Regional dialect leveling in Mandarin Chinese: The case of locative variation in the Chengdu dialect

This paper studies the variation that stems from language contact between the suffix -tou, a locative marker in the Chengdu dialect spoken in Southwest China, and its standard Chinese counterpart -mian. The data are drawn from sociolinguistic interviews with 40 native speakers of the Chengdu dialect. It is shown that the standard Chinese form -mian has outnumbered -tou in terms of occurrence, suggesting a change in progress over apparent time that essentially involves a dialect leveling that results from language standardization and contact-induced convergence. Meanwhile, the two variants undergo certain stylistic reallocation and begin to serve new socio-stylistic roles. To our knowledge, this is the first study that systematically investigates the variation of Chinese locatives. © John Benjamins Publishing Company.