Asia-Pacific Language Variation - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2015

The history of sociolinguistic research leads us to expect certain patterns of variation by social class, age and gender, but as the field expands to new societies with different social structures we often encounter unexpected results. Such findings can have great value in leading to higher level generalizations. Cases are cited of unexpected gender variation in studies of rural communities in Spain, Egypt, central India and south China where ethnographic observation leads to a better understanding of what seemed at first to be anomalous results.

Marrying Durkheim’s definition of the social fact (1895) with Gumperz’ classic framework for studying the speech community (1968), the paper argues that these concepts are crucial to the 21st century sociolinguistic enterprise. It explores the basic dimensions of variation across speech communities, illustrating their applicability to communities of several different types. These include monolingual communities where speakers have a common base in linguistic structure as well as complex multilingual communities with internal social divisions. Illustrations are drawn from the author’s research in French Canada and Papua New Guinea, and from Blanc’s (1964) study of Baghdad. Finally, the study of multilingual speech communities is linked to the understanding of how superposed linguistic knowledge is integrated across the lifespans of individual speakers and across communal groups. Even in such situations, members who do not share a language seek to communicate with each other, finding ways of doing so that respond to social opportunities and circumvent social barriers.

Since Labov’s early work (e.g., 1963, 1966), sociolinguists have frequently examined change in progress on the segmental level, but much less is known about tone change in progress. The present study finds evidence of a tone split in progress in Lalo, a Tibeto-Burman language of China. While many of the world’s tone languages show historical evidence of tone splits, to our knowledge this is the first time that a tone split has been observed while it is occurring, making it possible to closely examine phonological, social, and perceptual factors. In this sociotonetic study of Lalo, 2,938 tone tokens were extracted from recordings of 38 speakers and analyzed in terms of age, sex, and educational level. Multifactorial analyses show that the temporal extent of voiced stops’ depression of Tone 1 F0 is increasing in apparent time, especially among women, while VOT of voiced stops is decreasing as educational levels improve, giving speakers more contact with Mandarin Chinese. The same 38 speakers were also given a perceptual identification task in which F0 was systematically adjusted. Mixed-effects modeling showed that listeners used multiple acoustic cues (consonant voicing, F0 onset, and F0 shape) to identify the voiced initial. These findings suggest that Lalo is undergoing a tone split that follows Beddor’s (2009) coarticulatory path to sound change.

This paper uses variationist methods to attack a descriptive problem: by looking at the distribution of a typologically unusual subject prefix (tem- in realis and t- in irrealis) in a set of narrative texts recorded in Nkep, the language of Hog Harbour (Vanuatu), it explores the extent to which the goals of language documentation and variationist sociolinguistics can be pursued simultaneously. It concludes that a dual focus can benefit both enterprises. We find out considerably more about the nature of subject-verb prefixes in Nkep and about the ways in which the Nkep language handles grammatical properties such as the realis/irrealis distinction. The paper also notes that studies of variation in endangered language contexts can provide a positive framework for the local community to evaluate synchronic variation and change.