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THE SHESHATSHIU SOCIOLINGUISTIC VARIABILITY PROJECT: A PRELIMINARY REPORT Marguerite MacKenzie and Sandra Clarke Memorial University of Newfoundland

Introduction This paper constitutes a preliminary report on the investigation of linguistic variation among the speakers of a dialect of Montagnais spo­ ken at Sheshatshiu, Labrador. The project was undertaken in the fall of 1981 and fieldwork was carried out early in 1982. The purpose of the project is, first, to provide detailed documentation on the linguis­ tic variation known to exist among the speakers of Montagnais in this village and, second, to try to correlate any patterns of variation with non-linguistic factors. This study is of particular interest because the community of Sheshatshiu is highly different from the urban, socially stratified communities for which the investigative techniques common to modern sociolinguistic research have been developed. The people of Sheshatshiu are semi-nomadic hunters who have traditionally lived in small family groups. They are now resident for a good portion of the year in a single location, the community of Sheshatshiu, which is clearly non-industrial, has virtually no economic base, and exists by virtue of the fact that in former years it was a summer gathering place for families who had spent the entire winter hunting and trapping in the bush. At the moment, the largest employers in the community are the school and the band administration. The Montagnais dialect spoken today by residents of Sheshatshiu is noteworthy for its degree of intracommunity variability. Clearly, in such an apparently non-economically stratified society, the variable of informant socio-economic status could hardly be expected to aid in accounting for this perceived linguistic variability. Questions arise, however, as to whether such other typical social variables as age and sex would prove as important as they have in urban sociolinguistic studies, and whether the previously uninvestigated variable of informant band affiliation would shed significant light on linguistic variability within the community of Sheshatshiu. Methodology It is fairly obvious that many of the traditional methodologies for 250 MacKenzie and Clarke collecting sociolinguistic data in urban communities were not directly applicable to this project. To begin with, virtually no one in the com­ munity is literate in Montagnais, at least in the commonly accepted sense of this word in European society—that is no one can read flu­ ently on first encounter with the written form of the word. As a result, it was necessary to modify the usual approach in which formal speech style is elicited by assigning informants reading tasks which involve both individual words and longer passages. Secondly, the investigators were not completely fluent speakers of the local dialect of Montagnais. Yet all Sheshatshiu residents speak Montagnais as a firstlanguage , and the degree of bilingualism varies according to the age of the individual. Virtually everyone over 40 is monolingual in Montagnais, while bilin­ gualism in English increases among the younger generation. However, there exists a number of people in their mid 30s who do not consider themselves proficient in English as a second language. Consequently, it was not possible to make consistent use of a "translation from the English" approach, even to elicit a relatively formal style with respect to individual lexical and grammatical variables. A further problem oc­ curred in that a certain number of younger speakers refused to interact in any language but English with the non-native interviewers. As well, some speakers felt uncomfortable with non-native interviewers, and a native assistant was hired to carry out interviews exclusively in Mon­ tagnais with such informants. The interview was divided into two sections: 1) a formal word list from which speakers were asked to pronounce a base form and an in­ flected form of approximately 200 words 2) a segment of free conversa­ tion (connected discourse) between interviewer and interviewee, which ranged in length from 10 minutes to over an hour. The formal word list was administered by the non-native interviewer fluent in the related dialect of East Cree, or else by the native assistant. The free conver­ sation section of the interview was carried out among older subjects by the non-native interviewer fluent in the Sept-Isles dialect of Mon­ tagnais; among younger people, it was generally administered by the native assistant. The free conversation for older informants focused on questions pertaining to residence patterns and genealogical connections while for younger speakers it dealt with such topics as education, bilin­ gualism, amount of experience in the bush, and friendship networks. In addition all informants were invited to tell a story which ideally lasted Sheshatshiu Sociolinguistics 251

ten minutes. Such a segment was not difficult to obtain in the case of older speakers but proved extremely difficult to elicit from the younger informants, particularly the teenagers. The involvement of three different interviewers with backgrounds in three different Montagnais dialects could of course have fairly se­ rious implications, in that it could result in stylistic or dialect code switching on the part of the interviewee to attempt to accommodate the interviewer. In actual fact, however, the interviewers do not feel that there was a great deal of shifting in informants' speech patterns, since it was made very clear to participants in the study that both non- native interviewers were interested in learning the Sheshatshiu forms. Further, it was felt by the interviewers that although the Montagnais people appear very conscious of dialect variation they are not partic­ ularly self-conscious about styles of language, and previous experience in working with native informants had indicated that in fact people are interested in displaying differences rather than in adjusting to a common norm. The formal word list, then, was administered to mono­ lingual speakers by uttering the word in a non-local pronunciation, and then asking for correct Sheshatshiu pronunciation. The technique of forming a question on the model of "What do you call a thing which is used to do such and such?" was not used, since it was not possible to formulate sufficiently sophisticated questions which would elicit un­ ambiguous replies. This again is a problem of interviewers who are not native speakers working with a language the syntax of which has not been fully investigated. The Sample It is common practice in sociolinguistic investigations of large urban communitites to use a random sampling technique to select potential in­ formants. The community of Sheshatshiu, however, is extremely small; its total population is less than 600. The present study restricted itself to the speech of individuals 14 years of age and older. To enable selec­ tion of an appropriate sample, a card file was constructed to include all individuals in this age group; after eliminations resulting from speech and hearing impediments, mental infirmities, absence from the commu­ nity, etc., some 305 individuals remained. As, like many other native settlements in Canada, this community is not socially structured in the same way that European communities are, it is clear that other social parameters have to be used in order to make an appropriate sample 252 MacKenzie and Clarke

selection Obviously, this can be done with authority only if a great deal is known about the social structure of the community in ques­ tion. While in the present case a considerable amount of ethnological research had already been carried out (e.g. Mailhot and Michaud 1965, Tanner 1978), a detailed sociological survey of the community did not exist before the linguistic fieldwork began, and the two procedures had to be accomplished at much the same time. As a result of the absence of thorough social documentation of She­ shatshiu, the sample choice had to be made to some extent on a trial and error basis. The first criterion used in this regard was member­ ship of community residents in one of the six possible hunting groups proposed by Tanner (1978) on the basis of interviews done for a report on land use and occupancy. Since sex and age are well known soci­ olinguistic variables, the sample was stratified according to these two parameters as well. Factors such as the time of permanent settlement of the community and schooling or literacy in English resulted in an age division into four groups: teenagers, young adults, mature adults, and old people. It was decided, for purposes of analysis, to obtain equal cell sizes; this was rendered difficult, however, by the fact that the community contained only 15 adults over 62, in contrast to 50 or so adults between 37 and 62, well over 100 young adults and several hun­ dred teenagers. Within each hunting territory, an attempt was made to choose a family in which the four generations were each represented by a male and female speaker. Sample selection along the above lines proved difficult to handle, however, because the six hunting territory groups were found not to be recognized as such within the community; further, only the hunting ter­ ritory of the men, and not the women, had previously been identified, and only certain individuals in the community had been assigned to a hunting territory region. Interviewing of older people in the firstweek s revealed that the geographical territories were not particularly valid, mainly because most older people had moved around to a remarkable degree during their lives, and therefore had spent time in a number of different hunting territories. In addition, Sheshatshiu residents refused to identify a particular area of land as being "their" land. This is in contrast to other Cree-Montagnais communities with which the inter­ viewers had experience. Sheshatshiu Sociolinguistics 253

A second attempt to choose a sample focused on family groups. Again, the family was identified by surnames of male members, al­ though the genealogical background of the women members was also taken into consideration. However, difficulties resulted from the fact that the naming systems among the Montagnais are extremely compli­ cated. Families which share the same name are not necessarily related, and families which have different names can in fact be closely related— for instance, there are three Sheshatshiu households with three differ­ ent family names whose heads are in fact brothers, sons of the same father. It thus became clear that complete genealogies for all members of the community were necessary before one could confidently choose mem­ bers of the same family group. In addition the situation was rendered more complex in that there is an enormous amount of adoption of chil­ dren within Cree, Montagnais, and Naskapi communities. As a result, even individuals who are clearly within the genealogy of a particu­ lar family may not have grown up within that family, but have been brought up by grandparents or, indeed, any close or even distant rel­ atives. Only a complete life history of each individual, then, could reveal the complex interpersonal relationships which exist within the community. During the firstfe w weeks of interviewing, it became evident that a folk grouping of individuals within the village was in daily use by all community members. This grouping was related to territory, but was not identical with the territorial groupings hypothesized by Tanner (1978). These five recognized groups were 1) Mushuau-innut, or people who identified with the Naskapi speakers to the north 2) Uashau-innut, people who identified with the Sept-Isles and Schefferville speakers to the west 3) Maskuanu-innut, people who identified with the Lower North Shore speakers to the south 4) Sheshatshiu-innut, people who identified with Sheshatshiu itself 5) Mekentsheu-innut a subgroup of Uashau, consisting of people who identified with the powerful McKen- zie family of Sept-Isles and Schefferville. On the basis of these divisions, a new sample was chosen which, as before, represented four generations and both sexes. This final sample came to 87 individuals—some 28.5% of the total available population—and is presented in the following ta­ ble: 254 MacKenzie and Clarke

age group sex number of informants over AS M • F 6

37-S1 M 11

F 16

si-sa M 14

F 14

14-10 M 11

F 11

This is an extremely high percentage when compared with the num­ bers used in other sociolinguistic surveys, for example Labov (1972), Trudgill (1974), and Milroy (1980). While for each community-identified regional group an attempt was made to choose families which included all four generations, this choice was continually subverted by the fact that individuals who filleda n ideal slot according to age and genealogy had been adopted and brought up by some other family, to whose different speech patterns they would have been continually exposed. In the end, however, the interviewers were satisfied that a representative sample of the community had been chosen with respect to all three basic social variables of age, sex and regional background affiliation. To sum up, the following difficulties were encountered in choosing a sample, difficulties which would no doubt be typical of sociolinguistic investigations in other native communities: 1) It is extremely important to possess detailed social data—including com­ plete family histories and adoption information— before a sample is chosen for the purpose of correlating linguistic performance with relevant social pa­ rameters in a native comm unity of the type under study. While this may be a goal that in reality is almost never attained, extensive documentation is obviously needed to guarantee that the sample selected is genuinely rep­ resentative of the community, for communities with very small populations do not lend themselves to the random sampling techniques used by urban sociolinguists. Sheshatshiu Sociolinguistics 255

2) With nomadic hunters of the type represented by the Montagnais of Quebec and Labrador, it is necessary to have in-depth interviews pertaining to life histories, since individuals move around extensively during their lives and ally themselves with different groups during different hunting seasons. Therefore any individual has multiple ties to other individuals both inside and outside the community through links of blood, marriage, adoption and co-residence. We are hoping that one of the useful outcomes of this project will be the discovery of which, if any, of these ties correlates significantly with linguistic variation. A fact which became quite clear during the course of the interviewing was that every single member of the community is re­ lated in one way or another to virtually every other community member, and much work is needed on the significance of the degree of relationship. Nevertheless, it was clear that distinct subgroups were perceived by mem­ bers of the community, and individuals did view themselves as belonging to one or another of these groups. It is to be expected that self-identification and identification by others of membership is not always congruent. Linguistic Variability: The (sc) Variable A number of linguistic features are known to vary in Sheshatshiu Montagnais; the reader is referred to Clarke and Mackenzie (1982) as well as to Mackenzie (1980) for further details. The scope of this paper permits the discussion of a single linguistic variable in its preliminary analysis. The variable chosen, phonological in nature, will be noted as (sc), and represents the palatalized Montagnais reflexes of the Proto- Algonquian consonant clusters */xk/, */tk/ and */sk/.1 In the di­ alects of the eastern section of Quebec-Labrador, this variable assumes three actual phonetic variants or range of variants: 1) [st] (realized as either the alveo-palatal affricate [sc] or the fricative [s]/[z]) 2) [st] (through depalatalization of [it]—cf. the depalatalization of the animate noun plural marker /at/ to /at/) 3) [ss] (through total assimilation of the second element of the cluster) Variant 1) above is known to be particularly characteristic of the Mushuau dialect, while variant 3) is associated especially with the Uashau speech type. In other words, the existence of more than one variant of the (sc) variable within the community of Sheshatshiu would possess a potential social correlate, in that this linguistic variable would have a significant link with the (regional) group affiliation of informants. The word list of over 200 lexical items mentioned above contained some 24 items involving the (sc) variable. A list of these items is given

1 In other words, the three PA clusters became [Sk] or [sk] in Montagnais; this •equence then palatalized to [sc] before front vowels. For a historical treatment of lik]/[sk] variability in Montagnais, see Cowan (1077). 256 MacKenzie and Clarke

below; for convenience, the words are arranged according to the pre­ ceding vowel: 2

1) ust/ust sequences atuStew '(s)he works'

kustew '(s)he (ice) fishes'

mflstipaniw 'it comes to the surface'

STustimakan 'yeast'

GStimf ISIW 'bachelor'

ustTSikw 'his/her eye'

2) i&t/lst sequences tistihtam '(s)he remembers it'

clstimiSiw 'his/her limbs are numb'

iStimew '(s)he paddles away'

iStlswew '(s)he says (it) to him/her'

sipistipaniw 'it stretches'

wanitiStihtam '(s)he forgets it'

Words are given in a phonemic representation that is based on a dialect sur­ vey of the various Cree/Montagnais/Naskapi communities of the Quebec/Labrador peninsula. From these general representations, the actual phonetic forms of the various dialects may readily be derived (see MacKenzie 1080 for the characteristics of individual dialects, as well as Clarke 1082 for certain of the phonetic features of Sheshatshiu Montagnais). The phonemic representation adopted by the present study is not to be construed as a standard Montagnais/Naskapi orthography; rather, it constitutes a working representation for purposes of the present project. Sheshatshiu Sociolinguistics 257

3) eSt sequences peSils 'nearby'

4) ast/ast sequences anastew '(s)he puts down boughs'

aitimew '(s)he weaves snowshoes'

aStiy 'earth, land'

aStihkw 'pail'

asaSeu 'mud'

ayastimew 'Inuk, Eskimo'

mastekw 'swamp, muskeg'

mastenihtakuSiw '(s)he is cute'

mastiSin 'shoe'

nast 'very, completely, really'

pastisikan

For purposes of the present analysis, a mini-sample of 32 informants was selected; this sample was stratified as to sex, as well as to the four band/group affiliations and four age levels outlined above. As a result of the difficulties associated with quota filling that were discussed in the previous section, this mini-sample in fact included only 27 individuals, there being no individuals available to fillth e over-62 Sheshatshiu cell, the 21-36 Mushuau cell, and the over-62 female Maskuanu cell. Analysis of the actual phonetic forms used by the informants re­ vealed a certain amount of social conditioning of the variants of the 258 MacKenzie and Clarke

(sc) variable. By far the most frequently occurring phonetic variant was [ss], which was found among all four groups and ages, as well as both sexes. The palatalized variant [sc] typically occurred, among the under-62 informants, in two or three items (i.e., from 0% to 15% of the time), with no apparent lexical conditioning. For the two oldest Mushuau (i.e., Naskapi) speakers, however, [sc] is a much more frequent variant, occurring in almost 70% of cases for the male over-62 infor­ mant, and 35% for the female. In similar fashion, the over-62 male Uashau speaker has approximately 43% [sc] usage, and the over-62 Maskuanu male, 76%. This distribution would suggest that [sc] is age dependent, in that it occurs with by far the greatest frequency in the oldest speakers in the sample, the over-62 group. The only exception to this patterning is to be found in the male 21-36 Maskuanu speaker, who uses the conservative or earlier [sc] variant in 40% of the word-list cases. The reason for this last observation is at the moment unclear; much further work will have to be done before it can be determined whether, for this and other variables which are presently undergoing linguistic change, Sheshatshiu males are lagging behind females in the manner observed in a number of urban sociolinguistic studies. If the occurrence of the [sc] variant appears to be largely conditioned by non-linguistic factors, a second variant of the (§c) variable would seem nevertheless to be dependent almost exclusively on linguistic envi­ ronment. The variant in question is [st], which occurs for all informants without exception in the words /sTuscimakan/ 'yeast' and /uscinicisiw/ 'bachelor'. What these words have in common is the occurrence of short vowel /i/ plus nasal consonant /m/ or /n/ immediately following the (sc) variable. In other words, there appears to have been a regular phonological change of the historically earlier variant [sc] to [st] before the high front vowel followed by a nasal consonant. While [st] is appar­ ently realized categorically in the two words previously mentioned, it occurs variably in several other lexical items in which the same phono­ logical environment is met, among them /mascisin/ 'shoe'.3 Here, how­ ever, the explanation for the variable nature of the [st] variant would appear to lie in social rather than linguistic conditioning. For there o The word for 'shoe', /mastisin/, is somewhat different from the other cases examined. Here, it would appear that the loss of the short /i/ immediately following the /it/ cluster results in a cluster /StS/, which surfaces as either [ss] ([mass-in]), or, in this pre-nasal environment, as [st] ([mast in]). Sheshatshiu Sociolinguistics 259

is a certain amount of evidence to suggest that the [st] realization in these items was originally associated with one particular ethnic or band grouping. Thus the pronunciation [mast-in] for 'shoe' is today by far most prevalent among the Maskuanu group of informants, and is rare among other speakers.4 To sum up, an analysis of the mini-sample of 27 Sheshatshiu infor­ mants reveals, first of all, a change in progress with respect to the (sc) variable. The historically anterior realization [sc] has largely given way to the variant [ss]. Among younger informants, the occurrence of the [sc] pronunciation is fairly rare; indeed, [§c] is most frequent in infor­ mants over the age of 62. While for this latter group the social variable of band affiliation does not seem to play a major role with respect to the [sc] variant, there is some evidence to suggest that the highest ratio of this phonetic form will be found among older Mushuau, i.e., among Naskapi-affiliated speakers. Secondly, the present research on the (sc) variable has also revealed linguistic conditioning, in the form of a change from [§c] to [st] in the environment before /i/ plus nasal consonant. This change appears to have already been completed in the dialects of the various groups which compose the community of Sheshatshiu; however, while certain now relic forms (i.e., the words for 'yeast' and 'bachelor') have undergone the change in all dialects, these dialects do differ with respect to the implementation of the change in other lexical items which display the same linguistic environment.5 The preliminary analysis reported on in this paper, then, indicates that the widespread linguistic variability observable in Sheshatshiu Montagnais is conditioned by both non-linguistic and linguistic factors. Much fur­ ther work is needed to discover which of the non-linguistic variables of age, sex and band affiliation will prove most significant in clarifying language variability in this Montagnais community.

The realization (st) is quite rare in another lexical item in which the same phono­ logical conditions are met, namely the word /Msfcimisiw/ 'his/her limbs are numb'; in this case there is no apparent social conditioning. The fact that several Maskuanu speakers also use an [st] variant in the word /nS*t/ 'very, completely' suggests that the [it] [st] rule may also have been operative in the Maskuanu dialect in word-final position. 5 Thanks go to Lynn Drapeau for suggesting that the [it] to [st] change is one that was comrdeted Drior to the nrrsent. 260 MacKenzie and Clarke

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The project reported on in this paper has been made possible by a team research grant from the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER) of Memorial University of Newfoundland, as well as a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Research Fellowship to Marguerite MacKenzie.

REFERENCES

Clarke, Sandra 1082 North-West River (SheshStshlt) Montagnais: A Grammatical Sketch. Na­ tional Museum of Man, Mercury Series. Ethnology Service Paper 80. Ottawa. Clarke, Sandra and Marguerite MacKenzie 1081 Emerging Rules in North-West River (SheshStshlt) Montagnais. Pp. 210- 235 in Papers of the Thirteenth Algonquian Conference. William Cowan, ed. Ottawa: Carleton University. Cowan, William 1077 *xk/0k proto-algonquien dans le Montagnais du 17e siecle. Pp. 143-150 in Actes du Huiticme congres des Algonquinistes. William Cowan, ed. Ottawa: Carleton University. Labov, William 1066 The Social StratiBcation ot English in New York City. Washington: Center for Applied Linguistics. MacKenzie, Marguerite 1080 Towards a Dialectology of Cree-Montagnaia-Naskapi. Ph.D. thesis, Uni­ versity of Toronto. Mailhot, Jose and Andree Michaud 1065 North-West River. Etude ethnographique. Quebec: Universite Laval, Centre d'Etudes Nordiques. Milroy, Lesley 1080 Language and Social Networks. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Tanner, Adrian 1078 Land Use and Occupancy Among the Indians of North-West River, La­ brador. Mimeo. Trudgill, Peter 1074 The Social Differentiation of English in Norwich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.