Nasality in Zhangzhou: Distribution and Constraint

This study explores the distribution and constraint of nasality in Zhangzhou Southern Min spoken in Southern China. This dialect is observed employing the nasality in an ultimately dynamic, diverse but also severely constrained fashion. Vowels can be nasalised phonemically; nasals can be nuclei; the nasality can change the airstream mechanism and phonation of syllable onsets; a three-way nasal coda contrast can be identified but they appear to be complementary with obstruent codas conditioned by tones, while as many as 71% of theoretically possible nasality-featured syllables are prohibited from occurring in utterances. This exploration broadens our understanding of nasality as an important phenomenon in Southern China while contributing important empirical data to the typology of nasality in world languages.