Dissertation Defense for: Holman Tse: "Beyond the Monolingual Core and out into the Wild: A Variationist Study of Early Bilingualism and Sound Change in Toronto Heritage Cantonese”

Dissertation Defense for: Holman Tse, PhD Candidate

This dissertation focuses on variation and change in the vowel system of Toronto Heritage Cantonese with the goal of pushing variationist research on sound change beyond its monolingually oriented core (Nagy 2016) and in approaching the study of heritage languages from the perspective of spontaneous speech. It addresses whether or not there is evidence for contact-induced inter-generational vowel shifts, mergers, and splits in native vocabulary. It also addresses the extent to which demographic, ethnic orientation, or language use factors may account for these changes. The data comes from the Heritage Language Variation and Change in Toronto Project (Nagy 2011) and includes hour-long sociolinguistic interviews from Toronto residents of different age, sex, and generational backgrounds speaking in Cantonese along with Ethnic Orientation Questionnaire data and a picture description task from each speaker. The mean F1/F2 of each vowel category from each of 32 speakers were measured in native (and integrated English) vocabulary. The results show lack of vowel shifts, evidence for merger in progress of /y/ ~ /u/, and evidence for a pre-nasal split in /ɛ/. Factors related to Cantonese proficiency predicted both the merger and split. The lack of the same structural changes from Hong Kong speakers further supports an account based on contact-induced change. These findings challenge Labov’s Transmission and Diffusion model and suggest more sociolinguistic engagement with theoretical models of contact-induced change (cf. Thomason & Kaufman 1988, van Coetsem 2000).