First, an aside:

It’s bad enough when you catch yourself using the jargon you used to scorn, like in that business meeting where, in the heat of the moment, you come up with, “Right! And there will be great synergy between their brand name and our back-office capabilities.”

Right.

Is the choice of 吗 or 么 — to write Mandarin’s yes-no question particle “ma” — a register issue?

“But ‘register’,” I thought to myself, “might need some explanation. I should at least link to the Wikipedia entry if it’s good.”

Not only does Wikipedia claim my usage is outdated…

Writers (especially in language teaching) have often used the term “register” as shorthand for formal/informal style, although this is an aging definition. [Emphasis mine — ouch.]

… but the same entry reminds me that “formality” is a clearer term for what I was trying to ask in the first place.

Reboot

Back to our 么 or 吗 question of the day:

Is the choice of 吗 or 么 — to write Mandarin’s yes-no question particle “ma” — a question of formality?

I’m talking about this type of sentence:

你去么？= 你去吗？
Nǐ qù me/ma? = Nǐ qù ma?
Are you going?

During the last couple of weeks my eyes have been glazing over with transcripts of market research interviews. The interviews are very casual, and the 么 usage is all over them. I’d certainly seen 么 used like this before, but it had always struck me as a text message kind of usage, like “ur” instead of “your”, not something a person would type into a formal transcript, even if the transcript is of an informal conversation.

How common is 么 as the ma question particle? If only I had a proper corpus… In the meantime, the usual google search isn’t a lot of help. Because it ignores punctuation, you can’t search for, say, “么？” as a string. Anyway that would include 什么？ so it wouldn’t be that helpful. Here are the number of Google hits (in thousands) on a few question tags that might serve as useful proxies:

On the other hand, if I limit it to Google Books, here are the numbers (NOT in thousands):

Clearly if the g-hit numbers are remotely plausible, my original intuition — that 么 is less formal than 吗 — is entirely wrong because you have a far higher ratio of 么 to 吗 within books, which should be a more formal context.

There’s probably some funny math here, but right off I don’t see it.

Belatedly, I started poking around a corpus that Randy suggested. It looks enticing, but the plate’s already cold on this ersatz version of a breakfast experiment, so let’s take that last gulp of coffee and call it done with a quote from Mark Liberman himself:

I venture to suggest that the kind of research represented by this collective Breakfast Experiment^™ deserves a name. “Yes”, I hear you say, “how about ‘Computational Linguists With Way Too Much Time On Their Hands’?” No, actually, what I had in mind was something more like “Google Cognitive Linguistics”.