Dallas: SIL International, 2008. — 23 p. 德保县马隘镇马隘街府壮词汇表。Audio in WAV format (run time - 50:05).
A sociolinguistic survey of the Dejing Zhuang dialect area, Guangxi, China. 490 lexical item - Chinese, pinyin, English, Zhuang. I noticed more inter-speaker variation among these three speakers than I noticed at the previous two datapoints. When one speaker had a distinct pronunciation from the other two speakers, it was most often Speaker 1, the oldest. Initially, Speaker 1 was sitting immediately to my right, and when I would ask for a word to be pronounced, he would be the first, followed by Speakers 2 and 3/. After the first day (up through item 201), however, he moved to the futher side of the table, so that the pronunciation order was Speaker 2, Speaker 3, then Speaker 1; nevertheless, he still often produced an initial pronunciation that was distinct from the other two speakers. The most outspoken on the proper form of a word was usually Speaker 3/. The recording was done by speaker 3/. Vowel length was often hard to hear, in the absence of any contrasting pairs. In some cases, the vowels seemed very short, especially in some checked syllables. In other cases, vowel length was more audible as variation in the tone—that is, the tone (specifically the ³³⁴) sounded as if two beats were lower than the final beat. Some diphthongs were similar, with one vowel quality sounding as two beats, compared to one beat of the off-glide. I never marked length on syllables with only a single vowel nucleus and no coda, though in terms of phonetic length some of these were equal to other vowels (in diphthongs or closed syllables) that were marked as long. In unclear cases, I followed the length of the transcriptions from Zhang et al 1999. Tone qualities were also sometimes difficult to categorize. I will describe the tone categories we think we heard.