Erhua

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Érhuà (Chinese: 儿化; also called érhuàyīn 儿化音) refers to a phonological process that adds r-coloring or the "ér"(儿) sound (transcribed in IPA as /ɚ/) to syllables in spoken Mandarin Chinese. It is most common in the speeches of North China, especially in the Beijing dialect, as a diminutive suffix for nouns, though some dialects also use it for other grammatical purposes. The Standard Mandarin spoken in government-produced educational and examination recordings features erhua to some extent, as in 哪儿 (nǎr) ("where"), 一点儿 (yìdiǎnr) ("a little"), or 好玩儿 (hǎowánr) ("fun"). Colloquial speech in many northern dialects have more extensive erhua than the standardized language. Conversely, many Southern Chinese find the sound distasteful and usually avoid words with erhua when speaking standard Mandarin, replacing the above examples with 哪里 (nǎlǐ), 一点 (yìdiǎn), or 好玩 (hǎowán).

Only a small number of words in standardized Mandarin have r-colored vowels that do not result from the erhua process, such as 二 "two", 耳 "ear", etc. All of these non-erhua r-colored syllables are pronounced as [ɑɚ] with no initial consonant. All other instances of r-colored vowels are a result of erhua applying to originally non-r-colored syllables.

The basic rules controlling the surface pronunciation of erhua are as follows:

• Coda [i] and [n] are deleted.
• Coda [ŋ] is deleted, but the syllable becomes nasalized.
• Main vowels [i] and [y] become glides and have a [ə] added, which is rhoticized as [ɚ].
• Certain vowels are changed: [a] becomes [ɑ]; [e], [z̩] and [ʐ̩] become [ə]; [ɛ] in the finals [iɛn] and [yɛn] becomes [ɑ] (but it remains in the finals [iɛ] and [yɛ]).

The following chart shows how the finals from the above chart are affected by the addition of this suffix:

The behavior of retroflexed finals provides some evidence for the phonemic analysis of main vowels. The fact that [iɛn] and [yɛn] become [iɑɻ] and [yɑɻ] confirms their analysis as /ian/ and /yan/ (rather than /iən/ and /yən/), and the differing behavior of [z̩]/[ʐ̩] and [i] suggests that these should not be merged (contrary to Pinyin). The behavior of [ə] and [ɤ], however, is problematic, since it suggests that they should not be merged, contrary to most analyses. (An alternative, consistent with retroflex behavior, would be to merge [ə] and [z̩]/[ʐ̩] as a single /ə/ phoneme and maintain [ɤ] as a separate phoneme occurring only in a single /ɤ/ final. Some evidence for this comes from standard Beijing pronunciation, where [ə] and [z̩]/[ʐ̩] are simple vowels but "[ɤ]" is actually a complex diphthong, pronounced approximately as [ɯʌ] -- a combination of the vowels in Standard American "put" and "putt"}}.)

Examples

• 一瓶 (yìpíng) (one bottle) → 一瓶儿 (yìpíngr), pronounced "yìpírng"
• 公园 (gōngyuán) (public garden) →　公园儿 (gōngyuánr), pronounced "gōngyuár"
• 小孩 (xiǎohái) (small child) → 小孩儿 (xiǎoháir), pronounced "xǐaohár"
• 事 (shì) (thing) → 事儿 (shìr), pronounced "shèr"

External links

• 北京话儿 Beijing Pirate t-shirt - a pun on erhua
• Erhua pronunciation MP3 on MIT OpenCourseWare
• blog discussion of functions of Erhua in meaning, with sound samples