Patterned Vowel Variation in Mandarin Loanword Adaptation: Evidence from a Dictionary Corpus

This quantitative study examines vowel adaptation patterns in English-based Standard Mandarin (SM) loanwords drawn from a dictionary corpus. The findings are: (i) English non-central vowels are mostly matched in backness in SM, (ii) English high and low vowels have a strong tendency to be retained as high and low respectively in SM, whereas matches for English mid vowels mostly vary between mid and low in SM; (iii) the match between mid and low vowels and that between mid and high vowels are tolerated to various degrees, but a match between high and low monophthong vowels rarely occurs; (iv) a rounding mismatch rarely occurs for English unrounded vowels in the adaptation process, whereas non-high back rounded vowels, mid central vowels, and back diphthongs can be matched with an unrounded correspondent in SM. Possible explanations for and theoretical implications of these variation patterns are discussed.