Vietnamese Tones Produced by Australian Vietnamese Speakers

Abstract

This paper reports an acoustic study that examined the tonal features of Vietnamese language used by the Vietnamese community in Australia. The target of this examination is the comparative analysis of the phonetic characteristics of tones produced by Vietnamese in Australia and in Vietnam. Tones produced by young (n=10) and older (n=10) Vietnamese Australians residing in Brisbane, Australia, were acoustically examined and compared with those produced by corresponding young (n=10) and older (n=10) Vietnamese residing in either Ho Chi Minh City or Can Tho City, Vietnam. The results showed that the main patterns of mispronunciation of tones by the young Vietnamese in Australia (YVA) include (i) confusing tones that are in the same registers or/and have similar characteristics, (ii) the tendency to pronounce complicated tones as simple tones, and (iii) confusing the diacritics marking tones. By “mispronunciation”, we mean the differences in tones used in Brisbane, Australia from the tones used in Vietnam. This study also examined the frequency of the contour of all tones produced by all four groups. The results show significant differences in terms of the frequency and distribution of irregular and common tone contours between the YVA group and the three other groups, suggesting that the YVA group failed to produce the tones correctly or did not reach the required standard of tone production of contemporary Southern Vietnamese. In addition, the findings with respect to tone contours showed that the tonal range of the YVA group is narrower than that of the other three groups.

A Question of Tone

“…There is also no denying that the need to focus on the tones of many words that use the same consonants and vowels imposes an additional burden on language learners even though the problem may not be the idea that tones are completely new and do not exist in Western languages. Studies have found this additional burden for Westerners (Wang et al 1999;Wayland & Guion 2004;So 2005;Nguyen & Macken 2008) (Tăng 2006;Đào & Nguyễn 2017). Native speakers of Asian tonal languages also have difficulty when they learn a different tonal language, suggesting that learning rates depend on the familiarity with the specific tones themselves and not with tones overall (So 2005).…”