Tone realization in younger versus older speakers of Nanjing dialect

This article investigates differences of tone realizations and representations between younger and older speakers of Nanjing dialect, spoken in the city of Nanjing, China. We recorded thirty native speakers, divided into two groups according to their ages, reading monosyllabic and disyllabic words. After segmenting the vowels and extracting F0 (fundamental frequency) points, we performed statistical analyses on the slopes and mean values of tones to explore age differences. The results show phonetic and phonological differences for monotones and disyllabic tones. The results also demonstrate the loss of one tone sandhi process in the younger group, a loss which may be due to the influence of standard Mandarin.