There will be a meeting of the Language Variation & Change workshop this Friday, February 2nd at 3:30 pm in Rosenwald 301. Our speaker will be Britta Ingebretson. See below for details. We hope you can make it!

“Rhotic coda usage as stance-taking in Southern China”

Britta Ingebretson (UChicago)

Mandarin Chinese has two standard variations, Northern Mandarin, centered around Beijing, and Southern Mandarin, centered around Taiwan. Among other features, Northern Mandarin is known for widespread rhotacization of codas and rhotic suffixes on certain terms, a process known as erhuayin. Rhotacized codas and suffixes are completely lacking in Southern Mandarin. In this presentation, I will examine the strategic deployment of rhotacization in Huangshan, Anhui Province. Huangshanese speak Southern Mandarin and do not use rhotic codas or suffixes in daily speech, so such usage is rare and highly marked. In this presentation, I will show that speakers use rhotic codas to index particular stances towards national official discourses and policies or to index certain types of social personae.