Asia-Pacific Language Variation - Volume 8, Issue 2, 2022

This paper details a study investigating sociophonetic variation in Ende, a language spoken in Papua New Guinea. The study examines speech produced by 30 individuals, investigating what social and linguistic factors are linked with the variable alternation between stopped and affricated realizations of Ende retroflex obstruents [ʈ͡ʂ~ʈ] and [ɖ͡ʐ~ɖ].

Our analysis provides evidence that the obstruents in question are more likely to be realized as stops when they are voiced and when the speakers are orators. Orators are people who practice kawa, a long-standing practice whereby select individuals perform regular public orations. Among orators, the speaker’s age also appears to play a role in retroflex stopping. The link between the stop variant and social factors can be understood within the context of the distribution of power in the community, even in the absence of any explicit standard.

In spite of the centrality of the vernacular in sociolinguistics, we find, it is constantly pitched against the standard, failing to make meaning on its own. It is common practice in western sociolinguistics to identify variants as standard or non-standard, thus marking a distinction between the two and their social meanings. However, when researching English in non-western contexts, such a distinction may not always be tenable. This study reports on variation in the use of a pre-verbal auxiliary – derived from English periphrastic Do – in the speech of Indo-Guyanese speakers, a community of Indian descent in Guyana. A series of matched guise tests were conducted which suggest confusion in the minds of speakers in unambiguously labeling the variants as English, creole or mixed. Further, auxiliary variants are evaluated neutrally without attaching greater or lesser value or prestige in spite of an on-going change at an advanced stage. This has consequences for the very notions of standard and standard-ness, which continue to dominate sociolinguistic modelling of variation in western contexts.

Contrary to classic predictions associated with the gender pattern in variationism, the results of this study on the effect of age and gender on a phonological innovation suggests that older speakers drive innovation in this small Oceanic speech community of Vanuatu. Young and old men are prone to deleting the phonemic consonant, while women and middle-aged men tend to retain it. The v-shaped distribution of the variant requires considering the interactions and social status of individuals in this community where older men occupy the highest-ranking positions. The deletion does not appear to be stylistic, and multivariate analyses reveal the effect of surrounding vowels, sex and age, on the frequency of consonant deletion. The variation is interpreted as a change in progress towards the deletion of the velar fricative and its high incidence in younger men is explained by their frequent interactions with the older men.

Like many marginalized languages, Chanka Quechua (Peru) lacks community-wide prestige norms associated with standard-language ideology. Formal situations require Spanish, and few speakers are literate in Quechua, so normative speech styles are absent. Speakers’ evaluative judgments do not reference notions of correctness; rather, they value puro ‘pure’ speech and authenticity.

This paper explores alternative approaches to accessing sociolinguistic judgments with a study of the variably present uvular phoneme in the past tense /–rqa/ morpheme, as exemplified in the following alternation:

• (1) 

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  ri-rqa-ni	~	ri-ra-ni
  go-pst-1sg		go-pst-1sg
  ‘I went’		‘I went’

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To contrast speech from sociolinguistic interviews, careful, self-monitored speech is elicited through oral retelling of material presented aurally, rather than in writing. Of 38 participants, rural speakers tend to have higher rates of /q/ than urbanites and reflect idealized puro Quechua. We argue that authenticity guides variation, in place of standard language ideology.