Characteristics of Northern and Southern accents

Question

My first language is Cantonese. I learned Mandarin as a second language. Native speakers of Mandarin often understand me with no major issues. Of course, they recognize the Southern accents right away. Sometimes, I have trouble understanding people from Northern regions (example: Beijing). Other than the "learned" retroflex constants (zh, ch, sh, r) produced by native Cantonese speakers, what are the other characteristics that I should aware to understand better?

Sorry to over-generalize the regions and their accents. Please feel free to point out characteristics in speech between different sub-regions.

Note that I'm not asking about terminology difference between different dialect/regional speech. This topic can be covered in a separate question.

Answer 1

If you're looking for specific characteristics of particular accents, there are a couple I have noticed that have been fairly reliable.

I'm usually able to tell whether someone is from Shanghai (or a nearby Wu-dialect area) based on the way they pronounce the word 能 (néng). Instead of the standard [nəŋ], they often say [nəɲ]. Note the [ɲ] (a palatal nasal sound) rather than [ŋ] (a velar nasal sound). You can hear the differences on the Wikipedia pages that I linked. If you happen to listen to ChinesePod, you may notice that Jenny typically pronounces 能 this way. The reason for this particular pronunciation is because in Shanghainese and other Wu dialects, [ŋ] and [ɲ] are allophones of the same consonant and [ɲ] always occurs after the vowel /ə/.

Tianjin folks sometimes pronounce initial w- as [ʋ] (a labiodental approximate sound that sounds somewhat like [v]). There was some discussion of this sound on a post in the Beijing Sounds blog. I don't necessarily know the real explanation for this, but this sound did exist in Late Middle Chinese (ca. 1200 AD) and is transcribed by linguists as mv- (see note 2 under the table in this link). All the mv- sounds merged with w- and Mandarin and m- in Cantonese (e.g., 未 is wèi in Mandarin and mei in Cantonese), but it might be that in the Tianjin dialect w- merged with mv- and both came to be pronounced as [ʋ] (this is purely my speculation though).

If we go to more general dialectical characteristics, you can often find free variation of initial n- and l- consonants in the south, particularly in Cantonese-speaking regions. There is also free variation of h- and f- around south-central China (i.e., Hunan region). The latter probably has something to do with the fact that many /x/ and /ɣ/ sounds in Middle Chinese shifted to /x/ or /f/ (which correspond to pinyin h- and f-, respectively) in various modern dialects.

Answer 2

Not sure if this is what you mean, but a friend (native speaker) said that Northern regions tend to 捲舌 "roll their tongue" more than Southern regions.

I speak mandarin with a Taiwan accent (minimal 捲舌) and have been asked once if I came from Guangzhou - I'm assuming of my lack of 捲舌 was associated with a southern China accent.

Also, from my recent visit to Shanghai and Beijing, I noticed that in Beijing, people seemed to speak with slightly more variations in pitch and faster. While in Shanghai, people seemed to speak in a more monotone/flat manner, and also a bit slower (maybe I found it easier to understand since they didn't 捲舌 as much).