Asia-Pacific Language Variation - Volume 6, Issue 2, 2020

This paper reports on variation among speakers of Raga, an Oceanic language of Pentecost island, Vanuatu, in their use of borrowings from Bislama, the national language of Vanuatu, an English-lexifier contact language. The study measures the frequency of borrowings from Bislama in the speech of 50 speakers, surveys speakers’ strategies in assimilating loanwords into Raga and quantifies speakers’ rate of lexical replacement and insertion. This corpus of natural speech reveals an overall low incidence of borrowing from Bislama at 1.6 Bislama words per 100 recorded words. Women and younger speakers borrow more frequently from Bislama. Young speakers use borrowings in equal measure to add to their vocabulary and replace Raga words, while their elders tend to borrow from Bislama to add to their vocabulary, rather than replace Raga words.

This paper studies onset glottal stop deletion in the speech of Suva Rotumans, Fiji. The speech of 18 speakers was analysed and seven factors were tested to identify their prediction on glottal stop deletion. The linguistic factors tested were preceding sound segment, grammatical class, syllable stress, and style, while the social factors were age, gender, and denominational affiliation. Results reveal a change in progress, but towards glottal stop retention. Younger Rotumans and older Rotuman women are deleting glottal stops less compared to middle-aged women and older men. The low incidence of deletion by younger speakers is most probably due to identity, language education in Rotuman, and their increased awareness of their role in preserving the language. Additionally, older women are deleting glottal stops less, which could be attributed to contact, identity, and their consciousness of the standard.

This paper explores the sociolinguistic patterning of glottal choices in the English spoken in the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), a variety that variationist research has thus far eschewed. The analysis suggests that the schooling background of the speaker is the most crucial determinant for both /h/-dropping and /h/-insertion. These findings are not surprising given the dramatic social inequalities regarding access to educational opportunities that characterise the RMI. The locally-specific contact situation, in conjunction with the constraints on /h/-insertion, suggest that the English spoken in the Marshall Islands is typologically distinct from the Southern British dialect root described for other parts of the Pacific by Schreier (2019).

This paper presents a natural speech corpus-based study of word-initial [h]-drop from the Nmbo speech community of southern Papua New Guinea. It is a speech community within a traditional egalitarian multilingual language ecology sustained by a practice of virilocal exogamy, and there is strong intergenerational transmission of local vernacular languages. This study investigates the propensity of word-initial [h]-drop in nouns, based on Nmbo speech data of Kerake tribe people. The results from the Nmbo Sociolinguistic Corpus shows clear age-conditioned variation, with younger speakers showing a higher propensity for [h]-drop. Nmbo speakers residing both within and outside their Nmbo villages of origin appear to be partaking in the innovative [h]-drop. The origin of the [h]-drop appears to be from the village with a more multilingual profile, as would be predicted by the notion of a multilingual feature pool (Cheshire, Kerswill, Fox, & Torgersen, 2011, Mufwene 2001).