Zhanghua Yuanlin (彰化員林) accent

My wife has a cousin who is a lawyer in San Francisco. Despite the fact that he has lived all his life in the United States, he speaks Taiwanese Hokkien (Hoklo, Amoy, Southern Min) fluently. How fluently? I would say much more fluent than someone of the same age who has lived in Taiwan all his life. He can make a speech in Hokkien ad lib. But there's one marked feature in his Hokkien: A Yuanlin accent.

Yuanlin accent probably is one of the very few accents that have features conncected only to one locality in Taiwan. Other marked accents, for example those closer to Quanzhou accent can be heard in many places along the west coast. Those markedly close to Zhangzhou accent can be heard in Yilan as well as in the south.

The special feature of the Yuanlin accent is that "eng" is pronounced as /eng/. So people say: "ki-a-BENG, BENG-BENG LENG-LENG. (枝仔冰，冰冰冷冷。)"

What is more interesting is how this feature survived in cousin's accent. His mother grew up in Taichung City, with her roots in Zhanghua. Her father had worked in Yuanlin for a time, and that's how he picked up the feature. Cousin's mother then immigrated to the United States while she was still relatively young.

Had she stayed in Taiwan, I think this feature could have disappeared by assimilation to the mainstream Taiwan accent, which is to pronounce "ing" as /ing/ or /ieng/. And had the cousin grown up in Taiwan, he could have lost Hokkien altogether in favour of Mandarin.

This is similar to how Hokkien-speaking girls in Taiwan tend to preserve marked features than men, because they seldom use the language outside of their own families. This is a topic I will write about some other time.