Diphthongization in Southern Vietnamese
I have been studying Southern Vietnamese for over one year. What has been bugging me since the very beginning is that there is no definite resource on this dialect. There are quite a few blogs that teach what I guess is an "official" or "formal" version, but which leaves out many deviations from the Northern accent.
Thanks to Wikipedia and research papers, I have been able to finally figure out many of these differences (some, I still don't get). On the surface, SV is just NV with different tones and rolled r's instead of z's. But that's not true. There are more differences. But as a non-native speaker, I was unable to pin down what exactly those other differences were. Today, I want to introduce one of those features of SV that I'm sure everyone is familiar with - just maybe not on a conscious level.
What I'm talking about is formally known as "diphthongization". Less formally, it can probably be called a drawl. With words ending in vowels, Northerners will pronounce them short and steady. Southerners, on the other hand, tend to draw them out. At the same time, however, it's not just a longer version of the same vowel. Instead, it's like another vowel gets inserted in front.
To illustrate this phenomenon, I tried to find real-world examples on Youtube and compiled them into one clip. This is the link to the video
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