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Which accent features? Tourist guide filmed doing aggressive selling


Wippen (inactive)

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I went over this video news story in class. The news is really funny. A guide in Heilongjiang (which is located in North China) was videoed telling guests they were basically the sheep being slaughtered for three months of the year, the nine months of the year was spent sharpening the knife. She basically wanted them to part with more money than they had already paid. The tone on her part is aggressive selling.

 

The teacher told us as a side remark there was a regional accent coming through. She didn't expand.

I think she may just mean the Northern 儿化. I can also hear possibly the 月 and 右 being tonally perhaps a bit off. I am curious about this accent and what can others detect in the accent in terms either vowels, consonants, prosody or stress?

 

Link to Video here.

 

Edited by Tøsen
clarification on the location of Heilongjiang
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2 hours ago, 陳德聰 said:

To the untrained Southern ear, all I can tell you is that it is a “Northern” accent.

Cmon.... I had got that far.

 

I was hoping for more specifics since our teacher did not elaborate. I suspect she just means the erhua and then perhaps the items I suggested.

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Listen to some of her w's especially when she's saying 玩儿, many of them have a 'v' sound to them e.g. they sound like vanr instead of wanr.  Check out from 1.51 onwards, that's when it's very obvious and some of her other words have a stronger accent - still can't figure out exactly what she's saying around 1.54 玩儿得够gar?的.

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20 minutes ago, imron said:

Listen to some of her w's especially when she's saying 玩儿, many of them have a 'v' sound to them e.g. they sound like vanr instead of wanr.  Check out from 1.51 onwards, that's when it's very obvious and some of her other words have a stronger accent - still can't figure out exactly what she's saying around 1.54 玩儿得够gar?的.

Really helpful comments

 

I found the same video on QQ and there are subtitles on some of it, also on the sentence you mention. They suggest 玩得咯儿嘎的  whatever that is.

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@Publius Your analysis was exactly what I was hoping to get but didn't think I would. You went above and beyond ! Thanks.

 

With regards to the following, really chuffed you confirmed that. You also used the appropriate phonetics to describe these sounds. Thanks.

44 minutes ago, Publius said:

月 [ɥɤ] instead of [ɥe

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1 hour ago, Publius said:

There's also a lot of [ɤ] (哦) sounds.

For the longest time I thought 剥 in 剥水果 was pronounced bé because that's how the people around me always said it, at some point though I realised 'hang on, bé isn't even a proper Mandarin syllable'.  That wasn't even too far north (Hebei, just near where the Great Wall goes in to the sea).

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i could only recognise dongbeihua but more regional that that I wouldn't know. I think I can pick out a Beijing accent quite easily 

 

Actually an interesting question maybe for @Publius or any native speakers on here: how regionally specific can you detect a Chinese accent? i get the impression that chinese accents are much more uniform than many native english speaking accents. For example, In the UK or Ireland I can narrow an English accent down to cities or counties fairly easily 

 

 

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Not a native, but my impression is that most people don't get a lot of exposure to dialects/accents outside of standard mandarin and what's spoken in and where they live.  There's also a stigma associated with speaking in local dialect and accent. 

 

So while it probably is possible to identify the region/county/town by differences in accent and dialect, lack of exposure to those accents makes it difficult for most people except within a certain radius of where they live. 

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Good question! And good answer!

 

Yes, I think lack of exposure is definitely a reason. Most people nowadays speak a hybridized version of Putonghua at least publicly, e.g. 川普、广普、陕普 etc. And for good reason: if they speak their mother tongue, they may not understand each other, especially in the south where mountains and rivers and lakes means travel and contact were rare until very recently and the language has evolved in isolated pockets for so long that in Fujian for example, 闽东话, 闽南话, 闽北话, 闽中话 are mutually unintelligible. When I was in Yunnan, the locals thought I was from Tianjin, which is very amusing, because to me 天津话 is soooo different...

 

Another factor to consider is geography. UK is, relatively speaking, a small country (it's about the same size as Sichuan -- countries look larger on the map the closer they are to the poles), but has like what, hundreds of dialects/accents. Because the English language originated there. The US, on the other hand, is much more uniform. If you ask a 四川人 where another 四川人 is from, he will do a better job than a generic Mandarin speaker.

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16 hours ago, Publius said:

And 三十多度四十多度 is realized as 'sānrduōdù sìrduōdù'.

 

Lived in Dongbei, can confirm.  I remember the first time I heard this, I thought "Really, we're just going to drop the ten out of all the numbers?"

 

Although I have to say, I always found 多儿钱 much easier to say than 多少钱.

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20 minutes ago, somethingfunny said:

多儿钱 much easier to say than 多少钱

I understood the wit and laughed.

However, 儿 and 少 have different tones. I think they say "er" with third tone or is it neural (In Beijing at least) when saying 多er 钱. Is 儿 second er neutral? If neutral then you are right.

 

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9 hours ago, imron said:

Not a native, but my impression is that most people don't get a lot of exposure to dialects/accents outside of standard mandarin and what's spoken in and where they live.  There's also a stigma associated with speaking in local dialect and accent. 

 

So while it probably is possible to identify the region/county/town by differences in accent and dialect, lack of exposure to those accents makes it difficult for most people except within a certain radius of where they live. 

 

Beijing has a lot of non Beijingers especially amongst the younger generation so interaction and exposure is high.  I wonder if they can detect a regional accent per se rather than individual traits

 

 

8 hours ago, Publius said:

The US, on the other hand, is much more uniform. 

 

 

Well I wouldn't fully agree with that, regional parts of USA differs quite a lot from my experience but given western people are exposed to American accents regularly through media, interaction etc since childhood it's much easier to tell. NYC and New Jersey seem different to me

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1 hour ago, DavyJonesLocker said:

Beijing has a lot of non Beijingers especially amongst the younger generation so interaction and exposure is high.  I wonder if they can detect a regional accent per se rather than individual traits

Yes but they don't speak their local dialect. They speak standard mandarin with varying degrees of accent. The more well-educated, the more socioeconomically successful, the less the accent. Sometimes you can tell the general region, such as Dongbei, Xibei, Guangdong, Jiangzhe, etc, but not much more. It's like the foreigners in the UK, you detect a trace of Eastern European accent in someone's English, but whether they're from Warsaw or Budapest, you don't know. When they do start to speak their mother tongue which in theory could provide enough information to geolocate them, you don't understand a word.

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