Phonetics of Chinese Dialects

This comprehensive study of the phonetic properties of the sounds of Chinese dialects is based on instrumental data on the articulatory, acoustic, and physiological properties of these sounds. It covers a range of topics, including the sound categories of plosives, fricatives, affricates, nasals, approximants, vowels, diphthongs, triphthongs, and tones. The dialects covered are the representative members of the Chinese dialect groups, namely Guanhua (or Northern Chinese), Xiang, Gan, Wu, Min, Kejia (Hakka), and Yue. While many sounds are also found in other languages, there are those which are unique to Chinese dialects or rarely occur in other languages. In some instances, Chinese dialect sounds and those of other languages may share the same IPA transcription but differ in articulatory and acoustic characteristics. Teachers, researchers, and students of linguistics, language studies, speech pathology, and speech science are expected to find this book informative and useful. .