Asia-Pacific Language Variation - Volume 11, Issue 1-2, 2025

The sociolinguistic realities of multilingualism raise questions about the linguistic outcomes of language contact. The present study addresses this issue in the context of heritage languages. It investigates whether the relative backness of /u/ in Heritage Tagalog exhibits crosslinguistic influence from English. Over 1600 tokens of Tagalog /u/ were extracted from spontaneous speech of two generations of heritage speakers in Toronto and two groups of age-matched homeland speakers in Manila. A multivariate analysis of linguistic and social factors shows lack of an apparent time change in Toronto and in Manila: /u/ is realized in the back periphery of the vowel space; though some degree of fronting in both varieties is evident, this is attributable to coarticulation and speech rate. The study demonstrates that Tagalog /u/ in Toronto shares the same variable system as in Manila, and properties of the linguistic system can remain stable in the face of contact.

This paper calls for rethinking not only studies in the Philippines but also, from them, the premises of variationist sociolinguistics. Through a grounded-theoretic thematic analysis of 77 sociolinguistic studies, it identifies seven patterns shaped by postcolonialism. Key findings show that degree of language contact does not automatically determine the social salience of differences and that most studies depart from “canonical” methodologies, prioritizing multilingualism and (post-) colonial histories/ideologies over “variable-rule” analyses. These findings motivate a dual framing: rethinking variation in the islands, which revisits Philippine sociolinguistic research as a collective, relational body of work that transcends disciplinary boundaries; and rethinking variation from the islands, which uses these insights to refine variationist theory to better account for postcolonial ecologies. While latter-wave variationism advances post-structural insights (e.g., emic perspectives, indexicality), Philippine sociolinguistics extends these by embedding them in multilingual, postcolonial contexts, advancing alternative epistemologies that position these settings as generative sites for theorizing variation itself.

Discourse Markers (DMs) are particularly susceptible to borrowing between languages and several approaches can provide a framework to analyse speech in multilingual contexts. This paper examines a structural and a pragmatic-functional perspective: Myers-Scotton’s Matrix Language Frame (MLF) model and Matras’ Pragmatic-Functional (PF) perspective. It considers how DMs fit into these approaches and how they deal with code-switching in Kreol Morisien-French multilingual conversations. As it is rare to consider the same linguistic data from these different linguistic perspectives, this paper explores whether they are competing models or may offer complementary perspectives. MLF sees languages as distinct entities which are switched between, while PF involves context-appropriate selection of components from a complex repertoire. Matras’ pragmatic-dominance hypothesis is also explored through correlations with language use. Although the approaches emphasise different aspects of multilingual speech, it is concluded that together they can offer complementary perspectives on Mauritian discourse, despite being conceptually difficult to reconcile.

This study examines path encoding in motion event expression in Cantonese spoken in Toronto and Hong Kong using a comparative variationist methodology informed by motion event typology. It investigates the linguistic and social factors relevant to variation in directional self-motion event expression in Cantonese as spoken by two generations of speakers in Toronto and homeland speakers in Hong Kong. All relevant examples of self-motion event descriptions found in the spontaneous speech of 23 speakers in sociolinguistic interviews from the Heritage Language Documentation Corpus are compared intergenerationally and diatopically. The results suggest stable variation in Hong Kong but change in Toronto. Changes in Toronto are best explained as language-internal change following universal principles rather than simplification or contact with English. This study contributes to literature on the effect of language contact on motion event expression in multilinguals, while also highlighting the importance of considering first-generation immigrants as the baseline for second-generation speakers in addition to homeland speakers.

This paper presents a sociophonetic investigation of a contested aspect of Assamese vowel phonology, focusing on the mid front vowel space. Drawing on data from the newly developed COCAS corpus, the study investigates whether there is empirical evidence for the proposed two-way phonemic contrast (/e/ and /ɛ/), or whether mid front vowels are better understood as variable realizations of a single phoneme, and if so, whether such realizations are consistent across all contexts. Findings suggest that Assamese has a single mid front vowel phoneme /ɛ/, with systematic phonetic variation shaped by lexical history, speech style (spontaneous vs. controlled speech), and sociolinguistic ecology. These results challenge standard-based and ahistorical descriptions in earlier analyses, and underscore the importance of sociolinguistically grounded approach, with implications for sociolinguistic accounts of vowel variation in contact ecology.