Taiwan Mandarin, a Mandarin Variety Formed under the Social and Language Contact between Various Chinese Dialects and Their Speakers

Abstract

Hsu investigates the tonal range and high pitch tone performance of the second generation of Waishengren, both Mandarin Waishengren and non-Mandarin Waishengren, and their Benshengren peers in Taiwan. Waishengren and Benshengren refer both to a group of people and their dialectal idiosyncracies alike. The findings are: first, there is an ethnic Mandarin gap between second generation Waishengren and Benshengren; second, Waishengren Mandarin can be further subsumed as Mandarin-Waishengren Taiwan Mandarin and non-Mandarin-Waishengren Taiwan Mandarin; third, non-Mandarin Waishengren, though linguistically typologically close to Benshengren as both are non-Mandarin dialects, converge their Mandarin tonal performance toward Mandarin Waishengren; and fourth, the effect of the generational influence of Mandarin dialects, non-Mandarin dialects, and Southern Min is ordered from high to low as Mandarin dialects > non-Mandarin dialects > Southern Min. The study also suggested that the second finding is a hypercorrection of non-Mandarin Waishengren, motivated by their language insecurity.