Not sure if this is the right forum for this, but I was wondering if anyone with knowledge of the local dialect can help me out here for a phonology project that I am working on. The question that I have is mainly on how the tones work.

How exactly do the tones in 昆明话 work? How are the tones different from say, standard mandarin? And are tones affected by the type of sentences that they are spoken in? For instance, if asking a question or saying a commanding statement would affect the way tones work.

I would be grateful to anyone that could give me any kind of answer, anything simple would be fine. I don't expect anyone here to write a paper for me, but if I can figure out how the tones work, I can probably make more sense out of some of the recorded data that I have.

If you understand tones, you could use audio or video recordings of people speaking. That way you can develop your own system of analysis that is compliant with recognised phonological systems, standardise and codify it. If you use opinions of others, who will all be using a different set of criteria for describing tones, you have a problem, especially with quality control of your analysis.

Audio/video clips you can also re-visit them several times, and submit them as part of your study.

If you go to youku.com and type in 'kunming' or '昆明' you will find lots of klips. This will give you lots of samples of voxpop, many in Kunminghau.

Try GoK. Here is some really good stuff here by to get you started:

www.gokunming.com/[...]