Cover not available
Article published In:
Variation in the Pacific: Part I
Edited by Eri Kashima and Miriam Meyerhoff
[Asia-Pacific Language Variation 6:2] 2020
► pp. 250–277

Word-initial [h]-drop variation in Nmbo

Change-in-progress in an egalitarian multilingual speech community of Papua New Guinea

 | Australian National University | University of Helsinki
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).
Keywords: Papua New Guinea, Pacific, exogamy, deletion, lenition, phonological variation, network analysis, egalitarian multilingualism, apparent time construct
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The Nmbo speech community
  • 3.Data and methodology
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Linguistic conditions
    • 4.2Sociolinguistic and linguistic results
  • 5.Analysis and discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 18 December 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/aplv.20002.kas
References (72)
References
Abtahian, Maya (2018). Style and language maintenance. Paper presented at Sociolinguistic Symposium 22, Long Colloquium: Fresh insights on traditional variationist methods in non-English contexts , Auckland, New Zealand, June 28, 2018.
Ayres, Mary C. (1983). This side, that side: Locality and exogamous group definition in Morehead area, southwestern Papua. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago.Google Scholar
Baclawski, Kenneth Jr. (2018). Diglossia and change from below in Eastern Cham. Asia-Pacific Language Variation, 4(1), 73–102. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bates, Douglas, Mächler, Martin, Bolker, Ben, & Walker, Steve (2015). Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software, 67(1), 1–48. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bell, Allan, & Holmes, Janet (1992). H-droppin’: Two sociolinguistic variables in New Zealand English. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 12(2), 223–248. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Blythe, Richard A., & Croft, William (2012). S-curves and the mechanisms of propagation in language change. Language, 88(2), 269–304. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Boersma, Paul, & Weenink, David (2016). Praat: Doing phonetics by computer [Software program]. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam.Google Scholar
Campbell, Lyle, & Grondona, Verónica (2010). Who speaks what to whom? Multilingualism and language choice in Misión La Paz. Language in Society, 39(5), 617–646. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cheshire, Jenny, Kerswill, Paul, Fox, Sue, & Torgersen, Eivind (2011). Contact, the feature pool and the speech community: The emergence of Multicultural London English. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 15(2), 151–196. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Childs, Tucker, Good, Jeff, & Mitchell, Alice (2014). Beyond the ancestral code: Towards a model for sociolinguistic language documentation. Language Documentation and Conservation, 81, 168–191.Google Scholar
Cho, Taehong (2016). Prosodic boundary strengthening in the phonetics-prosody interface. Language and Linguistics Compass, 10(3), 120–141. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cukor-Avila, Patricia, & Bailey, Guy (2013). Real time and apparent time. In Jack K. Chambers & Natalie Schilling-Estes (Eds.), The handbook of variation and change (pp. 239–262). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
De Vries, Lourens (2012). Speaking of clans: Language in Awyu-Ndumut communities of Indonesian West Papua. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2012(214), 5–26.Google Scholar
Döhler, Christian (2018). A Grammar of Komnzo. Berlin: Language Science Press.Google Scholar
Dorian, Nancy C. (2010). Investigating variation: The effects of social organization and social setting. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Drager, Katie, & Hay, Jennifer (2012). Exploiting random intercepts: Two case studies in sociophonetics. Language Variation and Change, 24(1), 59–78. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Du Bois, John W., Schuetze-Coburn, Stephan, Cumming, Susanna, & Paolino, Danae (1993). Outline of discourse transcription. In Jane Edwards & Martin Lampert (Eds.), Talking data: Transcription and coding in discourse (pp. 45–89). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Epps, Patience (2018). Contrasting linguistic ecologies: Indigenous and colonially mediated language contact in northwest Amazonia. Language and Communication, 621, 156–169. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Evans, Nicholas (2012). Even more diverse than we had thought: The multiplicity of Trans-Fly languages. Language Documentation and Conservation Special Publication No. 5, 109–149.Google Scholar
(2015a). Restricted phonemes and interaction in Nen. Workshop on the Languages of Melanesia, Kioloa Australia.Google Scholar
(2015b). Inflection in Nen. In Matthew Baerman (Ed.), Oxford handbook of inflection (pp. 543–575). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
(2015c). Valency in Nen. In Andrej Malchukov & Bernard Comrie (Eds.), Valency classes in the world’s languages: Case studies from New Guinea, Australia, and the Americas, and theoretical outlook (pp. 1069–1116). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
(2017a). Did language evolve in multilingual settings? Biology and Philosophy, 32(6), 905–933. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2017b). Quantification in Nen. In Denis Paperno & Edward Keenan (Eds.), Handbook of quantifiers in natural language, volume 21 (pp. 571–607). New York, NY: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2018). The dynamics of language diversity. In Rajend Mesthrie & David Bradley (Eds.), Plenary and focus lectures from the 20th International Congress of Linguists (pp. 11–41). Cape Town, South Africa: UCT Press.Google Scholar
Evans, Nicholas, Arka, Wayan I., Carroll, Matthew J., Choi, Yun Jung, Döhler, Christian, Gast, Volker, Kashima, Eri, Mittag, Emile, Olsson, Bruno, Quinn, Kyla, Schokkin, Dineke, Tama, Phillip, van Tongeren, Charlotte, & Siegel, Jeff (2018). The languages of southern New Guinea. In Bill Palmer (Ed.), The languages and linguistics of New Guinea: A comprehensive guide (pp. 640–774). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
Evans, Nicholas, Carroll, Matthew J., & Döhler, Christian (2017). Proto-Yam phonology languages of Southern New Guinea. In The Languages of Melanesia Workshop. Manokwari, Indonesia.Google Scholar
François, Alexandre (2011). Social ecology and language history in the northern Vanuatu linkage: A tale of divergence and convergence. Journal of Historical Linguistics, 1(2), 175–246. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2012). The dynamics of linguistic diversity: Egalitarian multilingualism and power imbalance among northern Vanuatu languages. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2141, 85–110.Google Scholar
Haudricourt, André G. (1961). Richesse en phonémes et richesse en locuteurs [Number of phonemes and number of speakers]. L’Homme, 11, 5–10.Google Scholar
Hildebrandt, Kristine A., Jany, Carmen, & Silva, Wilson (Eds.). (2017). Documenting variation in endangered languages. Language Documentation and Conservation Special Publication, 131, 1–5.Google Scholar
Hitchcock, Garrick (2010). Mound-and-ditch taro gardens of the Bensbach or Torassi River area, southwest Papua New Guinea. The Artefact, 331, 70–90.Google Scholar
Kashima, Eri. (in press). The phonetics of Nmbo (Nɐmbo) with some comments on its phonology (Yam Family; Morehead District). Language Documentation and Conservation Special Publication.
(2020). Language in my mouth: Linguistic variation in the Nmbo speech community of Southern New Guinea. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Australian National University.Google Scholar
Kashima, Eri, Williams, Daniel, Ellison, T. Mark, Schokkin, Dineke, & Escudero, Paola (2016). Uncovering the acoustic vowel space of a previously undescribed language: The vowels of Nambo. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 139(6). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Katz, Jonah (2016). Lenition, perception and neutralisation. Phonology, 33(1), 43–85. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Labov, William (1965). On the mechanisms of linguistic change. Georgetown Monographs on Language and Linguistics, 181, 91–114.Google Scholar
(1972). The social motivations of sound change. In Sociolinguistic patterns (pp. 1–42). Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
(2007). Transmission and diffusion. Language, 83(2), 344–387. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lüpke, Friederike (2016). Uncovering small-scale multilingualism. Critical Multilingualism Studies, 4(2), 35–74.Google Scholar
(2018). Multiple choice: Language use and cultural practice in rural Casamance between convergence and divergence. In Jacqueline Knörr & Wilson Trajano Filho (Eds.), Creolization and pidginisation in contexts of post-colonial diversity: Language, culture, and identity (pp. 181–208). Leiden: Brill. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mansfield, John B. (2015). Consonant lenition as a sociophonetic variable in Murrinh Patha (Australia). Language Variation and Change, 27(2), 203–225. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
MPI (2018). ELAN (Version 5.2). The Language Archive. Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.Google Scholar
Meyerhoff, Miriam (1999). Sorry in the Pacific: Defining communities, defining practice. Language and Society, 28(2), 225–238. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Meyerhoff, Miriam, & Walker, James A. (2007). The persistence of variation in individual grammars: Copula absence in ‘urban sojourners’ and their stay-at-home peers, Bequia (St Vincent and the Grenadines). Journal of Sociolinguistics, 11(3), 346–366. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Meyerhoff, Miriam (2017). Writing a linguistic symphony: Analyzing variation while doing language documentation. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique, 62(4), 525–549. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mufwene, Salikoko S. (2001). The Ecology of language evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nordberg, Bengt, & Sundgren, Eva (1998). On observing real-time language change: A Swedish case study. Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet.Google Scholar
Pope, Jennifer, Meyerhoff, Miriam, & Ladd, Robert (2007). Forty years of language change on Martha’s Vineyard. Language, 83(3), 615–627. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Potowski, Paul (2013). Language maintenance and shift. In Robert Bayley, Richard Cameron, & Ceil Lucas (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of sociolinguistics (pp. 321–339). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Romero, Sergio (2009). Phonological markedness, regional identity, and sex in Mayan: The fricativization of intervocalic /l/ in K’iche’. In James N. Stanford & Dennis R. Preston (Eds.), Variation in indigenous minority languages (pp. 281–297). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ross, Malcolm (2005). Pronouns as a preliminary diagnostic for grouping Papuan languages. In Andrew Pawley, Robert Attenborough, Jack Golson, & Robert Hide (Eds.), Papuan pasts: Cultural, linguistic and biological histories of Papuan-speaking people (pp. 15–66). Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.Google Scholar
R Team (2017). R: A language and environment for statistical computing . R foundation for statistical computing. Vienna, Austria. Retrieved from [URL]
Rueck, Michael J. (2011). Social network analysis applied to language planning in the Morehead District, Papua New Guinea (Electronic Survey Report 2011, 37). Dallas, TX: SIL International.Google Scholar
Salisbury, Richard F. (1962). Notes on bilingualism and linguistic change in New Guinea. Anthropological Linguistics, 4(7), 1–13.Google Scholar
Sankoff, Gillian (2001). Linguistic outcomes of contact. In Peter Trudgill, Jack K. Chambers, & N. Schilling-Estes (Eds.), Handbook of sociolinguistics (pp. 638–668). Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
(1980). Multilingualism in Papua New Guinea. In The social life of language (pp. 95–132). Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Satyanath, Shobha (2018). Language variation and change in a small but diverse city in India. In Dick Smakman & Patrick Heinrich (Eds.), Urban sociolinguistics: The city as a linguistic process and experience (95–112). London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Siegel, Jeff (2014). The morphology of tense and aspect in Nama, a Papuan language of southern New Guinea. Open Linguistics, 1(1), 211–231.Google Scholar
(2017). Transitive and intransitive verbs in Nama, a Papuan language of Southern New Guinea. Oceanic Linguistics, 56(1), 123–142. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Singer, Ruth (2018). A small speech community with many small languages: The role of receptive multilingualism in supporting linguistic diversity at Warruwi Community (Australia). Language and Communication, 621, 102–118. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stasch, Rupert (2009). Society of others: Kinship and mourning in a West Papuan place. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stanford, James N. (2009a). Clan as a sociolinguistic variable: Three approaches to Sui clans. In James N. Stanford & Dennis R. Preston (Eds.), Variation in indigenous minority languages (pp. 463–484). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2009b). “Eating the food of our place”: Sociolinguistic loyalties in multidialectal Sui villages. Language in Society, 38(3), 287–309. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stanford, James N., & Yanhong Pan (2013). The sociolinguistics of exogamy: Dialect acquisition in a Zhuang village. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 17(5), 573–607. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Suokhrie, Kelhouvinuo (2016). Clans and clanlectal contact: Variation and change in Angami. Asia-Pacific Language Variation, 2(2), 188–214. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Thije, Jan D. ten, & Zeevaert, Ludgar (2007). Receptive multilingualism:Linguistic analyses, language policies and didactic concepts. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Torres Cacoullos, Rena, & Travis, Catherine E. (2018). Bilingualism in the community: Code-switching and grammars in contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tucker, Sara, Boevé, Marco, Fuller, Elizabeth, Gustafsson, Catharina, & Rueck, Michael (2003). Nambu Subfamily survey report (Tech. Rep.). Ukarumpa: Summer Institute of Linguistics.Google Scholar
Vaughan, Jill, & Singer, Ruth (2018). Indigenous multilingualisms past and present. Language and Communication, 621, 83–90. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Williams, Francis E. (1936). Papuans of the Trans-Fly. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Wurm, Stephen A., & Hattori, Shirō (1981). Language atlas of the Pacific area, Part 1 and 2. Pacific Linguistics, Series C, 66 and 67. Canberra, Australia: ANU.Google Scholar
Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Khachaturyan, Maria, George Moroz & Pe Mamy
2024. Do languages spoken in multilingual communities converge? A case study of reflexivity marking in Mano and Kpelle. Linguistics 62:5 ► pp. 1225 ff. DOI logo
Schokkin, Dineke
2021. Variable realisation of verb-final /n/ in Idi. Asia-Pacific Language Variation 7:1 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 9 october 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.