Typology of the Vowels, Consonants, and Tones of the Chinese Dialects

Linguistic typology refers to classification of structural types that occur across human languages, and the patterns found in typological generalizations are language universals. The two best known publications in this area of research are (i) Greenberg (1978) which is based on a sample representative of 209 languages developed by SAP (the Stanford Archiving Project) and (ii) Maddieson (1984) which is based on UPSID (UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database including the inventories of the sound systems of 317 languages. However, the typological generalizations presented in both publications are inferred from comparisons of the sounds of languages other than the Chinese dialects. In fact both SAP and UPSID consist of only three Chinese dialects. The aims of this research are:to make typological generalizations of the sounds and sound systems of the Chinese dialects through classification of the vowel phonemes, consonant phonemes, and tonemes of an areally and genetically balanced representative sample of the Chinese dialects;to provide explanations for such typological generalizations, such as the principle of maximal vowel dispersion and the principle of maximal perceptual contrast, etc., andto compare the findings in this study with those detailed in Greenberg (1978) and Maddieson (1984).The typology generalizations about the sounds and sound systems of the Chinese dialects in this study are not only subjects of importance in themselves, but also the prelude to formulating theories concerning the evolution of the sound system of Chinese.