Normalization of Zhangzhou Citation Tones

The seven citation tones of the Southern Min dialect of Zhangzhou are described impressionistically, and a linguistic-tonetic representation of their acoustics derived from the z-score normalization of the tones of 9 male and 12 female speakers. A normalization of the raw mean tonal data is shown to be slightly superior to a log10 transform, delivering about an eight-fold reduction in the between-speaker tonal variance (normalization index = 8.6). The data are then used to do a preliminary Monte Carlo investigation on how the normalization index changes with the number of speakers used to normalize.