III The Mouton World Atlas of Variation in English Edited by Bernd Kortmann and Kerstin Lunkenheimer Brought to you by | Australian National University Authenticated | 150.203.230.100 Download Date | 2/11/13 1:07 AM IV ISBN 978-3-11-027988-7 e-ISBN 978-3-11-028012-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliograhic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2012 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: iStockphoto/Thinkstock Typesetting: Dörlemann Satz, Lemförde Cartography: Hans-Jörg Bibiko, Leipzig Network diagrams: Christoph Wolk, Freiburg Printing and binding: Beltz Bad Langensalza GmbH, Bad Langensalza ? Printed on acid free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com Brought to you by | Australian National University Authenticated | 150.203.230.100 Download Date | 2/11/13 1:07 AM Table of contents v Table of contents Abbreviations of the WAVE varieties fi ix List of maps fi xi List of maps sorted by features fi xv List of phenetic networks fi xxi Bernd Kortmann and Kerstin Lunkenheimer Introduction fi 1 Part I: The British Isles Gunnel Melchers Orkney and Shetland English fi 15 Jennifer Smith Scottish English and varieties of Scots fi 21 Markku Filppula Irish English fi 30 Jennifer Kewley Draskau Manx English fi 48 Robert Penhallurick Welsh English fi 58 Graeme Trousdale English dialects in the north of England fi 70 Susanne Wagner Southwest English dialects fi 78 Peter Trudgill East Anglia fi 88 Anna Rosen Channel Island English fi 98 Part II: North America Susanne Wagner Newfoundland English fi 109 Alexander Kautzsch Earlier African American Vernacular English fi 126 Salikoko S. Mufwene Gullah fi 141 Robert Bayley Chicano English fi 156 Brought to you by | Australian National University Authenticated | 150.203.230.100 Download Date | 2/11/13 1:07 AM vi Table of contents Part III: The Caribbean and South America Jeffrey Reaser and Benjamin Torbert English in the Bahamas fi 169 Stephanie Hackert Bahamian Creole fi 180 Stacy Denny and Korah Belgrave Barbadian Creole English (Bajan) fi 197 Andrea Sand Jamaican English fi 210 Peter L. Patrick Jamaican Creole fi 222 Angela Bartens San Andres-Providence Creole English fi 237 Geneviève Escure Belizean Creole fi 255 Hubert Devonish and Dahlia Thompson Guyanese Creole (Creolese) fi 265 Bettina Migge The Eastern Maroon Creoles fi 279 Tonjes Veenstra Saramaccan fi 291 Donald Winford Sranan fi 302 Dagmar Deuber and Valerie Youssef Trinidadian Creole fi 320 Paula Prescod Vincentian Creole fi 329 Part IV: Africa Malcolm Awadajin Finney Sierra Leone Krio fi 343 John Victor Singler Liberian Settler English fi 358 John Victor Singler Vernacular Liberian English fi 369 Magnus Huber Ghanaian English fi 382 Magnus Huber Ghanaian Pidgin English fi 394 Rotimi Taiwo Nigerian English fi 410 Nicholas Faraclas Nigerian Pidgin fi 417 Brought to you by | Australian National University Authenticated | 150.203.230.100 Download Date | 2/11/13 1:07 AM Table of contents vii Augustin Simo Bobda Cameroon English fi 433 Anne Schröder Cameroon Pidgin fi 441 Josef Schmied Tanzanian English fi 454 Alfred Buregeya Kenyan English fi 466 Jude Ssempuuma Ugandan English fi 475 Susan Fitzmaurice White Zimbabwean English fi 483 Rajend Mesthrie Black South African English fi 493 Rajend Mesthrie Indian South African English fi 501 Sean Bowerman White South African English fi 511 Part V: South and Southeast Asia Devyani Sharma Indian English fi 523 Ahmar Mahboob Pakistani English fi 531 Michael Meyler Sri Lankan English fi 540 May L-Y Wong Hong Kong English fi 548 Verena Schröter Colloquial Singaporean English (Singlish) fi 562 Stefanie Pillai Colloquial Malaysian English fi 573 Part VI: Australasia and the Pacific Pam Peters and Peter Collins Colloquial Australian English fi 585 Peter Mühlhäusler Aboriginal English and associated varieties: shared and unshared features fi 596 Peter Mühlhäusler Norfolk Island/Pitcairn English fi 620 Rachel Hendery and Sabine Ehrhart Palmerston Island English fi 628 Kent Sakoda and Jeff Siegel Hawai’i Creole fi 643 Brought to you by | Australian National University Authenticated | 150.203.230.100 Download Date | 2/11/13 1:07 AM 628 Rachel Hendery and Sabine Ehrhart Rachel Hendery and Sabine Ehrhart Palmerston Island English* 1Introduction Palmerston English is spoken by just over 50 people on a remote atoll of the Cook Islands in the South Pacific. In 1863, the Englishman William Ma(r)sters settled on Palmerston with several Polynesian women from the Northern Group of the Cook Islands. Marsters ruled the island in an autocratic style: officially only English was allowed to be spoken and it is recorded that the children from his various wives spoke English with a strong British accent. The perpetuation of the speech was more difficult for the women than for the men be- cause they did not have a direct female example from Britain to imitate. The three branches of the family are now in their 8th generation and their offspring live mainly in Rarotonga, Aitutaki, New Zealand and Australia (several thousand people, with a varying degree of competence in the language, depending on the contact re- tained with Palmerston). Despite the small size of the Palmerston Island community, there is a great deal of linguistic variation, both among speakers and in the speech of individuals. Moreover, there is a perception of linguistic variation, as shown in the following conversation, where RH is the researcher: AB Some people on the island say “fowl” and some say “chicken”. “Chickens”, my dad simply say. “Can you go feed the chickens now?” RH So who says “fowl”? AB Um, mainly the the bush people. We’re the beach fellas, and they’re [gesturing to the other side of the island] the bush people. There’s a few of other things they say too. […] Cos most of the people on the bush side, they speak proper English and the beach side, they just communicate by their language. So if I would say to them the “shubble”, they would get angry at me. They don’t say it, cos they’re Engli- kind of closer to English, like MM and, uh, PT and them there. This perception is supported by an initial statistical analysis of data collected in 2009. This analysis was con- ducted on the presence or absence of five Palmerston Island English features (chosen for their ease of recog- nition and frequency of use): pro-drop (F42–44), bare nouns for semantic plurals (F57,F58), bare verb form for present tense third person singular, -s morpheme on non-third-person present tense verbs, and the use of was with they, we, or you. For each transcription of at least 100 consecutive words, a score was assigned for each of the five features: the number of times the feature was used divided by the number of times it could potentially have occurred. These scores showed a significant difference (p<0.05) for “bush people” vs “beach fellas” While the above discussion focusses on lexical and grammatical variation, variation is found at all lin- guistic levels. It is sometimes a matter of choice between local variants or standard English variants, but sometimes a choice between multiple local variants, e.g. the use of the term islet or motu, both of which are in frequent use on Palmerston Island. Statistical tests show that some variation is governed by gender (e.g. pro- drop is much more heavily used by men than by women), and some by age (use of singular forms of the verb be with plural subjects, e.g. they is, we is, you is is more frequent with younger speakers than with older people). Social group membership also seems to play a role, and may in fact be ultimately responsible for the apparent gender-related variation. At least some of the variation found in the speech of a single speaker is * This research was supported under a Grant for the Excel- number DP110103714) for Rachel Hendery. We would also like lence of Research by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft to acknowledge the assistance of Teura Mouraui-Pokoati for in 2007 for Sabine Ehrhart and under the Australian Research answering questions about Cook Island Ma¯ori. Council’s Discovery Projects funding scheme (project Brought to you by | Australian National University Authenticated | [email protected] Download Date | 1/23/13 1:14 AM Palmerston Island English 629 conditioned by register and accommodation. A large amount of the inter-speaker variation, however, is not so easy to account for, and may be personal-pattern variation: the phenomenon described for small communities of Gaelic speakers by Dorian (1994). 2Notable features 2.1 “Substrate features” The case of Palmerston Island English is not a prototypical “substratum-superstratum” situation. There was no resident population on the island when the first settlers arrived. Within the settlement group, however, English was certainly dominant in terms of power, as it is said that Marsters forbade the use of Cook Island M¯aori, the language of his wives, and there seems to be no record of other language use among the group, des- pite the possibility that one or more Portuguese speakers were present. In this sense, then, we can speak of a Cook Island M¯aori “substratum”. It is difficult to distinguish, however, between features that might have arisen in the learner English of this first generation and those that may have reached the language later as the result of contact with the surrounding region. The extreme isolation of Palmerston Island for many years does mean that we would expect fewer features to be the result of such later contact.