An acoustic study of segmentals and suprasegmentals of English in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou

English in China has attracted much research and scholarship in the past few decades, but there is a general paucity of acoustic-phonetic descriptions of English in China. The present study adopts a region-based acoustic approach to thoroughly investigate phonetic features of English spoken by university students from Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, which are arguably the most economically progressive cities in China. Specifically, it aims to describe segmental (vowels and consonants) and suprasegmental (rhythm) features of Beijing English, Shanghai English, and Guangzhou English, and conduct a cross-variety comparison among the three varieties. In addition, the study seeks to determine how sociolinguistic factors such as linguistic background, academic level, and disciplinary major affect the English pronunciation of speakers from Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou.

This study enlisted the participation of 45 female university students from Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou with varying academic levels and disciplinary majors. They were recorded while reading short passages and sentence sets from the test materials. Their speech data was primarily analysed acoustically, with perceptual analysis to complement the acoustic analysis.

Overall, the findings indicate that Beijing English, Shanghai English, and Guangzhou English had both shared features and distinct characteristics. There was a significant difference in the first formant (F1) values of vowels between Beijing English and Guangzhou English; however, no significant differences were found in the second formant (F2) values between the three varieties. There were also significant differences in vowel duration between Beijing English and Shanghai English, and between Shanghai English and Guangzhou English. Speakers from all three cities did not distinguishing certain vowel contrasts to varying degrees. Regarding consonants, aspiration was maintained between voiceless and phonologically voiced stops for speakers from all three cities. Shanghai English had perceptually more rhotic words than Beijing English and Guangzhou English, showing significant differences in F3 values and significant differences in the distances between F2 and F3. In terms of consonantal features, speakers from all three varieties exhibited vowel epenthesis, the substitution of /θ/ and /ð/, and various vocalisations of dark /l/. Rhythmically, the nPVI values were not significantly different between the three varieties.

The linguistic background of the speakers had the most impact on all three varieties of English. Vowel quality and duration were more influenced by sociolinguistic factors, while rhythmic patterning was the least affected.

The findings of this study have helped to advance the understanding of the pronunciation features and the development of English in China, thereby contributing to the linguistic feature pool of Chinese English (CE) as a whole and the positioning of CE in the World Englishes framework.