 " and " 灭" have been nearly discarded by the informants during the wordlist reading. That is to say, the change of these sounds has nearly reached regularity among the informants in the formal contextual style. On the contrary, some peculiar consonants are still kept by quite a lot of the informants, like the traditional pronunciation of the alveolar consonants [ts], [ts'], [s]. Generally speaking, sound change in the peculiar consonants in Tianjin dialect has not yet totally come to regularity.Apart from discovering the present situation of the peculiar consonants in Tianjin dialect, four social factors - age, gender, occupation and education background-are related to the informants' pronunciation so as to find out their relationship just as Labov has been advocating.The synchronic analysis of the informants' pronunciation shows that the younger the informant is, the less number of peculiar consonants there is during his wordlist reading. That is to say, the consonants in Tianjin dialect have been changing towards those in standard Chinese in the past decades.Just like Peter Trugill's conclusion (1995) that women on average use forms which more closely approach those of the standard variety or the prestige accent than those used by men, among the 100 informants in our research, women seem more likely to perform such change than men.As for occupation and education background, teachers pronounce the leastnumber of the peculiar consonants, and the more mental labor the informant does and more education he has got, the less peculiar consonants he keeps.Just as Labov's viewpoint that linguistic study cannot be separated from its social nature, the connection of the informants' pronunciation and their age, gender, occupation and education background shows there is certain relationship between people's sound change and their social background.