The study of Toucheng Taiwanese accent and vocabulary in I-Lan,Taiwan

[[abstract]]Abstract People who speak Taiwanese Southern Min live in I-lan area, Taiwan, with 95% Changchou accent, Fukien. Toucheng is the first city which was founded by Wusa in I-lan area in 1796. It has been over 200 years since the first settlers settled down in I-lan area. Has Toucheng people’s speech sound been changed? Has it created any phonetic change till now? The papers try to dig the fact out by conducting a field survey in Toucheng. The writer worked on the survey, from 2008’s summer vacation till May in 2009, which accumulated enough files with speech sound and vocabulary for reference and comparison. He especially tried to study the use of -i? (k), -i?? (k), and -ia? (k) at present, the existing situation of -u?, and whether the local speech sound of "province” [s?51] is substituted by [si?51] or not. Meanwhile, the writer also kept records of pronunciation and vocabulary of both the old and middle generations and embarked on a synchronic analysis for lexical diffusion and the direction of sound-change. Furthermore, for diachronic ,the writer compared his material with 1980 Lan ching-han's‘Chinese I-lan dialect vocabularies’ (1980) and Chang ping-sheng's ‘I-lan Minnan vocabularies’(2008) to check if there is any difference among three writers’ survey ,in the same county, but at different periods of time and in different cities . The study also tries to provide the information of diachronic linguistic change for future linguistic study in I-lan County. The writer hopes that the papers and files can be used by local linguistic educators as well.