A Study On The Phonological Variation Of Shaoyang Dialect

The popularization of Putonghua leads to frequent contact between dialects and Putonghua,forming a competition in daily life.Since the prestige of Putonghua is recognized,dialects are more likely to be similar to Putonghua,which is displayed in grammar,vocabulary and pronunciation.Belonging to the common language in Lou Shao district of Hunan dialects,Shaoyang dialect maintains the main feature of a relatively complete voiced system.However,along with the continuous invasion of Putonghua,the phonology of Shaoyang dialect has increasingly lost its local characteristics and produced new phonetic variants.This study is guided by the theory of language contact and lexical diffusion.By means of methods such as recording and observation,it selected 29 local people as respondents and collected 16 hours' conversational data and accumulated 379 sound tokens of daily conversations.Besides,GOLDVARB X and Excel(2007)were adopted to analyse the phonetic changes of Shaoyang dialect,and influences of linguistic variables such as lexical origins,lexical categories and social variables such as age,gender and educational background on phonetic changes of Shaoyang dialect are analysed.The results show that phonetic variations occur to Shaoyang dialect,which are mainly illustrated in the devoicing of voiced initials and literary reading gradually replacing colloquial reading.The former is that many voiced expressions of initial consonants in Shaoyang dialect have been transformed into voiceless ones in Putonghua.The other is literary reading gradually replacing colloquial reading.It is mainly reflected in the fact that many ancient pronounced words are replaced by phonetics of corresponding words in Putonghua.From the perspective of internal and external factors,the lexical origin is an important way for Putonghua to influence the phonology of dialects.The shared words in both languages have a high acceptance of phonetic variation,followed by dialectal intrinsic words.The rule of this change is that due to the phonetic similarity with Putonghua,common words in both languages are more obvious in the progress of devoicing.The inherent words in dialects go to the opposite,and tend to in the process of literary reading gradually replacing colloquial reading.As far as lexical categories are concerned,nouns,adjectives and verbs belong to open parts of speech with certain flexibility.Nouns are the most sensitive to sound changes,followed by adjectives and verbs with certain local characteristics.In addition,phonological changes are also influenced by social factors.The degree of education has a greater impact on phonetic variation.Highly educated people are more likely to accept phonetic variations of more devoicing due to the similarity between their dialects and standard language.What's more,age has certain effects on phonetic variation.The older people are,the more the ‘local flavor' of the dialect is.Under the influence of Putonghua,literary reading is gradually taking the advantages among them while middle-aged and young people tend to have more voiceless sounds.On the whole,the phonetic variation of Shaoyang dialect arises from various factors,which shows a trend of assimilation to Putonghua.As the carrier of culture,the dialect retains its own unique linguistic features.Nonetheless,with strong vitality and practicability,Putonghua is constantly infiltrating into the dialect system,leading to the loss of local characteristics of dialects.This requires us to deepen our understanding to dialects and make efforts to protect language diversity.