Erhua

Erhua (Template:Zh), also called "erization" or "rhotacization of syllable finals", is a phonological process that adds r-coloring or the er (; ) sound to syllables in spoken Mandarin Chinese. Erhuayin (Template:Zhi) is the pronunciation of "er" after rhotacization of syllable finals.

It is common in most varieties of Mandarin as a diminutive suffix for nouns, though some dialects also use it for other grammatical purposes. The Standard Chinese spoken in government-produced educational and examination recordings features erhua to some extent, as in Template:Tlit 'where', Template:Tlit 'a little', and Template:Tlit 'fun'. Colloquial speech in many northern dialects has more extensive erhua than the standardized language. Southwestern Mandarin dialects such as those of Chongqing and Chengdu also have erhua. By contrast, many Southern Chinese who speak their own languages may have difficulty pronouncing the sound or may simply prefer not to pronounce it, and usually avoid words with erhua when speaking Standard Chinese; for example, the three examples listed above may be replaced with the synonyms Template:Tlit, Template:Tlit, Template:Tlit. Furthermore, erhua is extremely rare or absent in Taiwanese Mandarin speakers.

Only a small number of words in standardized Mandarin, such as Template:Tlit 'two' and Template:Tlit 'ear' have r-colored vowels that do not result from the erhua process. All of the non-erhua r-colored syllables have no initial consonant, and are traditionally pronounced in Beijing dialect and in conservative varieties. In the recent decades, the vowel in the toned syllable er, especially Template:Tlit, has been lowered in many accents, making the syllable come to approach or acquire a quality like ar—i.e. ~ with the appropriate tone.

In some publications, particularly those on Chinese linguistics, the ; in terms with erhua is written with a smaller size to distinguish its non-syllabic nature. This also distinguishes it from the same character being used as a noun meaning 'son'. This practice may have been introduced by Yuen Ren Chao. The small-sized characters have been proposed to Unicode and provisionally assigned by Unicode in 2024.

Standard rules

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

• Coda
  • and are deleted.
  • is deleted and the syllable becomes nasalized.
  • becomes rhotacized.
• Nucleus
  • becomes if it is an underlying .
  • and become rhotacized.
  • and become glides ( and ).
  • is deleted.

Following the rules that coda and are deleted, noted above, the finals in the syllables (bànr) (gàir) are both ; similarly, the finals in the syllables (mèir) and (fènr) are both also . The final in (tàngr) is similar but nasalized, because of the rule that the is deleted and the syllable is nasalized.

The realization of ar, i.e. the erhua of coda-less a, varies. It may be realized as , distinct from anr and air, or it may be merged with the latter two. That is, a word like may be realized with either or depending on the speaker.

Because of the rule that and become glides, the finals of () and () are both , and and are both .

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

IPA and pinyin counterparts of bopomofo finals

	∅	Template:Ubl	Template:Ubl	Template:Ubl	Template:Ubl	Template:Ubl	Template:Ubl	Template:Ubl	Template:Ubl	Template:Ubl	Template:Ubl	Template:Ubl	Template:Ubl
∅	Template:Ubl	Template:Ubl	Template:Ubl	Template:Ubl	—	Template:Ubl	Template:Ubl	Template:Ubl	Template:Ubl	Template:Ubl	Template:Ubl	Template:Ubl	Template:Ubl
Template:Ubl	Template:Ubl	Template:Ubl	—		Template:Ubl	—		Template:Ubl	Template:Ubl	Template:Ubl	Template:Ubl	Template:Ubl	Template:Ubl
Template:Ubl	Template:Ubl	Template:Ubl	Template:Ubl	—		Template:Ubl	Template:Ubl	—		Template:Ubl	Template:Ubl	Template:Ubl	Template:Ubl
Template:Ubl	Template:Ubl	—			Template:Ubl	—				Template:Ubl	Template:Ubl	—	Template:Ubl

Examples

• (yìpíng, one bottle) → (yìpíngr), pronounced
• (gōngyuán, public garden) → (gōngyuánr), pronounced
• (xiǎohái, small child) → (xiǎoháir), pronounced
• (shì) (thing) → (shìr), pronounced

Beijing dialect

Aside from its use as a diminutive, erhua in the Beijing dialect also serves to differentiate words; for example, 'flour' and 'heroin'. Additionally, some words may sound unnatural without rhotacization, as is the case with or ( or 'flower'). In these cases, the erhua serves to label the word as a noun (and sometimes a specific noun among a group of homophones). Since in modern Mandarin many single-syllable words (in which there are both nouns and adjectives) share the same pronunciation, adding such a label on nouns can reduce the complication.

As an example, the syllable may mean one of 'bowl', 'gentleness', 'to take with hand', (a short form of Anhui), (a place name and surname), and 'late', 'night'. However, of these words, only 'bowl', 'the little bowl' can generally have erhua. Further, many people erhua , but only when it means 'night' and not 'late'. The rest never has erhua and erhua attempts will cause incomprehension.

Erhua does not always occur at the end of a word in Beijing dialect. Although it must occur at the end of the syllable, it can be added to the middle of many words, and there is not a rule to explain when it should be added to the middle. For example, 'brick', especially the brick used as a weapon) should not be .

The composition of the erhua system varies within Beijing, with the following variations reported. Apart from sub dialects, many sociological factors are involved, such as gender, age, ethnicity, inner/outer city, south–north.

• Some merge -ar (nucleus a with no coda) with -anr/-air (nucleus a with coda -i/-n), as , while others distinguish them as vs .
• Some merge -er single e with erhua. with -enr/-eir, as . This may depend on phonological environments, such as the tone and the preceding consonant.
• Some merge -ier and -üer with -ir/-inr and -ür/-ünr, as .
• Some merge -uor with -uir/-unr, as .
• Some lose the nasalization of -ngr, thus potentially merging pairs like -ir/-ingr, -enr/-engr and -angr/-anr.

In other Mandarin varieties

The realization and behavior of erhua are very different among Mandarin dialects. Tones are marked by the tone diacritics of the corresponding tone in Standard Chinese, and do not necessarily represent the actual realization of tones. Some rules mentioned before are still generally applied, such as the deletion of coda and and the nasalization with the coda . Certain vowels' qualities may also change. However, depending on the exact dialect, the actual behavior, rules and realization can differ greatly.

Chongqing and Chengdu

Erhua in Chengdu and Chongqing is collapsed to only one set: , Many words become homophonous as a result, for example 'board' and 'booklet', both pronounced with the appropriate tone. It is technically feasible to write all erhua in Pinyin simply as -er.

Besides its diminutive and differentiating functions, erhua in these two dialects can also make the language more vivid. In Chongqing, erhua can also be derogatory.

Different from Beijing, erhua can be applied to people's names and kinship words, such as (diminutive of the name Cao Ying ) and 'little sister' ().

Erhua occurs in more names of places, vegetables and little animals compared to Beijing.

Erhua causes sandhi for the reduplication of monosyllabic words. In both dialects, the application of erhua to a monosyllabic noun usually results in its reduplication, e.g. 'dish' becomes 'little dish'. The second syllable invariably has (Template:Zh) or the second tone.

In Chongqing, erhua causes sandhi in some bisyllabic reduplicative adverbs, where second syllable acquires Template:Zhi (Template:Zhi) or the first tone.

Zhongyuan dialects

Some dialects of Zhongyuan Mandarin preserve the coda . They are typically deleted in erhua like with the codas and .

Some dialects distinguish pairs like -ir/-inr and -ür/-ünr, making words like 'little chicken' and 'today' different. For example, in Huojia, the former is while the latter is .

Nanjing dialect

Erhua causes the medial to be dropped and the Template:Zh (third) tone to assimilate to the Template:Lang-zh (second) tone, the original tone of the morpheme .

The Nanking dialect preserves the checked syllable (Template:Zh) and thus possesses a coda Template:IPAslink. erhua checked syllables are realized with .

Non-rhotic erhua

Many Mandarin dialects have a handful of words exhibiting a fossilized lexical form of nasal-coda erhua. An example is 'nasal mucus', cf. the etymon .

In other Chinese languages

Wu

Wu Chinese varieties exhibit a similar phenomenon with the morpheme , generally pronounced . The erhua coda is almost always a nasal coda instead of a rhotic one. Some lects' erhua also causes vowel umlaut. The exception is Hangzhounese, which adds a er² final instead, which is phonotactically a rhotic.

For example, (Shanghainese: mo-cian, 'Mahjong') is etymologically (mo-ciaq-ng 'little sparrow'), from (mo-ciaq, 'sparrow'). The syllable (ciaq, ) undergoes erhua with the morpheme (ng, ), resulting in the syllable cian , which is then represented by the homophonous but etymologically unrelated word cian . Further examples include:

• Addition of rhotic coda (Examples from Hangzhounese)

• iaq⁷ 'duck' → iaq⁷-er²
• tsy¹-liau³ 'cicada' → tsy¹-liau³-er²
• shiau³-kuei³-dei² 'brat' → shiau³-kuei³-dei²-er²

• Addition of nasal coda (Examples from Wenzhounese)

• dei⁶-sy¹ 'crab' → dei⁶-sy¹-ng²
• tseo³ 'jujube' → tseo³-ng²

• Historical nasal coda resulting in umlaut (Examples from Shanghainese)

• lin⁶-doq⁸ 'icicle' → lin⁶-daon⁶ (often mistakenly written as , though etymologically correct spelling supported by nearby lects.)
• ho¹ 'shrimp' → hoe¹

Yue

Yue languages such as Cantonese have a small number of terms with (ji⁴, ) that exhibits tone change, such as the term (hat¹ ji⁴⁻¹, , 'beggar'). Cantonese also exhibits a diminutive formation known as changed tone (Template:Zh) by altering the base tone contour to that of the dark rising tone (), such as the term (gwong² zau¹ waa⁶⁻², 'Cantonese'), which etymologically may be an erhua based construction.

External links

• .
• .
• Erhua pronunciation MP3 on MIT OpenCourseWare. The accompanying text is located on page 40 of the notes.
• Blog discussion of functions of erhua in meaning, with sound samples.