Dialect contact and language death in Palau

This research project is being carried out jointly with Dr Kazuko Matsumoto of Tokyo University in Japan. 

The Palau Islands are an archipelago located in the Western Caroline region of the Pacific, with a population of 17,000 (The Office of Planning and Statistics 1997, Table 1). The Austronesian indigenous language, Palauan, has, as the result of a century of colonial domination by Spain, Germany, Japan and the US, come into prolonged contact with other non-local languages. Table 1 summarises, in chronological order, the relation between the colonial contact languages and the factors that engendered language contact.  

 Table 1. Language contact history in Palau  

One of the initial results of Kazuko's analysis of her data collected in Palau illustrates how the historical and political turmoil affected the language ability in the three languages (see Figure 1). The older the speaker, the higher their Japanese oral language ability (i.e. speaking and understanding), while the younger the speakers are, the higher their English oral language ability. The crossing point of Japanese and English oral language ability among those aged between 56-65 neatly corresponds to the end of WWII. After Palau gained independence in 1994, English has remained as the official language along with the indigenous language, Palauan, while the teaching of Japanese as a foreign language has been set up in Palauan schools. As a result, most older Palauans are Palauan-Japanese bilinguals, but since 1945 competence in Japanese has diminished rapidly, leaving many middle-aged Palauans as ‘semi-speakers’, and the younger islanders, who are bilingual in Palauan and English, as L2 learners.     

 Figure 1. The relationship between oral language ability in the three languages and age (Rating of language ability: 0=lowest; 20=highest)  

 You can find out more about the research we have been carrying out on Palau by looking at the list of publications on Kazuko's website. Together we are now investigating more specifically the language structure of the Japanese speakers in Palau.

Two topics interest us in particular:

1.                 Since this is a speech community undergoing second language death - of Japanese, we are interested in discovering whether, structurally, Palauan Japanese is dying in the same way as first language varieties are known to obsolesce (see, for example, Dorian's ground-breaking work on East Sutherland Gaelic). Data have been collected from both fully fluent Japanese speakers and 'semi-speakers' in Palau with a view to tackling this question. Variables under investigation include the negation system.

2.                 The Japanese community in Palau originates from settlement between 1914 and 1945. Many of the migrants were manual workers who lived and worked alongside indigeneous Palauans. The second part of our project assesses the extent to which models of dialect contact can account for the structure of the 2nd language Japanese spoken in Palau, given that the Japanese migrants came from many different parts of Japan and undoubtedly were speakers of often quite radically different varieties. Does Palauan Japanese show evidence of being a mixed dialect that has undergone koineisation as a result of the mixture of Japanese dialects on Palauan soil during the first half of the 20th century?

Early publications include:

Kazuko Matsumoto and David Britain. (2006). Palau: Language Situation. In Keith Brown (ed.) Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics (second edition): Volume 9. Oxford: Elsevier. 129-130.

Kazuko Matsumoto and David Britain. (2003). Contact and obsolescence in a diaspora variety of Japanese: The case of Palau in Micronesia. Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 44: 38-75.

Together we are currently editing a special issue of International Journal of the Sociology of Language on Japanese outside Japan, which includes contributions on the sociolinguistics of Japanese communities in Taiwan, Brazil, Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand and the US, as well as Palau.

Avoiding hiatus in southern British English? [with Sue Fox]

English accents employ a range of strategies to avoid a clash of vowels across word boundaries in vernacular speech. The definite and indefinite articles have different allomorphs - one before vowels and another before consonants; a large number of function words can be variably but systematically allomorphic (but in a range of different ways) (e.g. ‘to’ is routinely [tu:] before vowels and [t@] before consonants (where @ = schwa); ‘by’ in some varieties is [bai] before vowels and [b@] before consonants; “I” is often [ai] before vowels but [@] before consonants). Non-rhotic varieties often resort systematically to [r] insertion to avoid hiatus between a low or mid vowel and a vowel in the onset of the following syllable.

The transition between a word ending in a high vowel and one beginning with a vowel is often made through the use of glides  /j/ (front) and /w/ (back) and it seems that high-vowel ending allomorphs of function words are chosen to facilitate the use of a hiatus breaking glide. Where high vowels are not possible, other strategies are used, e.g. epenthetic [n] for the indefinite article or [r] in the case of preceding low and mid vowels. Uffmann (fc) argues that [r] is to be expected in such contexts because it is the most sonorous consonant available when a glide is not possible.

In a number of accents, however, (often where language contact may well have been influential), this widespread system is undergoing change. Consequently, the articles take the 'pre-consonantal' forms regardless of following environment, with a glottal stop inserted before vowels, epenthetic [r] is avoided in favour of the glottal stop and the ‘unstressed’ forms of function words (ending in [@]) are used less frequently in favour of the ‘full’ forms, even before consonants.

One variety currently undergoing this change is that spoken by the adolescent population of the ‘traditional’ East End of London, the homeland of ‘Cockney’. This area, now incorporated within the borough of Tower Hamlets, saw substantial immigration by Bangladeshis from the 1970s onwards and among young people it is Londoners of Bangladeshi origin who are in the majority. Much of the White population moved out of the traditional East End, settling in the outer suburbs of London and beyond. In this project we contrast hiatus breakers used among the adolescent community of Tower Hamlets in East London with those used in Romford (a popular destination for out-migrating Cockneys) and in an unrelated rural accent of Southern England (to provide an unconnected ‘control’ accent).

A first draft of our initial work on this topic can now be downloaded from here. We would very much welcome comments on this draft paper, but, as it is just a draft at this stage, please do not cite it without contacting us first.

 Variationist and generative approaches to variation [with Laura Rupp]

I have been working with Dr Laura Rupp of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam on a project attempting to bring together generative and variationist approaches to the analysis of morphosyntactic variation. We've been looking particularly at concord variation in English, trying to use generative syntactic theories to account for the rather complex patterns of variation thrown up by variation in English dialects. A co-authored book entitled "Concord variation: a generative-sociolinguistic perspective" is to appear in the not too distant future, published by Palgrave.

The Southern Subject Rule [with Laura Rupp, Michelle Bray, Sue Fox, Sue Baker and Juliette Spurling].

The English dialects of northern and south-western England, Scotland and parts of Ireland preserve reflexes of the so-called ‘Northern Subject Rule’. According to the Northern Subject Rule (NSR), present tense verbs may take the verbal suffix –s, except when adjacent to a personal pronoun as in (1) and (2):

(1)               the cats purrs

(2)               they purr

Furthermore, the NSR can also be seen to apply to the past tense of the verb ‘to be’ in many of these dialects, such that ‘was’ is used as the verb form except, again, when adjacent to a personal pronoun as in (3) and (4):

(3)               the cats was purring

(4)               they were purring

Our interest in this subject began when Michelle Bray, working on rural varieties of Suffolk English (in which the traditional variety does not inflect the 3rd person present tense singular), discovered that in her data the NSR was completely reversed. -s marking was more common after pronouns than NPs. I then tested the rule in my Fenland data when looking at the past tense of BE, and also found the NSR to be totally reversed too. What's more, in the Fenland data, the reversal appeared to be diffusing. Intrigued by this previously undiscovered pattern, colleagues working on other East Anglian varieties joined, examining their own data sets for the presence of this 'Southern Subject Rule' (SSR). Sue Fox found the SSR in her analyses of the past tense of BE among working class adolescents in Basildon (Essex), Sue Baker found it applying to the past tense of BE among a middle class women's friendship group in Brentwood (Essex) and Juliette Spurling found it in her examination of 3rd person present tense -s in Ipswich, the county town of Suffolk. The question then arose, why? We discussed our findings with Dr Laura Rupp, with whom I've been working on concord variation, and we think now we have a sociohistorically and linguistically justifiable reasoning for the patterns we found. We hope to get this written up soon and make the paper accessible from this site.

Dave Britain's MA and PhD research supervision interests

This section provides information on topics I am willing to consider supervising at MA and PhD level. Please contact me if you wish to discuss a possible topic. I am heavily oversubscribed with PhD students right now, though, so I'd be less keen to consider topics that do not fall squarely into one of the categories below.

New Dialect Formation and dialect contact/isolation:

He is particularly interested in empirical research that investigates the linguistic consequences of the mixing of different dialects of the same language, and the new dialects that often emerge as a result. This mixing can be caused by a wide range of factors, urbanisation, suburbanisation, New Town formation, land reclamation, colonialism, migration, industrialisation etc. He would very much like to supervise:

-   Research on diaspora varieties of languages other than English, such as Italian and Greek in Australia and Britain, Japanese in South America, Panjabi in Britain, Chinese in Britain and North America;

-   Research on varieties of English spoken by long-standing migrants to the UK (e.g. Italians, Greeks)

On the other hand, he’d also be happy to consider proposals looking at language variation and change in highly isolated communities.

Second Dialect Acquisition:

Research investigating the social and linguistic factors which affect our ability to acquire a second dialect, usually as a result of migration: most research to date has looked at English (predominantly the ability of North Americans to pick up a British dialect or vice versa), and so work on other languages, or other Anglophone communities would be useful. Also interesting is research on short-term dialect contact/acquisition contexts. He would also very much like to supervise research on the acquisition of Southern British English by Northerners.

Geolinguistics:

He is happy to supervise research which explores the linguistics/geography interface - particularly investigations of the geographical diffusion of linguistic innovations; the sociolinguistic validity of the rural-urban continuum (if such a thing exists), the regionalisation and supra-localisation of local dialects, the attrition of traditional dialects, and local reactions to linguistic innovations from dominant outside communities.

Language Obsolescence:

He is happy to consider PhD proposals investigating the structural decay of languages undergoing language death (as opposed to macro-sociolinguistic studies of language shift).

New Englishes:

Dave would be interested to supervise research on the structural nativisation of new varieties of English, especially in the Pacific or Asia.

Last Updated 23rd May 2008