Asia-Pacific Language Variation - Current Issue

How are honorifics, which are socially meaningful and socially conditioned, acquired, when their appearance in child-directed speech cannot replicate their use in adult-directed speech? In this paper, we conduct corpus and experimental studies aimed at characterizing the use of honorifics in child-directed speech in Korean. We find that the addressee honorific -yo is present at notable rates in child-directed speech, although the use of -yo in child-directed utterances is rated less natural than its absence. We further find that while -yo is given lower ratings for the presence of relevant social meanings when in child-directed speech compared to adult-directed speech, the use of -yo in child-directed speech is still significantly associated with these meanings. This suggests that while the presence of honorifics in child-directed speech is somewhat unexpected, such uses of honorifics nonetheless carry relevant information about the social meaning of honorifics.

This paper explores an emerging Brazilian Portuguese koiné spoken among Brazilian-dominant Latin American immigrants in Japan’s Greater Tokyo Area. It examines Strong-R (onset /r/) realizations by 79 speakers in the context of dialect and language contact within the diasporic setting. The results highlight (a) levelling and focussing towards [h] as a result of koineization and (b) early stages of the adoption of [ɸ], a xenolectal feature, resulting from contact with Japanese. The external and internal motivations for change towards [h] are identified as local and supralocal levelling and drift. The transition to [ɸ], and its linguistic and social embedding, are discussed in terms of acquisition order, the structure of the Japanese kana syllabary, and speakers’ social networks. The conclusion emphasizes the importance for koiné genesis of input dialects, ongoing language change in the homeland, the social meaning of variants in both pre- and post-contact societies, and speakers’ social networks and mobilities.

Within sociolinguistic research on English variation, Asian and Pacific Islander North Americans (APINAs) are frequently described as an “understudied population” due to the relative lack of published studies that analyze these speakers or communities. This structured literature review systematically characterizes the state of the field from a variationist perspective. We find that while studies on APINAs have become more common in the last decade, different groups are represented unevenly in the existing literature; for example, East Asian groups are commonly represented in the literature in contrast to South Asian groups. Furthermore, the vast majority of variationist studies analyze phonetic and phonological variation, with a theoretical focus on identifying participation in race-based varieties (ethnolects/raciolects) or in sound changes of the “majority” population, rather than using the inherent diversity of APINA groups to bring attention to how race and ethnicity are being used in Sociolinguistics.