Exploring pronunciation features of Yunnan English

Abstract

The English language has gone through cycles of prominence and decline in China since it arrived on Chinese shores in 1637 for the purposes of trade (Adamson, 2002). Since then the language has evolved in China from the stage when it was regarded as a language spoken by ‘barbarians’ (Adamson, 2002) in the 1700s to the present day which sees an unprecedented surge of enthusiasm for the language. This significant change in the attitudes of the Chinese people towards English has accelerated since China's open door policy gathered steam in the early 1990s. Conservative estimates place the number of people learning English in China at about 200 million. A recent estimate by Crystal (2008) suggests that the number of English speakers in China has, in fact, doubled, with the widespread enthusiasm for English generated by driving forces such as China's entry into the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the hosting of the Beijing Olympic Games, international tourism, foreign investment, the development of Western China, and the China-ASEAN Free Trade Area (CAFTA) launched on January 1, 2010.

A description of the Yunnan English accent

“…The results of t‐test show that for the Han English majors significant difference only exists between the vowel pair /ɒ/∼/ɔː/ (F1: t = 2.92, df = 4, p < 0.05; F2: t = 7.28, df = 4, p < 0.01; paired sample, two‐tailed) and F1 of the vowel pair /ʊ/∼/uː/ (t = 2.92, df = 4, p < 0.05, paired sample, two‐tailed). The overlap of /ʌ/∼/ɑː/ is found here, which accords closely with the previous study of Yunnan English in which distinction between these two vowels is also not maintained (see Ao and Low ).…”

“…These results, however, must be taken with caution due to the fact that participants in Ao and Low () only comprise English majors who may not represent the whole population of Yunnan English speakers. Another factor is that Ao and Low () is based on a small data set (only two participants from each ethnic group) and did not take into account influences from participants’ substrate languages. Furthermore, in terms of both duration and quality, vowels are in many cases indistinguishable in auditory terms.…”

“…Nine out of ten participants in their data pronounced the vowel /ʌ/ as [ɑ] in the words such as up, us, come and cousins . This feature, however, was not reported in the above‐mentioned studies of CE, which led Ao and Low () to believe that this is the widespread feature of Yunnan English. This may be traceable to the fact that the vowel /ʌ/ is absent in Yunnanese so Yunnan English speakers tend to replace it with [ɑ].…”

“…Three types of schwa (i.e. /ə/) insertion were found in Ao and Low (): (1) word‐final plosive + /ə/ + plosive (or other C/V), e.g. next to [ˈnekstə tʊ], used to [ˈjʊzdə tʊ] and just escaped [ˈdʒɑstə ɪˈskeɪpt]; (2) inside consonant cluster, e.g.…”

Rhoticity in Yunnan English

“…There is an obvious shortage of research on the pronunciation of English by Chinese, as pointed out by several scholars previously (Kirkpatrick : 146; Ao & Low : 29). A review of available literature reveals that earlier authors (Ho ) often seemed to focus on summarizing and listing the most important pronunciation ‘errors’ for Chinese speakers, with a purported aim of providing useful pointers to teachers working strenuously to ‘improve their students’ English’.…”