Northeastern "W"

[marcopolo79]

How would you describe the typical Northeastern pronounciation of words beginning with a "w"? I was trying to exlpain to a friend how it sounds to me something in between a "w" and a "v", but he was insistant that the "v" sound is absolutely foriegn to Northern Chinese, yet I still hear it every time I listen to programming from the mainland. Who do you think is right?

[39degN]

Yeah, i think V is aboviously foreign. actually there is no huge difference btw W and V to a northern mandarin speaker. thats why most mandarin speakers have accent with those two letters.

[wushijiao]

It is at least true that many norterners, when speaking English, say "walue" for "value", "wery" for "very", unlike Shanghaiese who have the v sound in the local language.

something in between a "w" and a "v",

Is this a 东北 thing perhaps?

[39degN]

i m not sure weather this is a totally northeastern thing, but at least some friends from beijing and other (northern) places have the same problem too.

[Jose]

sounds to me something in between a "w" and a "v"

I agree. It sounds to me like that too.

When I was living in England a couple of years ago, I had a Chinese friend from Heilongjiang. His name was Wei, and the English people, after asking him his name, would always call him "Vei".

Asking Chinese people about this is not very useful because they don't have two separate sounds v and w, so they're not really aware of the difference. (Except Shanghaiese speakers, maybe, according to Wushijiao).

[anonymoose]

Certainly here in Dalian, a lot of people pronounce 晚 as van. There are also other pronunciation idiosyncrasies, such as the tendancy to pronounce 白， 带， 开，来 etc. as bei, dei, kei, and lei respectively.

[Jose]

Actually, the v and w sounds get confused in other languages and language families too. The word "winter" is shared by several Germanic languages, but in German it is pronounced as "vinter", while I understand the Dutch pronunciation is something between English v and w, which shouldn't be very different from that Northern mandarin w. Maybe a Dutch speaker can confirm if this is the case.

[ala]

Asking Chinese people about this is not very useful because they don't have two separate sounds v and w, so they're not really aware of the difference. (Except Shanghaiese speakers, maybe, according to Wushijiao).

Yeah, Shanghainese and other Wu dialects (over 80 million speakers) have both w and v, and they are phonologically separate. Shanghainese also distinguishes semivowel w from zero-initial u. Non-Wu Chinese speakers have a really hard time mastering the u, w, v trio.

Shanghainese:

乌 u

吴 wu

无 vu

喂 uei

为 wei

饭 vei

稳 uen

混 wen

文 ven

挖 ua (short)

滑 wa (short)

罚 va (short)

淮 waa (long), as in 淮海路 Waahei lu

What goes with what is not very systematic with Mandarin, but quite derivable from Middle Chinese phonology.

such as the tendancy to pronounce 白， 带， 开，来 etc. as bei, dei, kei, and lei respectively.

Most dialects from mid (Shanghai) to northeastern China pronounce "ai" 爱 as "ei"