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Pasifika English in New Zealand: The Case of bro’Town

Pasifika English in New Zealand: The Case of bro’Town. Andy Gibson & Allan Bell Institute of Culture, Discourse and Communication, AUT University, Auckland, NZ. NWAV, Columbus Ohio, USA November 2006. bro’Town.

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Pasifika English in New Zealand: The Case of bro’Town

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  1. Pasifika English in New Zealand:The Case of bro’Town Andy Gibson & Allan Bell Institute of Culture, Discourse and Communication,AUT University, Auckland, NZ NWAV, Columbus Ohio, USA November 2006

  2. bro’Town • Adventures of 5 fourteen year-old boys in inner-city Auckland (4 Pasifika, 1 Maori) • Conceived of and voiced by a Samoan comedy group, the Naked Samoans • This presentation covers an analysis of three of the characters. These three characters are all Samoan and each is played by a different actor • Pepelo father • Valea son, 14 • Vale son, 14

  3. Why bro’Town? • Interest in performed varieties of language • Interest in the aspects of pronunciation used to mark NZ Pasifika identities • Little prior research on Pasifika varieties of NZE

  4. NZ-born vs. Samoa-born • Wave of immigration to NZ from Pacific Islands in 1970s As at 2001: • NZ-born Samoans in NZ: • 40% over 15 years old • Samoa-born Samoans in NZ: • 89% over 15 years old (Statistics New Zealand)

  5. Aims of Study • Investigate consonantal variables in the NZ-born characters (Valea, Vale) which may be associated with NZ Pasifika Youth Culture English and in the Samoan-born character (Pepelo) which may be affected by having Samoan as his first language. • Investigate instances of ‘double voicing’ (Performance from within already performed voice)

  6. The CharactersPepelo Sound1

  7. Valea Sound2

  8. Vale Sound3

  9. The Variables • /p/ aspiration - pub, precious • (DH) - these, their, them, their • (TH) - something, thanks, three • Linking /r/

  10. /p/ aspiration • Stops unaspirated in Samoan • Non-aspiration of /t/ has been noted as a feature of Maori English, though less so in younger speakers (Holmes, 1997; Bell, 2000) • Starks et al (fc.) found unaspiration of /p t k/ in Niuean NZE

  11. /p/ aspiration • All /p/s in syllable-initial position in stressed syllables were analysed • Length of aspiration was measured, from release burst to onset of second formant

  12. /p/ aspiration Sound4

  13. /p/ aspiration • Pepelo has much less aspiration of /p/ than the boys • This may be a substratal effect from Samoan, Pepelo’s portrayed 1st language • Non-aspiration of /p/ does not seem to have been taken up as part of the youth ethnolect

  14. /p/ aspiration – Double Voicing Sound5

  15. (DH) & (TH) • No dental fricatives in Samoan • (DH) and (TH) affrication in Maori English (Bell, 2000) • TH-fronting in young Pakeha NZE (Campbell & Gordon, 1996) • NZ Pasifika English: • DH-stopping (DH  /d/) • TH-fronting (TH  /f/) • TH-fronting more common in word-final position (Starks and Reffell, 2006)

  16. (DH) • All word-initial instances of (DH) analysed • Auditory analysis • Coded as dh (for dental fricative) or d (for alveolar stop) • d category also includes a few dental affricates

  17. (DH) Sound6

  18. (TH) • All instances of TH (in all word positions) were analysed • Most tokens realised as either [th], [f] or [v] • 5 tokens (out of 79) realised as stops (removed from analysis below)

  19. (TH) Sound7

  20. (TH) – Double voicing Sound8

  21. (TH) Realisations of TH by character 6 of 10 [v] occurrences are in the word (with)

  22. (TH) Realisations of TH by word position

  23. (DH) & (TH) • Pepelo has very high rates of both DH-stopping and TH-fronting - again, probably a substratal effect. • Valea uses high rates of both DH-stopping and TH-fronting, though not as much as Pepelo • Vale uses low rates of DH-stopping and moderate rates of TH-fronting

  24. Linking /r/ - Background Hay and Sudbury (2005): Study tracks decline of rhoticity in NZE. Linking /r/ continues to appear at high rates. Starks and Reffell (2005): Low rates of linking /r/ in reading passages by Pasifika youth.

  25. Linking /r/ - Methodology • All potential linking /r/s across word boundaries analyzed • Tokens at intonation phrase boundaries excluded, also excluded if hesitation between words • Coded as r or 0

  26. Linking /r/ - Results Sound9

  27. Linking /r/ - Results Linking /r/ by phonetic environment

  28. Where do these variants come from? • Substratal influence? • But some of these are also common in other vernacular varieties of English… • Influence of hip-hop?

  29. A question of ethnicity? • How to define this style of speech in terms of social factors? • This is not just NZ Samoan English • This variety of NZ English is associated with being young, Polynesian, interested in hip-hop culture, living in South-Auckland… ???

  30. Conclusions • Very high levels of /p/ non-aspiration, DH-stopping and TH-fronting in Samoa-born NZ Samoan English. Some of these features may be caused by a substratal influence • DH-stopping, TH-fronting and low rates of linking /r/ in NZ-born NZ Samoan English • These features are not just ethnic identity markers, they are related to an emerging sub-culture which needs to be defined through more detailed ethnographic study. • The use of these features is manipulated to project different personas from within already performed voices

  31. References • Bell, Allan. 1990. Audience and referee design in New Zealand media language. In Bell and Holmes (eds): 165-194. • Bell, Allan. 1992. Hit and miss: referee design in the dialects of New Zealand television advertisements. Language and Communication 12.3-4: 1-14. • Bell, Allan. 2000. Maori and Pakeha English: a case study. In Bell and Kuiper (eds) New Zealand English: 221-248 Wellington: Victoria University Press. Amsterdam: Benjamins. • Campbell, Elizabeth and Elizabeth Gordon. 1996. ‘What do you fink?’ Is New Zealand English losing its ‘th’? New Zealand English Journal 10: 40-46. • Coupland, Nikolas. 1985. 'Hark, hark, the Lark': Social Motivations for Phonological Style-Shifting. Language & Communication 5(3):151-171. • Foulkes, Paul. 1997. Rule inversion in a British English dialect - a sociolinguistic investigation of [r]-sandhi in Newcastle upon Tyne. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 4(1) - A Selection of Papers from NWAVE 25. 259-270. • Hay, Jennifer and Andrea Sudbury (2005).    How rhoticity became /r/-sandhi.  In Language 81.4, pp 799-823. • Holmes, Janet. 1997. Maori and Pakeha English: some New Zealand social dialect data. Language in Society 26(1): 65-101 • Lippi-Green, R. 1997. Language, ideology, and discrimination in the United States. London:Routledge. • Starks, Donna and Hayley Reffell. 2006. Reading ‘TH’: Vernacular variants in Pasifika Englishes in South Auckland. Journal of Sociolinguistics 10(3): 382-392. • Starks, Donna and Hayley Reffell. 2005. “Pronouncing your Rs in New Zealand English: A study of Pasifika and Maori students”. New Zealand English Journal 19: 36-48. • Starks, Donna, Jane Christie and Laura Thompson (in press). Niuean English: initial insights into an emerging variety. To appear in English Worldwide. • http://www.stats.govt.nz/analytical-reports/pacific-profiles/samoan/population.htm. Retrieved on 1/11/06

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