This chapter examines how the front rounded vowels /y/ and /ø/ are realized in two varieties of Chinese Korean: Hunchun and Dandong. In Seoul Korean, these vowels have mostly diphthongized, but variation is reported in other dialects. In a large-scale study including acoustic measurements from the two aforementioned heritage varieties, two homeland varieties (i.e., Seoul and Northern Hamgyeong), and local Mandarin varieties, as well as self-reports of language background, we examine the potential influence of ancestral dialect, prestige dialect, and contact language on the realization of heritage varieties. Results show more monophthongal realizations of the vowels in question in Dandong, Hunchun, and Northern Hamgyeong Korean than in Seoul Korean. We also find that Dandong speakers show less diphthongization of /y/ than Hunchun speakers, whereas the two groups do not differ in the production of /ø/. We attribute this difference to influence from Mandarin, which has a more dominant community-level presence in Dandong than in Hunchun.

The detailed phonology of the word level, defined as the last lexical stratum. This is stratum 2 in English, which, like stratum 1 is word bounded, is structure preserving, and has access to word-internal structure assigned at the same stratum, but unlike stratum 1 is not cyclic and is not subject to the Strict Cycle Condition, allowing rules like Vowel Shift and Velar Softening to apply freely in nonderived contexts. Vowek Shift is a chain shift that affects stressed tense vowels by shifting high vowels to low and raising low vowels to mid and mid vowels to high, without creating any mergers. Some additional rules are required to ensure the final vowel qualities. Some tensing rules apply on stratum 1 or this stratum before Vowel Shift, another applies after Vowel Shift. Vowel reduction produces two or three vowels (depending on dialect), not just schwa as in SPE. Rules for consonants include Velar Softening, Palatalization, Spirantization, with interesting and complex ordering relations. Summary of the stratum 2 rules and their ordering.

The use of the term "Mandarin" did not start until the time of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), but the phonological features of Mandarin can be traced to the time of the Liao dynasty (916–1125) and the Song dynasty (960–1127). While the Qièyùn phonology as a national standard was artificially kept in use for the imperial examination and poetry composition, a sound system of a colloquial language-based standard had been developing in northern China. This system, which became the direct ancestral language of Modern Mandarin, can be traced to the tenth century. The transition of the national standard from the Middle Chinese of the Sui–Tang time to the Old Mandarin of the Yuan time was not just a change of the phonological system in time, but more importantly it was a change of a geographical dialect. From the tenth century on, the northern dialects, represented by the dialect of the modern Beijing area, gradually gained its standard status. The new phonological standard of the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368) was a continuation of the phonological standards of the Chinese language spoken in the territories of the Liao and Jin.