Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2014 November 7

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November 7

L's and w's from Mandarin speaker

I have a friend whose native language is Sichuanese Mandarin. His accent is not generally noticeable except that he regularly pronounces his l's with something close to a w sounds. Examples include building and HLS, where both l's seem very much like w's to me. Sichuanese_Mandarin#Initials suggests that the dialect lacks the [l] ("On the other hand, five initials in Beijing do not exist in Sichuanese: [tʂ], [tʂʰ], [ʂ], [ʐ] and [l]".) Is he just replacing that with a w? Thanks! ÷seresin 05:13, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

I currently live in Sichuan, and from what I know, /l/ does not occur in the coda of a syllable in Sichuanese (and I think Mandarin in general), so many people here replace it with a velar glide. As a result, "all" sounds something like [ɑʊ̯]. I think the fact that English /l/ in the syllable coda is velarized and thus quite close to /w/ also affects this. At the same time, /na/ and /la/ are merged in Sichuanese, and often this carries over when people speak English. I hear people pronounce "nine" as "line", "nap" as "lap" or vice versa all the time. I keep trying to get Sichuanese speakers to hear the difference between [læp] and [næp] or [ɑɫ] and [ɑʊ̯], but it's hard for them to even hear the difference. However, when the /l/ is at the beginning of a syllable and the next sound isn't some type of /æ/ or /a/, as in "little", "late", or "long", people don't seem to have any problem with it. --Terfili (talk) 07:19, 7 November 2014 (UTC)