What Does The Hakka-Cantonese Bring To The Heterogeneity Of Cantonese?

Based on the perspectives of "the linguistic community exhibits orderly heterogeneity" and "language contact is a process of language learning", this paper sets out to the actuation of the language change by looking into an empirical case study.Language contact brings about plenty of heterogeneities to the language communities, by means of the language learning of the different sides. We choose Hakka and Cantonese as the first and second language respectively, and observe the learning processes of the Hakka people who have moved to Guangzhou and used Cantonese as a SLA. Our emphasis here is to scrutinize the heterogeneious factors in the language community of Cantonese that may lead to a sound change.T3 and T6 in Cantonese are set as the tagets of our investigation, whose pronunciations are merged by Hakka people frequently. We use three methods to collect data: questionnaire, perception test and production test. Moreover, we adopt statistical methods to analyze the collected data.For a language community, we found the age of arrival is the most important factor that affects the Hakka speakers' Cantonese level, while age factor concerns more about the heterogeneity of the Cantonese community. For an individual speaker, we found his pronunciation may vary with the same word. What's more, we analyze the asymmetry found between an individual's perception and production on T3 and T6.We then discuss the relationship between the merging of T3-T6 in Hakka-Cantonese and the change trend of Cantonese tone system. We believe that heterogeneity increases sharply and plays an important role in a sound change, while language contact acts as a direct actuation.