A preliminary study on third tone sandhi in Malaysian Mandarin / Poh Shin Chiew

Mandarin Chinese has increased in importance among the Chinese community in Malaysia. At present, not only is Mandarin the only medium of instruction in Chinese schools, it has also become a lingua franca of local Chinese Malaysians of various dialect groups. With the expansion of the Global Chinese concept, numerous studies have been carried out on the Mandarin used in Malaysia (henceforth, Malaysian Mandarin). However, these studies have mostly focused on lexical and syntactic aspects rather than on the phonetic system of Malaysian Mandarin. In an attempt to begin filling this gap, and to better understand the development of sound systems in varieties of Mandarin within the concept of Global Chinese, this paper examines the acoustic characteristics of the third tone sandhi in Malaysian Mandarin. A nursey rhyme which consists of nineteen third tone (T3) syllables were used to collect production data from 44 Chinese Malaysian undergraduate students. The findings indicate that generally, the T3 sandhi phenomena in Malaysian Mandarin matches the sandhi rule of Standard Chinese. However, the acoustic realization of T3 in terms of pitch contour and voice quality show some difference. In addition, the implementation of T3 sandhi is also affected by the syntactic and rhythm structure if a disyllabic or trisyllabic T3 sequence occurs across two foots. The findings suggest that the prosodic structure in Malaysian Mandarin may be developing differently from Standard Mandarin.