The typology of voiceless fricatives across Chinese dialects

This study examines the typology of voiceless fricatives across 201 Chinese dialects, focusing on their inventories, place contrasts in two vowel contexts [_i] and [_a], as well as the phonotactics of voiceless fricatives in terms of their combinations with the two vowels. The results show an average of 4.11 fricatives per dialect, with [s f ɕ x] as the most frequently observed. As for fricative inventories, [f s ɕ x] is the most frequent and [f s ɕ ʂ x] the next. For voiceless fricatives, the [_a] context is generally more likely to license place contrasts than the [_i] context. In terms of phonotactics, fricatives at different places show different patterns in their combinations with vowels, with [ɕ ʃ] most frequently followed by [i] while [f s ʂ x h] by [a].