Long'an Thowa (Zhuang)
Phonological description, sound variation and change on vowel length contrast, and tone contextual variation in a Zhuang variety. Phonological description was done together with Dr. Zihe Li in Peking University and Hei Vangz in UC Berkeley. The project on tone contextual variation is joint work with Dr. Zihe Li.
Long’an Thowa is a Zhuang (Tai-Kadai) variety spoken in Long’an County, Guangxi, China. Building on my fieldwork, this project approaches the language from three angles: describing its sound system, understanding how the vowel length contrasts is changing, and analyzing its tone contextual variation.
Phonological description
A description of the consonant, vowel, and tone systems of Long’an Thowa, based on fieldwork recordings. Fieldwork and analysis were joint work with Dr. Zihe Li in Peking University and Hei Vangz in UC Berkeley.
Status: manuscript being submitted to the Journal of the International Phonetic Association.
Vowel length contrast in variation
Long’an Thowa contrasts long and short vowels, but speakers do not all realize or perceive this contrast in the same way. Through paired production and perception experiments, I examine how speakers weight different acoustic cues to vowel length, whether production and perception line up, and what role contact with other languages plays in the direction of change.
Presented at: LabPhon 19 (Hanyang University, 2024; poster) and the 2025 Annual Meeting of the LSA (Philadelphia; talk). See publications for the proceedings papers.
Tone contextual variation
An ongoing study of tone contextual variation, combining acoustic analysis of fieldwork data with phonological analysis. This is joint work with Dr. Zihe Li (Peking University).
Status: paper in preparation for ICPhS.