Wu Dialect Citation Tones

This is a project to describe the acoustics of Wu dialect citation tones using material recorded mostly in the last three decades of the last century. It allows you to see, and in some cases also to hear, the great variation in citation tones across a large part of the Wu area. The tonal acoustics are colour-coded so that you can identify cognates across varieties.

Click here to view the Wu dialect citation tones page.

These Wu dialect data are from three main sources:

(1) Tape-recordings made by Prof. Zhu Xiaonong and his assistant in the late 90’s as part his large-scale post-doctoral survey of Wu tones and tone sandhi funded by a large Fellowship Grant from the Australian  Research Council. Prof. Zhu recorded about 120 speakers from 80 sites.

(2) Tape-recordings  made in the mid 80's by Prof. William Ballard as part of his survey of tones and tone sandhi in southern Wu varieties, funded by the US National Endowment for Humanities. This collection contains recordings of 35 speakers from 35 sites.

(3) Tape-recordings made by my students and myself over about the last 45 years. They consist primarily of tape-recordings of older (i.e. 60++) speakers from the N.E. of the Zhejiang area around Ningbo. I made these during my doctoral research in the mid-70’s.

All three sets of recordings were primarily intended to elicit data for analyzing disyllabic Wu tone sandhi, as well as, of course, tones on monosyllables. Because of this, the same words are often found in all three sets. I record my gratitude to Profs. Ballard and Zhu for making their valuable recordings available for digitization and analysis.The data are also available upon request to anyone interested in further acoustic-phonetic research of the speech of this area (there is a treasure-trove of data for vowel acoustics, for example!).

Taizhou Tonation

This is the auditory and acoustic material accompanying my International Congress of Phonetic Sciences paper Tonatary Patterns in Taizhou Wu Tones. This paper describes the interaction between extrinsic phonation type and citation tone in four speakers from the Taizhou subgroup of Wu who have a mid-Rhyme glottal stop in reflexes of Middle Chinese yin shang and yang shang tones. The material comprises audio and acoustic data of the four speakers' eight citation tones which allows you to look at the tonal acoustics at the same time as listening to them. Click here for the link to the Taizhou data.

Wu Dialect-Geographical Acoustic-Tonetics

This is a project to describe acoustically the geographical distribution of types of disyllabic tone sandhi across the Wu dialects of Zhejiang province using material recorded over the last 45 years. As with all the data on this webpage, you can look at the tonal acoustics at the same time as listening to them. Currently there is data from 109 speakers.

The Wu dialect data are from the same sources described above for the citation tones.

I record my gratitude to Profs. Ballard and Zhu for making their valuable recordings available for digitization and analysis.The data are also available upon request to anyone interested in further acoustic-phonetic research of the speech of this area (there is a treasure-trove of data for vowel acoustics, for example!).

Click here to open a map of Zhejiang which allows you to hear how the same words are pronouced in many of the different sites across the area. Currently, disyllabic words with reflexes of Middle Chinese yinping (Ia) tones on both constituent morphemes can be accessed. The geographical distribution of a subset of these can be found in my INTERSPEECH 2018 submission.

Click here to inspect and listen to the acoustics of 109 speakers from different Wu sites.

 

Wenzhou 温州 (甌江Oujiang subgroup)

Recording of a 34 year-old male (b. 1954) made by Prof. William Ballard in 1988. (This is green site 1 on the map)The informant was born in Ruian, a county to the south of Wenzhou, but moved to Wenzhou when 3 years old. You can look at the tonal acoustics at the same time as listening to them. The data have been analysed in several papers links for which you can find in the web-pages.

For his eight citation tones click here.

For his right-dominant disyllabic tone sandhi click here.

Wencheng 文成 (甌江Oujiang subgroup)

Recording of a 21 year-old male (b. 1967) made by Prof. William Ballard in 1988. (This is green site 4 on the map above) The informant was born in Wencheng and lived there until 19 years old. You can look at the tonal acoustics at the same time as listening to them. A paper is also available with a detailed analysis of the data.

For his seven citation tones click here.

For his right-dominant disyllabic tone sandhi, click here.

For a paper with a detailed analysis of the data, click here.

Maodian 毛店 (婺州 Wuzhou subgroup)

Recording of a 27 year-old male (b. 1961) made by Professor W.L. Ballard in August 1988 at Ehime university in Japan. (This is yellow site 6 on the map.) The informant was born in Maodian and lived there until 17. You can look at the tonal acoustics at the same time as listening to them.

For his nine citation tones, and comments on what is interesting about them, click here.

For his disyllabic tone sandhi, and comments on what is interesting about them, click here.

A paper is also available here with an analysis of some of the data.