Asia-Pacific Language Variation - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2016

This paper presents results from a study of sociolinguistic variation in Hong Kong Sign Language (HKSL). Specifically, it reports findings about location variation in a class of signs like know that are produced at/above the signer’s forehead in their citation form, but are sometimes articulated at a lower location in everyday conversation. Eight hundred tokens of target signs from 40 signers were analyzed. As also found in studies of location ‘dropping’ in similar signs in American Sign Language, Australian Sign Language, and New Zealand Sign Language, variation in HKSL correlates with linguistic and social factors in a systematic way ( Lucas, Bayley, & Valli, 2001 ; Schembri, McKee, McKee, Pivac, Johnston, & Goswell, 2009 ). A comparison of findings across these four languages is presented and discussed. The results of the present study suggest that a set of forehead-located signs that express the names of deaf schools may have affected results due to their salience. The work environment (i.e., sign language related work roles) of participants may also affect ‘careful’ versus lowered production of forehead signs.

This is the first variationist sociotonetic study to use free-speech data for exploring tone. Due to the challenges of analyzing tone in free-speech data, prior work on sociotonetics has been limited to relatively formal speech styles: word lists, sentence frames, and phrase lists. But connected speech styles, including free speech and reading passages, are important for segmental sociophonetics and most other linguistic variables. Will free-speech data always be out of reach for sociotonetics? Can tone variation in connected speech data be normalized and meaningfully analyzed for sociolinguistic research questions? Using field data from the Sui language of China, this paper develops a practical approach for analyzing tone variation in connected speech data, and then applies it to a specific research question about dialect contact in exogamous Sui villages. Results show that some types of intra- and inter-speaker tone variation in connected speech can be effectively analyzed, although other types of tone variables are neutralized in this speech style.

The utopian Eskayan language and script has been spoken for at least three generations by a small community on the island of Bohol in the southern Philippines. Speakers, who use the language in special domains, attribute its creation to a legendary ancestor known as Pinay. In this paper I consider the origins of Eskayan vocabulary, showing how lexical models from Cebuano, Spanish and English account for a small proportion of Eskayan lexemes. The traces of these colonial languages lend important clues to the development of the lexicon as a whole, shedding light on the tumultuous historical context in which Eskayan came into being. Further, the patterning of Eskayan vocabulary reveals Pinay’s folklinguistic conceptions about the nature of ‘language’ and linguistic variation.