249 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 first language, 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 first weeks 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.