Of the 1.3 billion residents of China, approximately 850 million speak Mandarin Chinese as their first language. For more than 60 million others, Cantonese Chinese is their first language. Although both languages are sometimes called 'Chinese', the two sound so different that a Mandarin speaker and a Cantonese speaker cannot understand one another. Mandarin, spoken in Beijing and much of northern China, is the official language of mainland China. Cantonese, however, is more common in southern China and Hong Kong. Both languages are tonal, meaning that when pronouncing words, the voice must rise or fall in certain ways. However, Mandarin has four tones, while Cantonese has nine different ones.Which organisational structure does this text primarily use?

. DiscussionAll rhythmic measures in this study confirm the syllable-timing impression of Cantonese and Beijing Mandarin. Theresults show that Cantonese has more extreme rhythmicvalues than Mandarin, French and Italian, which presumablyis contributed by the absence of lexical stress in Cantonese. Asimilar situation is also found in Singaporean Mandarin whichhas far fewer unstressed syllables than Beijing Mandarin. Thedata in [7] shows that Singaporean Mandarin has the lowestnPVI_V value and the highest %V value among all thelanguages in their study, suggesting that SingaporeanMandarin is the most typical syllable-timed language. It willbe of interest to compare more syllable-timed languages withand without lexical stress to assess the effect of lexical stressin syllable-timing.The significant difference in %V values of the two stylesin Cantonese and Mandarin (read speech vs semi-spontaneousspeech) implies that speakers may slightly change theirrhythmic patterns according to speaking styles. This seemsquite possible because read speech and spontaneous speechcan differ in many aspects, including prosody. The stylisticdifference in %V can also be partly explained bysegmentation issues. Initial /j/ and /w/ were consideredconsonantal if there were acoustic cues for segmentation.However, in semi-spontaneous speech, many of these initialglides could not be separated from the following vowels sothey could only be considered vocalic. This contributed to ahigher percentage of vocalic portions in semi-spontaneousspeech. On the other hand, results indicate that Mandarinspeakers spoke faster in semi-spontaneous speech than readspeech. Benton et al. [2] also showed that in Mandarin, genre(news broadcast vs interview) indeed gave significantlydifferent values for various rhythmic measures, whichparallels the stylistic difference found in this study. So far,most studies on speech rhythm use only one speaking style,either read speech or spontaneous speech. More studiescomparing speaking styles are needed in order to furtherexplore the relationship between speech styles and rhythm.The data of Cantonese English and Mandarin Englishposes a challenge to the acoustic measures. The two Englishaccents sound syllable-timed. VarcoC and %V show that theyare closer to syllable-timed than to stress-timed languages, butΔC, nPVI_V and rPVI_C values all suggest that they arecloser to stress-timed languages. The parameters of ΔC, ΔS,nPVI_V, rPVI_C and rPVI_S can only categorise languagesaccording to the auditory impression of speech rhythm classesif the data of the two English accents was excluded. Thissituation highlights the issue of using acoustic measures todetermine speech rhythm of non-native speakers.Results of the averaged syllable durations suggest thatCantonese and Mandarin speakers employed a slowerspeaking rate when they read in English, which is a commonphenomenon of second language speakers. As a result, manyof their syllables would be lengthened compared to the speechof native English speakers. Careful listening to the accented-English speech samples reveals that such lengthening is notsimply due to final-lengthening because these lengthenedsyllables can occur in various positions within an utterance.As expected, difficult words were lengthened more than easywords, but simple words like ‘North Wind’ and ‘Sun’ couldbe lengthened too. Individual speakers differ in the degree ofsuch selective lengthening, but they all reduced their speakingrate in English compared to their native language. Thesespeakers, having a syllable-timed native language, did notreduce unstressed syllables like what native English speakerswould do. Such selective lengthening contributes to a higherdegree of pairwise variability and a larger standard deviationof various intervals, but in an opposite way compared tonative English speakers (having many lengthened syllables vshaving many reduced syllables). Impressionistically, the twoEnglish accents still sounds quite syllable-timed. A slowerspeaking rate and selective lengthening result in thediscrepancy between listeners’ impression and the conclusionbased on some acoustic measures.Normalisation procedures for speaking rate alone may notsolve this problem because the higher variability in duration iscontributed by both speaking rate and selective lengthening.Among the five normalised measures used in this study, onlyVarcoC shows evidence that the two English accents aregrouped with syllable-timed languages. White & Mattys [12]also found some discrepancy between subjective impressionof second language rhythm and the results based on acousticrhythmic measures. Therefore, more studies on secondlanguage rhythm are needed in order to address this issue.5. ConclusionsThis study confirms the syllable-timing impression ofCantonese and Beijing Mandarin with acoustic rhythmicmeasures. Results show that Cantonese has more extremerhythmic values than Mandarin, French and Italian because ofthe lack of lexical stress. A slower speaking rate and selectivelengthening in Cantonese English and Mandarin Englishcontribute to the discrepancy between subjective impressionof their rhythm and the results based on rhythmic measures.The VarcoC and %V parameters give the best classification ofspeech rhythm in this study

Which statement about the diffusion of the English and Chinese languages is true?Group of answer choicesEnglish is spoken in only the United Kingdom and the United States, while Chinese is spoken all over East Asia.The number of English speakers is declining, while the number of Chinese speakers is steadily increasing.English has diffused worldwide, while Chinese is spoken mostly in China.English and Chinese are both spoken worldwide as lingua franca languages.

A learner of Mandarin must learn Chinese characters to speak the language.Group of answer choicesTrueFalse

Which of the following language families is NOT represented in China?

difference between english and chinese intrusment