Mandarin Accent of English
Like all non-native accents of English (that is what we used to call a "Foreign accent", as opposed to what in the theatre is called a "Regional Dialect), English with a Beijing Mandarin accent can have many forms, depending on the speaker's experience speaking English, who their teacher was, whether they have traveled extensively to English-speaking countries, etc. As a result, there is a wide spectrum of possibilities for this accent.
I have made a breakdown for a fairly "strong" accent, that we can "dial back" (that is, towards General American English) depending on the character's background and circumstances. There is a PDF file which presents the various sounds of English individually in a chart, with each one written out in the International Phonetic Alphabet. If you are unfamiliar with IPA, you can listen to the sounds associated with the symbols on my website here. (note this is a Flash resource, so iOS devices can’t access it — If you have to look at an IPA chart on iOS, use this version instead.)
Also, I have created audio files to accompany this handout. You can either access these audio files from this webpage, or you can download them ALL in a single .zip file if you want to put them on your phone or iPod. I would import them into iTunes, or some kind of equivalent, to do that. They are all in .mp3 format. You can also get all the audio as a single, large mp3 file, if you prefer.
The various vowels are referred to here by their Lexical Set names (a word that is supposed to be representative of the group of words that share the same vowel, so FLEECE stands in for words with the EE (IPA [i] ) vowel.) I have carefully made sure that there is time after the words in the word lists and after each practice sentence for you to repeat what you hear. Drilling is important in learning the sounds.
You should have listened to the Audio Samples below and read the Accent Overview before accessing these files. It is worth noting that as I demonstrate each sound, I tend to do a fairly STRONG accent of Mandarin-English, and you may be doing a LIGHTER version of the accent, depending of course on your character choices. I figure it’s better at this point to be a bit too strong than too light.
- Overview
- Consonants
- FLEECE & happY
- KIT
- DRESS
- TRAP
- Guarantee
- BATH
- PALM
- LOT
- THOUGHT
- GOOSE
- MUSIC
- FOOT
- STRUT
- HURRY
- commA & lettER
- NURSE
- FACE
- PRICE
- CHOICE
- MOUTH
- GOAT
- R-Coloured Diphthongs
In 2012, I participated in a panel on Asian Accents for the Voice and Speech trainers Association, VASTA. Though my part of the panel focused on Japanese accented English, my colleague Steven Eng, who teaches at NYU, prepared a breakdown of Mandarin, Standard Mandarin Chinese as an Accent. This is available online via our Asian Accent website, where you'll find resources for Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese.
Audio Samples
From Steven Eng
Beijing Mandarin Sample (male)—Li Baodong, PRC's Permanent Representative to the UN from 2010 to 2013.
Beijing Mandarin Sample 2 (male)—Chen Kaige, acclaimed film director.
Beijing Mandarin Sample (female)—Zhang Ziyi, actress, perhaps best known for the films Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and Memoirs of a Geisha (2005).
From The International Dialects of English Archive
Beijing 1, a 23 year-old student, born and raised in Beijing, living in the US at the time of the recording. For more background and a transcription of what he's saying see, dialectsarchive.com's page for this accent donor.
For more samples of Beijing speakers speaking English, see the video samples page.