When Ongoing Historical Sound Change Meets with Social Factors

Language is always on the way of change from a variationist perspective. Diachronically, the phonetics and phonology of a language result from historical processes; synchronically, the lexicon is subject to social and idiosyncratic variations. In this connection, the present regional, social, and idiosyncratic variations across speech communities in a kindred language group are of central interest to historical linguistics as well as sociophonetics, since they pursue the facts of sound change and the mechanisms of sound variations and thus probe into the past and even predict the future of the phonetics and phonology of that language group (Labov, 1994, 2001; Foulkes & Docherty, 2006). In this paper, I will discuss a particular case where the internal historical sound change meets with external social factors, namely how the post-oralization of the nasal initial consonants in Chinese dialects groups (Hu, 2007) are influenced by the authoritative Standard Chinese.