A Perceptual Dialect Study of Taiwan Mandarin: Language Attitudes in the Era of Political Battle1

from the standard Mandarin in China. Although the government has enforced its “Mandarin Only Policy”, strictly treating Mandarin as the only office language in Taiwan, Taiwan Mandarin has even become more diverse among speakers because of different degrees of contacts with regional dialects and also the conflicts between different ethnic and political groups. Located against this background, this paper has two foresights. First, drawing on Silverstein’s (1996) concept of indexicality, I will discuss how different phonological variants in Taiwan Mandarin can possibly produce indexical relationships between linguistic variants and social or political identity. Second, I will examine the people of Taiwan’s perceptions of two varieties of Taiwan Mandarin: Taibei qiang ‘Taipei accent ’ and Taizhong qiang ‘Taichung accent’. One hundred and fifty-eight students were recruited to listen to four speakers from Taipei and Taichung and rate the voice on twelve traits using a six-point scale rate. Listeners were also asked to answer the region where the speaker is from in a forced-choice question with five choices. The study finds that salient dialect-specific properties are important cues for listener