The Imposition of Cantonese on Mandarin in the City of Guangzhou

While many research studies have described Cantonese-Mandarin contact and the languages’ mutual influence in Guangdong Province, few of them delve into the linguistic mechanism that triggers Cantonese’s material (e.g. words, pronunciations, and/or grammar) transfer to Mandarin. This paper will work to explain this mechanism in Van Coetsem’s (1988) framework of “Borrowing and Imposition”. The Cantonese-to-Mandarin transfer is a case of imposition, with Cantonese as the linguistically dominant language and Cantonese L1 speakers as the agent of the transfer. Examples both from previous studies and from multimedia materials are used to illustrate that the seemingly discrete phenomena at all lexical, phonological, and syntactic levels can be analyzed through the same imposition framework. The imposition of materials from Cantonese on Mandarin is caused by and compensates for the source language (Cantonese) speakers’ lack of proficiency in Mandarin, the recipient language.