This thesis reanalyzes data collected from published fieldwork sources and brings a new perspective to Shaoguan Tuhua, the genetically unclassified vernacular speech used in the Shaoguan area, northern Guangdong Province, China. The reanalysis consists of a quantitative study of the Shaoguan Tuhua varieties and some Hakka varieties (the regional lingua franca) and a contact linguistic study on one of the Shaoguan Tuhua varieties, Shibei Shaoguan Tuhua, and its Hakka neighbor, Qujiang Hakka.
This thesis uses a combined methodology. It consists of the traditional Chinese dialectological research methods, phylogenetic network (computational) methods, and contact linguistic frameworks. Neither phylogenetic network methods nor contact linguistic frameworks are sufficiently used in Chinese dialectology. In terms of studying Shaoguan Tuhua, the use of these methodologies is new.
This thesis first of all introduces the historical and sociolinguistic contexts of Shaoguan Tuhua. Shaoguan Tuhua has been in contact with Hakka for about seven hundred years, and Hakka speakers significantly outnumber Shaoguan Tuhua speakers. The majority of Shaoguan Tuhua speakers, especially the younger generation, can speak fluent Hakka.
Based on the historical and sociolinguistic background, this thesis goes on to examine the result of the Shaoguan Tuhua-Hakka contact. A phylogenetic network method is then conducted by drawing distance-based graphs called neighbor-net splits. This thesis encodes the data and generates network graphs using the SplitsTree4 software. The graphs show that on lexical, phonological, and morphosyntactic levels, Shaoguan Tuhua and Hakka do not diverge categorically but the differences are gradual. In the continuum, Shibei Shaoguan Tuhua and Qujiang Hakka form a cluster, which indicates their similarity on all levels. These two varieties are lexically and structurally closer to each other than they are to other varieties in the Shaoguan area—than even to their own sister varieties.
Then, under Van Coetsem’s (1988) framework of “borrowing and imposition”, this thesis proposes that the mechanism of the Qujiang Hakka-Shibei Shaoguan Tuhua transfer of language materials is imposition. This means that the transfer is carried out by those bilinguals who are more fluent in Qujiang Hakka, and the direction of transfer is from Qujiang Hakka (the Source Language) to Shibei Shaoguan Tuhua (the Recipient Language). The proposal is then corroborated by statistical, structural, and sociolinguistic evidence.