Comparative Study On Phonetic Features Of Radio Broadcast In Malaysian Mandarin,Putonghua And Taiwanese Mandarin

This study compares the accent of Malaysian Mandarin with that of Putonghua and Guoyu(Mandarin Chinese as spoken on Chinese Mainland and Taiwan,respectively),in particular focuses on language style(register,variety)of radio broadcast and one particular accent feature,that is the duration of syllables within disyllabic words and expressions.More specifically,this thesis aims to quantify the proportion of the length of the two syllables within any particular disyllabic word(expression)as found within the research sample,and by the means of comparison of the three geographical areas assess whether Malaysian Mandarin inclines to any of the two aforementioned standards,that is Putonghua or Guoyu.The hypothesis of this research was that the syllables in Putonghua will be of almost the same length,whereas the second syllable in Guoyu is longer relative to the first syllable;the author expected that in this particular phonetic feature,Malaysian Mandarin will perform similarly to Putonghua.For the purpose of this research,several radio stations representative of the three respective regions were selected.The sample that is being studied in this research thus comes exclusively from radio broadcast(news and entertainment programming),and was recorded during several recording sessions that also involved careful listening and noting down the times when speech occurred.A comprehensive editing process was necessary in order to produce a complete sample ready for evaluation;at the same time,the content of the recordings was written into text and all disyllabic words and expressions were highlighted.The author then manually labeled each individual syllable on a spectrogram using the Praat software.Utilizing the time information generated in Praat software,the author then created a table in which the final calculation of the proportion of the length of the first syllable to the length of the second syllable for all examined cases was performed.The author analyzed a total of 1376 words and expressions which equals to 2752 individual syllables.The survey results show that the situation for Malaysian Mandarin is similar to that of Putonghua in Mainland China.In general,the second syllable in Taiwan is longer when compared to the other two geographical regions,and this phenomenon is even more obvious when comparing only those words that are located at the end of the sentence(or before any relatively longer pause in speech).As to the question whether the tendency of Malaysian Chinese to incline to the mainland(at least when this particular linguistic feature is taken into account)may be a result of language standardization attempts,or in other words,a reflection of language policy in the media-these and similar questions still await further research.