Research On Experimental Phonetics Of Maoba Dialect In Wuhu County

Maba dialect is spoken in Wuhu and belongs to Tongjing sub-dialect, a branch of Xuanzhou Wu dialect. In recent years, Maba dialect has been greatly affected phonetically due to the promotion of Mandarin Chinese and the influence of Jianghuai Mandarin. In view of the lack of studies on Maba dialect, it seems increasingly urgent to preserve and properly analyze the phonetic characteristics of this dialect. With the aid of acoustic phonetic experiments, this paper presents a comprehensive analysis and description of the initials, finals, and tones of Maba dialect, and also seeks to compare the phonetics of two control groups, the elderly group and the youth group. In this paper, experimental phonetic methods are for the first time adopted to study the Wu dialect spots in Wuhu, with a view to obtaining a global picture of local phonetics and providing materials for studies on Xuanzhou Wu dialect.Initials in Maba dialect are described in terms of their length, GAP value, spectrogram, format, difference and slope, with the experimental findings presented below. (1) The two control groups are consistent in the number of initials and phoneme categories:all these two groups have 29 initials-28 initial consonants and 1 zero initial. (2) Aspirated initials are longer than unaspirated ones in length but when it comes to GAP, the opposite is proven to be true. Both plosives and affricates by the elderly are longer than those by their young counterparts; however, GAP of the elderly is evidently shorter than that of the youth. Differential energy boundaries of unaspirated plosives are relatively clear in the pronunciation of the elderly but much vague in the pronunciation of the youth. In the studies on the slope of the three sets of plosives, the slopes of the elderly change sharply while those of the youth show gentle changes. (3) Fricatives show relatively long duration, and voiceless fricatives, excluding palatal fricatives and glottal fricatives, are all longer than aspirated voiced fricatives. Acoustic energy of the fricatives by the elderly is much stronger than that of the youth, and the acoustic strength of voiced fricatives are much higher than their voiceless counterparts. In addition, in the speech of the youth, [sfi] is gradually fading away. (4) [n] and [1] in Maba dialect are not free variants of the same phoneme. (5) The status of [rfi] as an independent phoneme is being gradually replaced by [th], and this tendency is much more obvious in the youth.Finals in Maba dialect are described in terms of their length, format, spectrogram, and curvature, with the experimental findings presented below. (1) The two control groups are not consistent in the number of finals and phoneme categories:the speech by the elderly has 43 finals while that by the youth has 44, with the major difference in nasalized finals. (2) In the speech of the elderly, each final is longer than it is in the speech of the youth in general. Comparisons of compound vowels, nasalized vowels, and vowels ending with glottal stop show that the elderly group and the youth group display some similarities as well as some differences, reflecting the phases and continuity of language. (3) Monophthongs in the two control groups don’t show much difference in terms of the acoustic space in C(V) structure, though acoustic space of the elderly group is slightly wider. Monophthongs in these two groups basically belong to the same system, but possibilities can’t be excluded that changes are taking place or have taken place. In general, the youth is much more affected by the Mandarin, in particular in their finals system. In contrast, the elderly’s finals system is relatively well preserved, although impacts from various factors are also inevitable.With regard to tones in Maba dialect, this paper mainly examines F0 curve, tone value, length, relationship between time domain and intensity, relationship between fundamental frequency and sound intensity, etc., and major research findings are presented below. (1) The F0 curve of the elderly resembles a funnel, while that of the youth bears many similarities with football. (2) Two tone sets (with each containing 5 tones) are found in Maba dialect, each for the elderly group and the other for the youth. For elderly speakers, the values of dark level tone, light level tone, rising tone, departing tone, and checked tone are 42,23,313,53 and 4 respectively; however, when it comes to young speakers, the values of these tones change to 31,23,212,34 and 4. (3) The length of level tones is longer than checked tones. (4) Regarding the relationship between tone intensity and time domain, both the elderly group and the youth group display four distinct categories:front-peak type, mid-peak type, back-peak type, and double peaks type. (5)The fundamental frequency of level tones is proportional to their sound intensity, but the fundamental frequency and sound intensity for checked tones are connected in a self-contained manner.