Variability Investigation Balihan Island Dialect Tone

Balihan dialect area is located in southwest of Chifeng city. It is a dialect island with the characteristics of Ji and Lu dialects which are branches of Beijing dialect. This article describes the pronounciation of Balihan dialect, and compares the new system with the old system of this dialect. Chifeng, which is a city next to Beijing, is the representative point in this paper. Our task is to describe the pronunciation of Chifeng dialect and compare it with Balihan dialect. The main difference between Balihan dialect and Beijing mandarin is the unvoiced sounds of the fourth tone in ancient Chinese language now belong to the first tone of Chinese language. Besides, the feature, which was pointed out by re-professor has now disappeared so it is no longer the difference with Chifeng dialect.We have designed the investigation paper, which analyzes the variation phenomenon of the tone system in Balihan dialect. The result shows that the social factors of the variation includes gender, age, level of education and language environment. The stability of twisting tone in Balihan dialect has direct connection with the age, education level, and gender of our subjects. It decreases with aging, while increases with higher education level. The effects of gender is not obvious, but the investigation shows that it’s more stable with males. The variation of first tone and second tone in this dialect are not as stable as twisting tone. They are still in the middle of changing, which is the main feature that could distinguish Balihan dialect from Chifeng dialect. At the same time, the variation of first tone and second tone of Balihan dialect has connection with the social factors of our subjects. For example, the younger subjects are, the wider the variation is. The higher the education level is, the variation is more stable. Language environment has great effect on the tone variation of Balihan dialect. Frequent contacts with neighbor dialects made the tone variation in Balihan dialect more evident.