This chapter presents select signs that show several common stylistic traits of written Chinese. They include classical Chinese elements, mixed lexical compounds with both classical and non-classical components, and classical Chinese grammatical features. There are also many ‘out of vocabulary’ items not usually found in dictionaries. They include aliases for place names and the numerous ad hoc and fleeting abbreviations, whose interpretation crucially depends on background knowledge.

This chapter samples health-related signs, including several public service announcements from past pandemics, medicines, and various offices and departments in a neighborhood community clinic in Shanghai.

Sampled in this chapter are some signs seen in shopping establishements. They include types of businesses, parts of a store, routine steps for making a purchase, (non-cash) payment methods, discount, and receipts.

In this chapter, hotel and hostel signs will be given. It is important to bear in mind that hotels and hostels are only infrequently straightforwardly referred to as places of lodging such as 旅馆 or 旅店. They can be misleadingly called 酒店 ‘alcohol shop’ or 饭店 ‘food shop’.

Reflecting the cultural and regional diversity in China, signs may contain dialectal elements, especially those of the major dialects such as Cantonese, Min, and Shanghai/Wu. Dialects can differ in vocabulary and grammar, and particularly in sound. The differences in sound can sometimes be seen in phonetic transliterations. Dialectal words are those that do not have counterparts in the standard language. They are often written by borrowing standard characters just for the sound without regard for their original meaning (Rebus Principle); they can also be written in specially created dialectal characters. Dialects can also resemble classical Chinese, as they tend to retain features of older Chinese.

This chapter samples basic signs for public transportation. In China, getting around in and between cities is done mostly by public transportation such as bus, metro, and train.

Early language exposure is crucial for acquiring native mastery of phonology, and multilingual exposure results in enhanced phonetic/phonological learning ability in adulthood. It remains unclear, however, whether early language exposure has lasting benefits when the quantity and quality of speaking drop dramatically after childhood. We investigate the production and perception of Arabic in fifteen early-interrupted exposure (i.e., childhood) speakers and fifteen late-exposure (i.e., novice) speakers. We compare the production of both groups to that of a control group of fifteen early uninterrupted exposure (i.e., native monolingual) speakers. The experiment included tasks addressing language proficiency, word production, and speech perception. Early-interrupted exposure speakers outperformed late-exposure speakers on all tasks of the language proficiency diagnostic, while also displaying more native-like perception and production. Our study adds further support to the body of work on the measurable long-term benefits of early language experience for an individual’s phonetic and phonological skills, even when language experience diminishes over time.

This study analyzed the production and perception of Portuguese and English voiceless stops by twelve heritage learners of European Portuguese. Data were collected through two pseudoword reading tasks, a cross-linguistic rated dissimilarity task, and a cross-language perceptual assimilation task. The results show that Canadian English–European Portuguese bilinguals did not perceptually distinguish between aspirated and plain voiceless stops. However, the acoustic analysis revealed that they produced a significant language-specific difference between English aspirated and Portuguese unaspirated voiceless stops. Individual variation was observed in the categorization and production of heritage Portuguese plain stops and correlated with language use and perceived accent ratings.

Based on quasi-spontaneous speech data taken from a map task study designed to test Icelandic intonation, this chapter compares the intonation of declaratives and polar questions (PQs) in moribund North American (heritage) Icelandic (NAmIce), spoken by elderly speakers in Manitoba, Canada, to that of Modern Icelandic (ModIce), spoken by two age groups in Iceland. We find similarities between ModIce and NAmIce that we interpret as maintenance of Icelandic characteristics in NAmIce (e.g., L*+H L% nuclear contour in NAmIce PQs), as well as differences that we interpret as transfer from North American English to NAmIce (e.g., L* H% nuclear contour in NAmIce PQs, L*+H nuclear accent in NAmIce declaratives). These results are in line with previous research on intonation in heritage languages. We do not find pervasive differences between the two ModIce age groups.

This is the first variationist sociolinguistic study of Cantonese tone-merger using conversational recordings. These data differ from experimental data exploring tone mergers: the speech is continuous and spontaneous, the tones appear in diverse contexts, and speakers are from both Toronto and Hong Kong. We investigated the status of three reportedly ongoing mergers: T2/T5忍 / 引, T3/T6 印 / 孕, and T4/T6 仁 / 孕. We measured three cues (i.e., mean pitch, pitch at 90% duration of the syllable, and pitch slope) in 12,000+ tokens from thirty-two speakers. Using normalized duration and speaker pitch, mixed-effects models showed that unmerged tones are statistically distinguishable in spontaneous speech, but that two of the three “ongoing-merger” pairs are fully merged, and the third is nearly merged. Analyses included segmental and suprasegmental (i.e., phrasal position, word position, adjacent tones) factors affecting pitch. We found no differences between heritage and homeland speaker samples.