Linguists identify seven dialect zones in China, each having a distinctive sound system but sharing one written system. Shandong Dialect and Beijing Mandarin both belong to northern Mandarin (Shi, 201
Linguists identify seven dialect zones in China, each having a distinctive sound system but sharing one written system. Shandong Dialect and Beijing Mandarin both belong to northern Mandarin (Shi, 2010). They are different dialects within the same language. The regional accent of Shandong people mainly arises from tone differences between Shandong Dialect and Beijing Mandarin. Due to the lack of tone studying of Shandong dialect in domestic academia, this study selected one of the main branches of Shandong Dialect, Weifang Dialect, to investigate the pitch contours and heights of its tones through experimental analysis. In Documentation of Weifang Dialect (1992), pitch scale of four tones were described as 213 ("yinping"), 42 ("yangping"), 55("shangsheng"), 21("qusheng") respectively just according to the authors’ perceptual observation and experience. Since this book lacked acoustic measurements and statistical data, tone values can, to some extent, be regarded as not accurate enough. The experimental data in this study can be taken as a new reference of tones in Weifang Dialect.