The Sociophonetic Study On Kemie Language

Sociophonetics is a relatively new field of phonetics that has gradually become an independent discipline.It takes the perspective of integrating experimental phonetics and sociolinguistics to illustrate how sounds are meaningfully organized from both linguistic and social aspects.The previous studies have primarily concentrated on European languages or other dominant languages,with Chinese dialects and minority languages in China receiving less attention.Thus,based on sociophonetic paradigm,this study aims to collect the materials of six native Kemie Language informants in Jiangtou Manmi Village to examine the phonetic variations from aspects of vowels,consonants and tones emerged owing to the age factor.The native Kemie Language informants in Jiangtou Manmi Village of this study encompass three groups(grandfather group,father group and son group),two for each group,and all of them are male.Both fieldwork and phonetic experiment method have been adopted in this study.Fieldwork involves perceiving and transcribing the core vocabulary of Kemie Language with IPA,followed by a preliminary analysis.As for the method of phonetic experiment,in order to probe into the phonetic variations of Kemie Language among three generations,the materials were recorded through Byly,followed by the extraction of acoustic parameters such as fundamental frequency,formants,and duration in the Praat by employing Xu’s(2009)script.Finally,a one-way ANOVA was conducted in the software of SPSS to test whether the mean values of formants,VOT and tones were significantly different among three groups.The results and findings of the present study are as follows:(1)Based on fieldwork,the complex vowels do not exist differences while the differences in monophthongs can be perceived among three groups.Then the adoption of phonetic experiment indicates that the variation of monophthongs /a/ /(?)/ /u/ /i/ is manifested through tongue height or frontness.And the statistical analysis of tongue position shows significant differences among three groups.(2)Stops can clearly be perceived as varied during the fieldwork while other consonants are not.And further study of VOT values of the above three groups reveal that the VOT values are inverse with age,i.e.,the voiced stops in the younger generation tend to be voiceless compare with the other two groups.In addition,both the pre-syllables and the stops in word initial aspirated stop syllables of Kemie Language are lost and the percentage of loss is also inversely correlated to age,i.e.,the younger the informants are,the greater the initial stops drop,which is in line with pre-syllable dropping of Wa Language,i.e.,the pre-syllable of a word dropped and the rest part gradually evolved into an independent syllable.(3)In the tonal analysis,the low rising tone(13)and the mid-level tone(33)show a significant difference among three groups.As the age decreases,the tonal merger of the two tones becomes more obvious,which is consistent with the findings of some tonal variation studies in Chinese dialects.This sociophoetic study of the synchronic phonetic variations of Kemie Language not only expanded approaches to the phonetic studies of minority languages in China,but also provided new evidence for the phonetic variationist and typological studies of Mon-Khmer Languages.