ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the history and development of Chinese sociophonetics and its main achievements. Chinese sociophonetics began as a combination of Chinese sociolinguistics and instrumental phonetics around 2000. The emergence of Chinese sociophonetics coincided with the rapid urbanization process in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, building fascinating opportunities to explore interactions between dynamically changing social forces and phonetic variation in Putonghua and Chinese dialects. Chinese sociophonetics differs from many other sociophonetic traditions by its rich body of research on lexical tone—though, as we review, Chinese sociophoneticians explore a wide range of phonetic variables in addition to tone. We illustrate some work in Chinese sociophonetics with a brief case study of tone in Wuxi, and conclude by recommending future research directions for Chinese sociophonetics.
