Structural changes in a language are considered nearly inevitable consequences of language death (Campbell & Muntzel 1989; Wolfram 2002). The literature on sound change in endangered languages has focused on whether the changes are internally or externally motivated and, therefore, the difference between categorical sound shifts and gradient phonetic effects has been overlooked. This paper discusses sound change in Northern Paiute through two experiments that investigate the difference between categorical changes in the phonological inventory and subphonemic variation within a category. The paper argues that sound change in obsolescing languages may take one of two predictable paths: substitution or approximation/expansion of phonological categories in the moribund language.
In Eastern Cham, the modern reflexes of Classical Cham disyllables exhibit variation between sesquisyllabic and monosyllabic word shapes, which suggests that the language is becoming increasingly monosyllabic. This apparent change in progress has been attributed to contact with monosyllabic Vietnamese, but a variationist study of formal colloquial speech based on interviews conducted with 42 native speakers sheds doubt on this claim. I propose that the variation in word shapes is actually due to the quasi-diglossia found in Eastern Cham communities. It seems that the variation in word shapes can be explained by the subjects’ attitudes towards the two varieties of their own language and that these attitudes are in turn shaped by the relative prestige of Cham and Vietnamese languages and cultures.
The aim of this paper is to explore the variability between voiced and voiceless affricates and fricatives in initial and post-consonantal position in a western dialect of Catalan: Lleidatà. The eastern Catalan dialects are more prestigious than the western dialects, and the former have less affricates than the latter. The data obtained can be summed up in the following way: (1) there is a loss of alveolopalatal affricates only in words containing voiceless affricates and when they are pronounced by readers (in news programs); (2) the voiceless fricatives and affricates in initial and post-consonantal position are better discriminated than the voiced ones, and the fricatives are starting to be considered the “correct” pronunciation by some speakers who have a secondary level of education.
This paper documents a case of new dialect formation in the Canadian aboriginal community of Sheshatshiu, Labrador, established as a permanent settlement in 1959. It examines the applicability of a quantitative variationist approach to the investigation of language change and cross-generational linguistic focusing in a context characterized by the absence of an overt status hierarchy. Results indicate partial dialect convergence among first generation residents of the new settlement. Despite the community’s relatively egalitarian socioeconomic profile, phonological change leading to dialect convergence is shown to be linked to a covert status hierarchy based on territorial group membership, with upward social mobility playing an important role.
Māori is the indigenous language of New Zealand. Its increasingly close contact with English over the last 150 years led to its endangerment, though it is now subject to active revitalization efforts. This chapter reports on some results from the MAONZE (Māori and New Zealand English) Research Project, which is studying aspects of the mutual influence of Māori and English in the area of pronunciation. Three groups of male speakers are analyzed, with birth dates ranging over 100 years (1880s to 1980s). Acoustic analyses of vowels and diphthongs are presented together with analyses of the stop consonants and /f/ (). The results show that there has been considerable change in all the analyzed aspects of Māori pronunciation. Some changes could reflect languageinternal change, but since they relate closely to similar changes that have taken place in New Zealand English over the same time period, they probably also represent external influence.
Jonaz Chichimec is an endangered Otopamean language spoken in Misión de Chichimecas adjacent to the city of San Luis de la Paz in Guanajuato, Mexico. Four ongoing phonological changes are described with respect to the age of the speakers. The restructuring of the system of classifiers used for possession is also examined.
Kaqchikel, a Quichean language of the Guatemalan Highlands, is well known for its Tense/Lax Vowel Contrast (TLVC) and the wide range of dialect variation of its vowel system, but the acoustic properties of its vocoids have never been scrutinized. A preliminary survey of the speech of ten informants from four sub-dialect areas, with a focus on San Juan Comalapa, shows regular patterns of variation according to degree of tongue-root fronting or backing (ATR and RTR), along with unexpected clues of a lingering Proto-Mayan length correlation. Emerging vowel shifts are described and traced to the Colonial era and to more recent social upheavals. A striking regularity of dialect patterns is observed when Kaqchikel is viewed as a diasystem.
This paper examines phonological attrition from a variationist viewpoint in an urban speech community where the target language is a marginalized one. This language is Catalan, the major speaking area of which is dominated by Spanish. Fieldwork is based on a sample of 69 subjects representing the small number of speakers born in the city who learned Catalan by engaging in natural meaningful communication. In the past, the phonological level of the grammar had remained the most faithful to the Catalan heritage in local speech. Recently, however, this component of grammar has become the most affected by attrition, as shown in the vocalic and consonantal systems, which are now converging from Catalan to Spanish.
Due to fast-paced urbanization and rural exodus, speakers of different dialects of the Ewe language are thrown together in Lome, the capital city of Togo. Using various theoretical approaches that attempt to address such phenomena, I provide a quantitative analysis suggesting that urban Ewe in southern Togo is undergoing processes of leveling and simplification. I investigate the use of bilabial fricatives, alveolar affricates, and reduplication (as dependent variables) to show that ethnicity, community setting, and gender are influential factors in Ewe language variation in southern Togo.
Previous work on Quechua language variation and change has focused on what changes had occurred to the syntactic system (cf. Sanchez 2003) or the phonological system (cf. Pasquale 2000, 2001, 2005; Guion 2003). This article will explore the motivations for linguistic change in Quechua, particularly in the vowel system of Quechua speakers in a speech community in contact with Spanish. Two examples of phonological change will be reviewed. First, the phonological change in Quechua which raises the high vowels /I/ and /~/ to the level of [i] and [u] will be explained as a change in progress. Second, an allophonic rule in Quechua which backs /i/ to [e] and /~/ to [o] when in the vicinity of a uvular consonant (e.g., [q], [q’], [qh]) is compared among monolingual and bilingual speakers of Quechua. Linguistic and social factors are both at work in these examples to explain the motivation for phonological change in Quechua.
This study investigates the phonological variation and sound change in the Yami diphthongs (ay) and (aw) (e.g., mangay ~ mangey ‘go’, araw ~ arow ‘day, sun’), a Philippine language spoken on Orchid Island, 60 kilometers southeast of Taiwan. Previous studies (Rau & Chang 2006; Rau & Dong 2006) found that the two diphthongs were undergoing vowel raising on the island with an isogloss separating the more progressive northeast from the more conservative southwest. However, social factors were not discussed, and thus no interpretation of the vowel raising was provided.
The present study examined both linguistic and social factors accounting for vowel raising, with a goal of interpreting the indexical meanings of sound change in the two diphthongs on the island. The data were 20 narratives taken from a Yami corpus (http://yamiproject.cs.pu.edu.tw/yami), 10 narratives from Dong & Rau (1999, 2000), and word list elicitation collected in 1995. Our results from VARBRUL analyses confirmed that vowel raising is a geographical feature and that the rates of change have formed a clear isogloss separating the northeast from the southwest varieties. However, vowel raising of (ay) has progressed slightly faster than that of (aw). The preceding segments of (ay) and (aw) favoring raising are mainly determined by the feature of [continuant]. For both diphthongs, [+continuant] favors raising whereas [–continuant] disfavors it. There was stylistic variation with more raising in narrative style than in word list reading. Vowel raising was preferred by males; however, young females seem to have surpassed young males in adopting this feature in narrative style, a phenomenon corresponding to the social mobility of women. Perhaps vowel raising has ceased to be a gender marker and shifted to an ethnic identity marker.
This paper is a quantitative study of the intervocalic fricativization of /l/, a marked allophonic process across languages, which has nevertheless become a linguistic stereotype of the dialect of K’iche’ Mayan spoken in the township of Santa Maria Chiquimula (MAR) in the highlands of Western Guatemala. Based on the quantitative analysis of 1856 tokens of intervocalic /l/ from sociolinguistic interviews and recordings of 85 speakers (34 women and 51 men), I will show that it is precisely its status as a regional stereotype that has led it to override its phonetic markedness to spread throughout the township and beyond as ethnolinguistic marker of MAR. A pattern of sociolinguistic variation has emerged in which women lead over men in frequency of the fricative variant. There is also variation related to frequency of contact with speakers of other dialects. Men are more sensitive to the stigmatization of fricativized /l/ due to their more frequent contact with speakers of other dialects of K’iche’, and therefore accommodate more than women, contradicting the well known sociolinguistic principle that women tend to avoid stigmatized forms more than men.
West Frisian is an indigenous minority language situated in the north of the Netherlands. The majority language is Dutch. Both languages traditionally have an alveolar [r]. However, during the last century Dutch has acquired two other variants of /r/, namely uvular [r] and approximant [r]. We examined whether the close contact with Dutch has influenced the pronunciation of /r/ in Frisian. Recordings of 26 speakers of Frisian showed alveolar [r] only. However, we did find traces of uvular [r] in Town Frisian, spoken in the older cities in Friesland. This variant is due to contacts between the urban elites in Friesland and in Holland at the beginning of the twentieth century. Apparently, neither in Dutch nor in Town Frisian has uvular [r] been a model for speakers of Frisian. Also, the more recent approximant has not (yet) infiltrated.
This paper investigates the process of language shift in Mansi (Vogul, Uralic language family). The scope of the investigation is a period of approximately 100 years and analyzes two corpora of written texts to see what kinds of changes are manifested in various sub-systems of Mansi as a result of the intensive language shift going on in the language. Two aspects of the language are targeted: on the one hand, the grammatical system (and, within it, the use of the passive and the dual), in order to see what kinds of changes and simplification processes characteristic of language loss are happening; and, on the other hand, the lexicon and the Russian elements that can be found in it.
Descriptive accounts of Scottish Gaelic dialects (e.g. Borgstrøm 1937; Oftedal 1956; Ternes 1973) have noted significant regional variation in the surface description of nasal mutation; this paper brings previously unpublished data from archives of the Linguistic Survey of Scotland to bear on the full range of variation across Gaelic speaking Scotland. We employ these data to map out the actual range of variation in the nasal mutation; using Mapmaker software we focus on three graded parameters: voicing, aspiration, and nasalization. With this research we demonstrate the continuing value of “historical” data for the analysis of endangered and minority languages. As yet, no maps have been published based on this survey data.
The source of and, hence, principal factors constraining, several variables in Bislama, an English-lexified Pacific creole, remain the subject of some dispute. This chapter uses quantitative methods to evaluate the strength of claims that variable presence/absence of arguments in Bislama is principally due to the transfer of preferences in the substrate languages. It focuses particularly on the role that the animacy of a referent plays in determining:
a. presence/absence of pronominal subject in a clause,
b. the form of 3p agreement, and
c. the presence/absence of pronominal objects (Crowley 1990, 2002).
Other research has claimed discourse salience (not a substrate feature) and/or direct possession relations (substrate feature) are more relevant (Meyerhoff 2000, 2003a). Clauses of spontaneous conversational Bislama recorded on Malo island in the 1990s and a corpus of 10 Tamambo (the Malo vernacular, Jauncey 1997) narratives or process texts are analysed for the same factors. The results show that animacy is a significant constraint on the subject pronominal variable, but it is not strong for the other two variables. The result is an empirical gain and a theoretical gain. First, claims for transfer of substrate features into Bislama are motivated in a more transparent way than they have been before. Second, we see clearly the potential that multivariate analysis offers for resolving outstanding questions and debates relating to language contact and the role of substrate transfer. This is especially true for the Pacific creoles where we continue to be able to gather, and analyse, substrate corpora.
The study of minority languages highlights the need for variationist approaches to grammars. This article addresses some conflicts that arise when we combine the enterprises of writing a descriptive grammar and constructing a sociolinguistic description of a language. Conflicts between conciseness and completeness on the one hand, and sociolinguistic accuracy and representation of competing variants, on the other, are addressed. As a case in point, I discuss documentation (in book and web formats) of the endangered language Faetar, spoken in a small village in southern Italy, focusing on (1) advantages and disadvantages of various data collection methods; (2) organization of examples that illustrate inter- and intra-speaker variation; (3) codification of an oral language; (4) value judgments necessitated by codification; and (5) coordination with other grammars.
Speakers in a Warlpiri community in northern Australia are participants in a complex multilingual situation in which there has been a dramatic change in the last thirty years. Children, and adults under approximately age 30, now speak a new bilingual mixed language as the language of their everyday communication. The new language, Light Warlpiri, systematically combines elements from the variety of Warlpiri spoken in Lajamanu (Lajamanu Warlpiri) and Aboriginal English or Kriol (an English-lexified creole). Both Lajamanu Warlpiri and Light Warlpiri are learned and spoken in the community. In both languages grammatical relations are indicated by an ergative-absolutive casemarking system on overt agents and a nominative-accusative system of bound pronouns, and both show variable word order. But in Light Warlpiri ergative case-marking is optional, and word order and pragmatic factors also contribute information about indicating agents. The study shows that there has been intergenerational change in the use of ergative case-marking in Warlpiri, with younger speakers using it on agents less often than older speakers. Both children and adults use ergative marking more often on agents that are postverbal, and children produce this pattern more frequently than adults do, which suggests that they are regularizing a pattern found in adult speech.
This paper discusses variable patterns of overt marking in Bishnupriya NP structure. The main interest of the paper lies in the use of animacy-based classifier clitics (clf) which may be located on the head of a noun phrase, on one or more dependents, on both the head and the dependent(s) or on neither (i.e., zero marking). The variation in marking appears to be intimately linked with the structure of NP, variability in word order of NP constituents (i.e., head and the dependents), and the occurrence of the pronominal/numeral clitics (cl). The presence of cl itself is variable. The connection between the variable patterns of marking (of both clf and cl) and the variation in the ordering of head and dependent is explained in terms of bilinguality that is deeply embedded into the linguistic structure of Bishnurpriya. The duality of structure, it is argued here, serves as the symbolic marker of dual linguistic and ethnic identity of the Bishnupriyas as Bishnupriya Manipuri.
As lesser studied minority languages are added to the purview of quantitative variationist sociolinguistics, we naturally expect to see lesser studied sociolinguistic variables brought to the forefront. One such variable is clan. Among the Sui people of southwest China and in many other societies, clan has a powerful sociolinguistic influence. Therefore, following in the tradition of “age as a sociolinguistic variable” (Eckert 1997), “gender as a sociolinguistic variable” (Meyerhoff 1996; Wodak & Benke 1997) and so on, the present article suggests that clan, too, may be viewed as a key player in variationist sociolinguistics. Using insights from Sui and other communities, this chapter investigates clan as a sociolinguistic variable in terms of each of the three approaches to language and identity outlined by Mendoza-Denton (2002): “Sociodemographic categorybased identity,” “practice-based identity,” and “practice-based variation.” Clan is shown to be a highly relevant and meaningful sociolinguistic variable from all three perspectives.
This paper presents a cognitive semantic description of the ongoing process of language loss in the encoding of spatial topological relations in a Northern Athapaskan language, Dene Sųłiné. Using the Topological Relation Markers elicitation tool (Pederson, Wilkins & Bowerman 1998), results are presented that show a difference in the encoding of spatial topological relations between younger and elder speakers. This difference becomes visible through selected data points that show elder speakers encoding spatial topological relations on a higher degree of specificity than younger speakers. This is reflected by a larger inventory of morpho-syntactic and semantic choices. In addition, younger speakers produce rather restricted and often ungrammatical utterances; their inventory for linguistic variety is limited or simply not available. As I will argue in this paper, this limitation is due to ongoing language loss and the influence of English as the dominant way to communicate.
Structural changes in a language are considered nearly inevitable consequences of language death (Campbell & Muntzel 1989; Wolfram 2002). The literature on sound change in endangered languages has focused on whether the changes are internally or externally motivated and, therefore, the difference between categorical sound shifts and gradient phonetic effects has been overlooked. This paper discusses sound change in Northern Paiute through two experiments that investigate the difference between categorical changes in the phonological inventory and subphonemic variation within a category. The paper argues that sound change in obsolescing languages may take one of two predictable paths: substitution or approximation/expansion of phonological categories in the moribund language.
In Eastern Cham, the modern reflexes of Classical Cham disyllables exhibit variation between sesquisyllabic and monosyllabic word shapes, which suggests that the language is becoming increasingly monosyllabic. This apparent change in progress has been attributed to contact with monosyllabic Vietnamese, but a variationist study of formal colloquial speech based on interviews conducted with 42 native speakers sheds doubt on this claim. I propose that the variation in word shapes is actually due to the quasi-diglossia found in Eastern Cham communities. It seems that the variation in word shapes can be explained by the subjects’ attitudes towards the two varieties of their own language and that these attitudes are in turn shaped by the relative prestige of Cham and Vietnamese languages and cultures.
The aim of this paper is to explore the variability between voiced and voiceless affricates and fricatives in initial and post-consonantal position in a western dialect of Catalan: Lleidatà. The eastern Catalan dialects are more prestigious than the western dialects, and the former have less affricates than the latter. The data obtained can be summed up in the following way: (1) there is a loss of alveolopalatal affricates only in words containing voiceless affricates and when they are pronounced by readers (in news programs); (2) the voiceless fricatives and affricates in initial and post-consonantal position are better discriminated than the voiced ones, and the fricatives are starting to be considered the “correct” pronunciation by some speakers who have a secondary level of education.
This paper documents a case of new dialect formation in the Canadian aboriginal community of Sheshatshiu, Labrador, established as a permanent settlement in 1959. It examines the applicability of a quantitative variationist approach to the investigation of language change and cross-generational linguistic focusing in a context characterized by the absence of an overt status hierarchy. Results indicate partial dialect convergence among first generation residents of the new settlement. Despite the community’s relatively egalitarian socioeconomic profile, phonological change leading to dialect convergence is shown to be linked to a covert status hierarchy based on territorial group membership, with upward social mobility playing an important role.
Māori is the indigenous language of New Zealand. Its increasingly close contact with English over the last 150 years led to its endangerment, though it is now subject to active revitalization efforts. This chapter reports on some results from the MAONZE (Māori and New Zealand English) Research Project, which is studying aspects of the mutual influence of Māori and English in the area of pronunciation. Three groups of male speakers are analyzed, with birth dates ranging over 100 years (1880s to 1980s). Acoustic analyses of vowels and diphthongs are presented together with analyses of the stop consonants and /f/ (). The results show that there has been considerable change in all the analyzed aspects of Māori pronunciation. Some changes could reflect languageinternal change, but since they relate closely to similar changes that have taken place in New Zealand English over the same time period, they probably also represent external influence.
Jonaz Chichimec is an endangered Otopamean language spoken in Misión de Chichimecas adjacent to the city of San Luis de la Paz in Guanajuato, Mexico. Four ongoing phonological changes are described with respect to the age of the speakers. The restructuring of the system of classifiers used for possession is also examined.
Kaqchikel, a Quichean language of the Guatemalan Highlands, is well known for its Tense/Lax Vowel Contrast (TLVC) and the wide range of dialect variation of its vowel system, but the acoustic properties of its vocoids have never been scrutinized. A preliminary survey of the speech of ten informants from four sub-dialect areas, with a focus on San Juan Comalapa, shows regular patterns of variation according to degree of tongue-root fronting or backing (ATR and RTR), along with unexpected clues of a lingering Proto-Mayan length correlation. Emerging vowel shifts are described and traced to the Colonial era and to more recent social upheavals. A striking regularity of dialect patterns is observed when Kaqchikel is viewed as a diasystem.
This paper examines phonological attrition from a variationist viewpoint in an urban speech community where the target language is a marginalized one. This language is Catalan, the major speaking area of which is dominated by Spanish. Fieldwork is based on a sample of 69 subjects representing the small number of speakers born in the city who learned Catalan by engaging in natural meaningful communication. In the past, the phonological level of the grammar had remained the most faithful to the Catalan heritage in local speech. Recently, however, this component of grammar has become the most affected by attrition, as shown in the vocalic and consonantal systems, which are now converging from Catalan to Spanish.
Due to fast-paced urbanization and rural exodus, speakers of different dialects of the Ewe language are thrown together in Lome, the capital city of Togo. Using various theoretical approaches that attempt to address such phenomena, I provide a quantitative analysis suggesting that urban Ewe in southern Togo is undergoing processes of leveling and simplification. I investigate the use of bilabial fricatives, alveolar affricates, and reduplication (as dependent variables) to show that ethnicity, community setting, and gender are influential factors in Ewe language variation in southern Togo.
Previous work on Quechua language variation and change has focused on what changes had occurred to the syntactic system (cf. Sanchez 2003) or the phonological system (cf. Pasquale 2000, 2001, 2005; Guion 2003). This article will explore the motivations for linguistic change in Quechua, particularly in the vowel system of Quechua speakers in a speech community in contact with Spanish. Two examples of phonological change will be reviewed. First, the phonological change in Quechua which raises the high vowels /I/ and /~/ to the level of [i] and [u] will be explained as a change in progress. Second, an allophonic rule in Quechua which backs /i/ to [e] and /~/ to [o] when in the vicinity of a uvular consonant (e.g., [q], [q’], [qh]) is compared among monolingual and bilingual speakers of Quechua. Linguistic and social factors are both at work in these examples to explain the motivation for phonological change in Quechua.
This study investigates the phonological variation and sound change in the Yami diphthongs (ay) and (aw) (e.g., mangay ~ mangey ‘go’, araw ~ arow ‘day, sun’), a Philippine language spoken on Orchid Island, 60 kilometers southeast of Taiwan. Previous studies (Rau & Chang 2006; Rau & Dong 2006) found that the two diphthongs were undergoing vowel raising on the island with an isogloss separating the more progressive northeast from the more conservative southwest. However, social factors were not discussed, and thus no interpretation of the vowel raising was provided.
The present study examined both linguistic and social factors accounting for vowel raising, with a goal of interpreting the indexical meanings of sound change in the two diphthongs on the island. The data were 20 narratives taken from a Yami corpus (http://yamiproject.cs.pu.edu.tw/yami), 10 narratives from Dong & Rau (1999, 2000), and word list elicitation collected in 1995. Our results from VARBRUL analyses confirmed that vowel raising is a geographical feature and that the rates of change have formed a clear isogloss separating the northeast from the southwest varieties. However, vowel raising of (ay) has progressed slightly faster than that of (aw). The preceding segments of (ay) and (aw) favoring raising are mainly determined by the feature of [continuant]. For both diphthongs, [+continuant] favors raising whereas [–continuant] disfavors it. There was stylistic variation with more raising in narrative style than in word list reading. Vowel raising was preferred by males; however, young females seem to have surpassed young males in adopting this feature in narrative style, a phenomenon corresponding to the social mobility of women. Perhaps vowel raising has ceased to be a gender marker and shifted to an ethnic identity marker.
This paper is a quantitative study of the intervocalic fricativization of /l/, a marked allophonic process across languages, which has nevertheless become a linguistic stereotype of the dialect of K’iche’ Mayan spoken in the township of Santa Maria Chiquimula (MAR) in the highlands of Western Guatemala. Based on the quantitative analysis of 1856 tokens of intervocalic /l/ from sociolinguistic interviews and recordings of 85 speakers (34 women and 51 men), I will show that it is precisely its status as a regional stereotype that has led it to override its phonetic markedness to spread throughout the township and beyond as ethnolinguistic marker of MAR. A pattern of sociolinguistic variation has emerged in which women lead over men in frequency of the fricative variant. There is also variation related to frequency of contact with speakers of other dialects. Men are more sensitive to the stigmatization of fricativized /l/ due to their more frequent contact with speakers of other dialects of K’iche’, and therefore accommodate more than women, contradicting the well known sociolinguistic principle that women tend to avoid stigmatized forms more than men.
West Frisian is an indigenous minority language situated in the north of the Netherlands. The majority language is Dutch. Both languages traditionally have an alveolar [r]. However, during the last century Dutch has acquired two other variants of /r/, namely uvular [r] and approximant [r]. We examined whether the close contact with Dutch has influenced the pronunciation of /r/ in Frisian. Recordings of 26 speakers of Frisian showed alveolar [r] only. However, we did find traces of uvular [r] in Town Frisian, spoken in the older cities in Friesland. This variant is due to contacts between the urban elites in Friesland and in Holland at the beginning of the twentieth century. Apparently, neither in Dutch nor in Town Frisian has uvular [r] been a model for speakers of Frisian. Also, the more recent approximant has not (yet) infiltrated.
This paper investigates the process of language shift in Mansi (Vogul, Uralic language family). The scope of the investigation is a period of approximately 100 years and analyzes two corpora of written texts to see what kinds of changes are manifested in various sub-systems of Mansi as a result of the intensive language shift going on in the language. Two aspects of the language are targeted: on the one hand, the grammatical system (and, within it, the use of the passive and the dual), in order to see what kinds of changes and simplification processes characteristic of language loss are happening; and, on the other hand, the lexicon and the Russian elements that can be found in it.
Descriptive accounts of Scottish Gaelic dialects (e.g. Borgstrøm 1937; Oftedal 1956; Ternes 1973) have noted significant regional variation in the surface description of nasal mutation; this paper brings previously unpublished data from archives of the Linguistic Survey of Scotland to bear on the full range of variation across Gaelic speaking Scotland. We employ these data to map out the actual range of variation in the nasal mutation; using Mapmaker software we focus on three graded parameters: voicing, aspiration, and nasalization. With this research we demonstrate the continuing value of “historical” data for the analysis of endangered and minority languages. As yet, no maps have been published based on this survey data.
The source of and, hence, principal factors constraining, several variables in Bislama, an English-lexified Pacific creole, remain the subject of some dispute. This chapter uses quantitative methods to evaluate the strength of claims that variable presence/absence of arguments in Bislama is principally due to the transfer of preferences in the substrate languages. It focuses particularly on the role that the animacy of a referent plays in determining:
a. presence/absence of pronominal subject in a clause,
b. the form of 3p agreement, and
c. the presence/absence of pronominal objects (Crowley 1990, 2002).
Other research has claimed discourse salience (not a substrate feature) and/or direct possession relations (substrate feature) are more relevant (Meyerhoff 2000, 2003a). Clauses of spontaneous conversational Bislama recorded on Malo island in the 1990s and a corpus of 10 Tamambo (the Malo vernacular, Jauncey 1997) narratives or process texts are analysed for the same factors. The results show that animacy is a significant constraint on the subject pronominal variable, but it is not strong for the other two variables. The result is an empirical gain and a theoretical gain. First, claims for transfer of substrate features into Bislama are motivated in a more transparent way than they have been before. Second, we see clearly the potential that multivariate analysis offers for resolving outstanding questions and debates relating to language contact and the role of substrate transfer. This is especially true for the Pacific creoles where we continue to be able to gather, and analyse, substrate corpora.
The study of minority languages highlights the need for variationist approaches to grammars. This article addresses some conflicts that arise when we combine the enterprises of writing a descriptive grammar and constructing a sociolinguistic description of a language. Conflicts between conciseness and completeness on the one hand, and sociolinguistic accuracy and representation of competing variants, on the other, are addressed. As a case in point, I discuss documentation (in book and web formats) of the endangered language Faetar, spoken in a small village in southern Italy, focusing on (1) advantages and disadvantages of various data collection methods; (2) organization of examples that illustrate inter- and intra-speaker variation; (3) codification of an oral language; (4) value judgments necessitated by codification; and (5) coordination with other grammars.
Speakers in a Warlpiri community in northern Australia are participants in a complex multilingual situation in which there has been a dramatic change in the last thirty years. Children, and adults under approximately age 30, now speak a new bilingual mixed language as the language of their everyday communication. The new language, Light Warlpiri, systematically combines elements from the variety of Warlpiri spoken in Lajamanu (Lajamanu Warlpiri) and Aboriginal English or Kriol (an English-lexified creole). Both Lajamanu Warlpiri and Light Warlpiri are learned and spoken in the community. In both languages grammatical relations are indicated by an ergative-absolutive casemarking system on overt agents and a nominative-accusative system of bound pronouns, and both show variable word order. But in Light Warlpiri ergative case-marking is optional, and word order and pragmatic factors also contribute information about indicating agents. The study shows that there has been intergenerational change in the use of ergative case-marking in Warlpiri, with younger speakers using it on agents less often than older speakers. Both children and adults use ergative marking more often on agents that are postverbal, and children produce this pattern more frequently than adults do, which suggests that they are regularizing a pattern found in adult speech.
This paper discusses variable patterns of overt marking in Bishnupriya NP structure. The main interest of the paper lies in the use of animacy-based classifier clitics (clf) which may be located on the head of a noun phrase, on one or more dependents, on both the head and the dependent(s) or on neither (i.e., zero marking). The variation in marking appears to be intimately linked with the structure of NP, variability in word order of NP constituents (i.e., head and the dependents), and the occurrence of the pronominal/numeral clitics (cl). The presence of cl itself is variable. The connection between the variable patterns of marking (of both clf and cl) and the variation in the ordering of head and dependent is explained in terms of bilinguality that is deeply embedded into the linguistic structure of Bishnurpriya. The duality of structure, it is argued here, serves as the symbolic marker of dual linguistic and ethnic identity of the Bishnupriyas as Bishnupriya Manipuri.
As lesser studied minority languages are added to the purview of quantitative variationist sociolinguistics, we naturally expect to see lesser studied sociolinguistic variables brought to the forefront. One such variable is clan. Among the Sui people of southwest China and in many other societies, clan has a powerful sociolinguistic influence. Therefore, following in the tradition of “age as a sociolinguistic variable” (Eckert 1997), “gender as a sociolinguistic variable” (Meyerhoff 1996; Wodak & Benke 1997) and so on, the present article suggests that clan, too, may be viewed as a key player in variationist sociolinguistics. Using insights from Sui and other communities, this chapter investigates clan as a sociolinguistic variable in terms of each of the three approaches to language and identity outlined by Mendoza-Denton (2002): “Sociodemographic categorybased identity,” “practice-based identity,” and “practice-based variation.” Clan is shown to be a highly relevant and meaningful sociolinguistic variable from all three perspectives.
This paper presents a cognitive semantic description of the ongoing process of language loss in the encoding of spatial topological relations in a Northern Athapaskan language, Dene Sųłiné. Using the Topological Relation Markers elicitation tool (Pederson, Wilkins & Bowerman 1998), results are presented that show a difference in the encoding of spatial topological relations between younger and elder speakers. This difference becomes visible through selected data points that show elder speakers encoding spatial topological relations on a higher degree of specificity than younger speakers. This is reflected by a larger inventory of morpho-syntactic and semantic choices. In addition, younger speakers produce rather restricted and often ungrammatical utterances; their inventory for linguistic variety is limited or simply not available. As I will argue in this paper, this limitation is due to ongoing language loss and the influence of English as the dominant way to communicate.