For my phonetics course (LIGN 210) this quarter, I described the sound system of Chongqing Chinese (重庆话), the variety of Southwestern Mandarin I grew up speaking. About 32 million people speak it, but it is often filed under Sichuan Chinese or treated as close enough to Standard Mandarin to skip.

I recorded a native speaker producing minimal pairs for every consonant and vowel, plus the North Wind and the Sun passage, and measured the recordings in Praat. Some differences from Standard Mandarin:

  • No retroflexes. 吃 ‘eat’ is [tsʰi³¹], with an alveolar affricate.
  • No [n] at the start of a syllable. Words that begin with /n/ in Standard Mandarin begin with /l/, so 泥 ‘mud’ is [li³¹].
  • [x] becomes [f] before [u]. 虎 ‘tiger’, [xu²¹⁴] in Standard Mandarin, is [fu²¹⁴].
  • A voiced labiodental /v/, which Standard Mandarin lacks: 屋 ‘house’ is [vu³¹].
  • Glottal stops between syllables, as in 木偶 ‘puppet’ /mu³¹ʔou⁴⁴/. Earlier descriptions do not mention these.

All four tones can be heard on a single syllable: 乌 [vu⁴⁵] ‘dark’, 屋 [vu³¹] ‘house’, 雾 [vu⁴¹] ‘fog’, and 舞 [vu²¹⁴] ‘dance’. In my recordings, the “high falling” tone (T3) dips below the “middle falling” one (T2), possibly because of creaky voice, which also makes automatic pitch tracking less reliable.

Time-normalized F0 contours of the four Chongqing Chinese tones

The six Chongqing Chinese monophthongs plotted by F1 and F2

The data and scripts are on GitHub.