Chinese Phonetics

AboutEdit

Within China itself, the Chinese language is divided between 7-10 subgroups each with a variation on "Chinese". Due to the variation caused by the large number of speakers, individuals from one subgroup do not always understand individuals from the other 7 subgroups.

The most common form of Chinese is known as "Mandarin", and is the most major influence of the 7-10 subgroups within China and is considered China's main language for this reason. Mandarin is not Mutual intelligibility and generally most words or sentences are capable of being understood by others who speak a version of Mandarin. The language itself originated from Northern China and spread over time. Mandarin is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world and is spoken by 70% of all Chinese within China. When taken as a whole there are a estimated 1 billion speakers of the language; the most of any language in the world. When a VOCALOID is said to have a "Chinese Voicebank", it refers to having a voicebank in this variant of the Chinese language. Common forms of this language is also considered the Lingua franca of China.

Mandarin Chinese has 21 consonants and 16 vowels. They can be combined together to create more than 400 mono-syllabic sounds.^[1] As a tonal language, Mandarin Chinese also have 4 main tones and a neutral tones that distinct different characters by using their tones. However, tones are usually ignored when composing lyrics.

Due to how widespread the language is, it has influenced a number of languages around the area of China, having an influence on both Korean Phonetics and Japanese Phonetics.

VOCALOID and the Mandarin languageEdit

As of 2018, Chinese is considered the second most popular language and has the 3rd largest voicebank selection on offer. However, there is still much unknown about the engine at this time.

Notes on AccentsEdit

Despite the general belief that singers completely lose their accents when they sing, this is not the case in every instance and an accent is possible to be heard even in singing vocals. However, the reason many are led to believe this is that there are several methods of training singers to disguise or otherwise hide their natural accents - they may even adopt an accent that isn't their own for singing. Samples include genres such as western or country, black music such as Jazz or Soul. Singing also uses different muscles to speech, resulting in difference of air pressure and way the throat moves and genres such as Opera are most likely to make a accent appear almost entirely absent.^[2][3]

Mandarin is noted for having hundreds of variations on the language within different localized areas. This is contributed to the large number of speakers and the widespread nature of the Chinese language and circumstances behind the area.

Mainland AccentsEdit

The phonology of Standard Chinese, the official language of China, is modeled on Beijing Mandarin. This is the version of Mandarin VOCALOID also uses.

Taiwanese AccentEdit

Standard Chinese is also spoken in Taiwan. The phonology is slightly different; many Taiwanese usually pronounce retroflex (zh, ch, sh) consonants as alveolar consonants (z, c, s) due to influence from Hokkien. When they do (e.g. in formal situations), they pronounce retroflexes softer than in standard Mandarin.

Due to the meaning of words and changes between the accent, a Taiwanese speaker is not always understood by speakers from Mainland China.

• Xin Hua

Japanese AccentEdit

Japanese-Mandarin accented VOCALOIDs are produced by those who came from Japan. Their voice providers have the Japanese language as their native language, but were used to produce Mandarin-Chinese voicebanks. Therefore the Japanese-Mandarin accent is a non-native Mandarin accent, showing significant and notorious differences in comparison to the native Mandarin accents.

• Hatsune Miku

Phonetic chartEdit

ReferencesEdit

1. ↑ link
2. ↑ explanation for accents in singing and also a lack of
3. ↑ [ http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2013/08/why-british-singers-lose-their-accent-when-singing/ "Why do British singers lose their accents?"]

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