The Tonal System of Singapore Mandarin

This paper presents an acoustic study of the tonal system of Singapore Mandarin and compares the results with those of Beijing and Taiwan (e.g. Xu 1997, Shih 1988). The results show that Singapore Mandarin differs from the other varieties in a number of ways, particularly in the realisation of Tone 2, which is marked by a low level stretch not found in the other varieties. This system is also influenced by the sociolinguistic variables of gender and language background. Overall, the results support previous studies in showing that phonologically identical tonal systems can exhibit dialectal variation in realisation, while the intra-dialectal variation suggests that tonal realisation can be used for indexical purposes.