The Phonetic Realizations of the Mandarin Phoneme Inventory: The Canonical and the Variants

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview on the phonetic realizations of the Mandarin phoneme inventory. There are two major sections. The first is a general description of the phoneme inventory, which includes five vowels and 19 consonants, along with four lexical tones. In addition to acoustic properties of individual phonemes, major allophonic rules are also discussed. The second section covers some variations on consonants, vowels, and tones in three major Mandarin varieties of Taiwan, Singapore, and China. Some variations are fairly region-specific, while others are more commonly found across various dialects. The former includes the retroflexed vowel suffix in the Mainland variety, the qualitative difference in realizing the neutral tone between the Taiwan and the Mainland variety, and the so-called fifth tone in Singapore Mandarin. The latter includes the deretroflexion and hypercorrection of sibilants, both of which can be found in Taiwan and Singapore Mandarin, and the syllable-final nasal mergers, which can be found in all three major dialects. Interestingly, these cross-dialectal variations also show large within-region variabilities. Both the canonical and the variant realizations of the phonological system are discussed in light of child language acquisition.