A Diachronic Study of Vowel Harmony in Chinese Loanwords in the Ordos Dialect
67th Annual Meeting of the PIAC, Gotemba 2025
Ordos City is bordered by Shanxi, Shaanxi, and Ningxia. This unique geographical positioning has facilitated the absorption of numerous Chinese loanwords into the Ordos dialect through linguistic contact. The etymology, semantic analysis, and evolutionary processes of these words, alongside the real pronunciation of loanword phrases and phenomena like phonetic addition and subtraction, have been the main focus of prior research on loanwords in the Ordos dialect. however, the phonetic modifications in loanwords from the perspective of vowel harmony have not received much attention. This study draws upon recorded pronunciations of loanwords documented by domestic Mongolian scholars since 1957 and is complemented by a spoken corpus of the Ordos dialect. It systematically examines vowel harmony in Chinese loanwords, leading to the following key points: 1. Vowel harmony limits the use of Chinese words previously borrowed into the Ordos dialect. Their phonetic structure conforms to the Mongolian contrast between tense and lax vowels, rounding harmony, and the dialect-specific [ʊ+ʊ] and [ʉ+ʉ] harmony rules, undergoing notable transformations that reflect the systematic phonological adaptation of Chinese loanwords in the Ordos dialect. Vowel harmony is still a limiting factor in some newly emerging Chinese loanwords. However, an analysis of spoken corpus data shows that this constraint is not uniformly stable, exhibiting certain variances. 2. New patterns are evident in the phonetic evolution of loanwords in the modern Ordos dialect. In the past, certain loanwords within this dialect strictly adhered to vowel harmony rules and were fully localized. Nonetheless, the pronunciations of these words are becoming more similar to those of the original language. Particularly for newly popular Chinese loanwords like ” Douyin,” “Daohang,” and “Liuliang,” they preserve more of the parent language’s phonetic characteristics in their pronunciation. However, it is important to note that loanwords retain Ordos prosodic patterns despite phonetic approximation.