Baotou Nasal Variation: A Re-investigation After 15 Years

This thesis is a sociolinguistic study of Mandarin nasal variation. Using the variationist sociolinguistics theory, we investigate the speech community of Kundulun, Baotou, a city of PRC. After quantitative statistic analysis of a sample including 21 informants, this paper interprets the constrain effects of nasal variation from the language internal and external, and then describes the structure of this special speech community. All the work is done within the frame of Real Time. Mandarin nasal variation study is a re-investigation of the same speech community (Xu 1992) after 15 years. It also employs variationist approach with the respect to theory basis, field method, field unit and analysis way, etc. The findings are: Although there is no great change on Mandarin nasal variation, some new environmental effects begin to work including linguistic and sociolinguistic conditions, as well as a lot of regulation of old conditions. The explanation of these changes is the aim of this paper. Two variables are focused in this paper: vowel nasalization and consonant deletion. We report the statistics findings of VRA in two ways, and it confirms again some effects on two variables which were found by other scholars. So nasalization and deletion are two separate variation items. Some social factors continue to influences now and several weak correlations strengthen interpretive power on nasalization and deletion. The most obvious improvement is Career does play an important role in conditioning effects. Dialect background remains broad variation range, however, the sequence of conditioning effects in the group inverts. On nasalization Sex and Style begin to favor and deletion has no more stylistic differentiation as a Marker 15 years ago. Nasalization and deletion have no age or generation gap. On these discoveries the thesis then gets, nasal variation as a change in progress slows down its speed in evolvement and the structure of Baotou speech community shows a direction toward stratification model. On these basis, the paper finally gives a prospect to Chinese sociolinguistics.