A sociotonetic analysis of Sui dialect contact

Abstract

A B S T R A C TSui clan exogamy can serve as a laboratory for investigation of dialect contact and immigration. The Sui people, an indigenous minority of southwest China, have marriage customs requiring that a wife and husband have different clan origins, and the wife permanently immigrates to the husband's village at the time of marriage. Due to subtle interclan dialect variation, a married woman may have different dialect features than her husband and other local villagers. This study presents an acoustic analysis of such clan-level variation in lexical tone, a sociotonetic analysis. Results show that the immigrant women maintain the tone variants of their home clan dialects to a high degree despite spending a decade or more in the husband's village, thus illustrating a case where linguistic identity is maintained in the face of close, long-term contact.I would like to thank the Sui people who patiently taught me to speak their language and who kindly provided the information and data used in this study. I would also like to thank Dennis Preston,

Child dialect acquisition: New perspectives on parent/peer influence1

“…Since not all of the children's mothers participated in the study, the children's speech is compared to sets of baseline speakers that are representative of each child's respective matrilect and patrilect. This approach is supported by Stanford's (2007Stanford's ( , 2008 finding that most Sui married women maintain their original clanlects very accurately even after a decade or more in the husband's village. Thus, children's matrilects and patrilects may be closely approximated as the speech of non-mobile baseline speakers in those respective clans.…”

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