A study of sociolinguistic variation in Malaysian Mandarin tones

Abstract

In multilingual and multiethnic Malaysia, Malaysian Mandarin (MalM) is a heterogeneous variety. Due to the linguistic diversity in Malaysia, MalM has drawn scholarly attention to the phonetic variation of this variety. This study investigates the citation tone production in MalM across language and geographical groups. Seventy-one fluent Mandarin speakers were recruited, stratified by their dominant home languages and geographical regions. Findings from the acoustic and statistical analyses suggest a close resemblance of citation tones in MalM and Putonghua, the standard Mandarin used in mainland China, except for T3’s tone contour. Additionally, there are some notable differences correlated with their primary language and their geographical regions in the tonal realizations in T3 and T4. This suggests that the dominant language and geographical background of the speakers possibly influence citation tone production in MalM. Overall, this study identifies that MalM is not a homogeneous variety in the heterogeneous Malaysia and supports the perspective that MalM is a unique variety within the Global Chinese paradigm.