Project Description
English in paradise?: Emergent varieties in Micronesia
We set out to investigate five previously undescribed varieties of English that are developing in Micronesia, in the Northern Pacific Ocean – an area of the world that has a complex colonial past (Spain, Germany, Japan, Britain, Australia and the US are all implicated in at least some places), but which now has English as an official language and a language of school instruction (alongside local languages in some cases). Of all the colonial rulers, only the Japanese showed interest in settlement. All parts of Micronesia have had Anglophone colonial rulers, but some only since 1945. Colonial Anglophone settlement of the islands has been minimal. Today, some parts are independent, while others are either fully integrated with, or technically independent, but contractually tied to the US. Micronesia is also linguistically diverse, housing a wide number of Austronesian languages, only some of which belong to the Micronesian sub-branch.
The five Micronesian Englishes that will be examined are those of Saipan (in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI)), Kosrae (in the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM)), Guam (an unincorporated territory of the United States), Kiribati and Nauru (both independent). These have been chosen because they have quite distinct colonial histories, they have different intensities of Japanese contact in the first half of the 20th century, they have followed different postcolonial paths, they have different indigenous substrate languages that might shape emergent new Englishes, and they have different experiences of postcolonial demographic change.
Why are Micronesian Englishes interesting? In general, few postcolonial Englishes that have resulted from US rather than British colonial rule have been extensively examined dialectologically. The main exception, the Philippines, experienced intensive contact with US English at the beginning of the 20th century, unlike in Micronesia, where contact was later and fleeting. Whilst many studies of postcolonial Englishes have examined varieties largely in isolation from others, a recent model by dialectologist Edgar Schneider has proposed a socially, historically, politically and linguistically developmental trajectory that all postcolonial varieties of English follow, but again only the Philippines represent US-based postcolonial Englishes in this model. The study of these Micronesian Englishes allows us to test this model, analysing communities that experienced American control, but little American settlement or social contact.
Three PhD students will carry out dialectological fieldwork in these three islands of Micronesia, collecting recordings of local people speaking English. Together with an existing, recently collected corpus of English from the Republic of Palau, west of the FSM, a large transcribed corpus of spoken Micronesian English will be built, supplemented by appropriate written texts in English from the islands.
We set out to investigate five previously undescribed varieties of English that are developing in Micronesia, in the Northern Pacific Ocean – an area of the world that has a complex colonial past (Spain, Germany, Japan, Britain, Australia and the US are all implicated in at least some places), but which now has English as an official language and a language of school instruction (alongside local languages in some cases). Of all the colonial rulers, only the Japanese showed interest in settlement. All parts of Micronesia have had Anglophone colonial rulers, but some only since 1945. Colonial Anglophone settlement of the islands has been minimal. Today, some parts are independent, while others are either fully integrated with, or technically independent, but contractually tied to the US. Micronesia is also linguistically diverse, housing a wide number of Austronesian languages, only some of which belong to the Micronesian sub-branch.
The five Micronesian Englishes that will be examined are those of Saipan (in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI)), Kosrae (in the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM)), Guam (an unincorporated territory of the United States), Kiribati and Nauru (both independent). These have been chosen because they have quite distinct colonial histories, they have different intensities of Japanese contact in the first half of the 20th century, they have followed different postcolonial paths, they have different indigenous substrate languages that might shape emergent new Englishes, and they have different experiences of postcolonial demographic change.
Why are Micronesian Englishes interesting? In general, few postcolonial Englishes that have resulted from US rather than British colonial rule have been extensively examined dialectologically. The main exception, the Philippines, experienced intensive contact with US English at the beginning of the 20th century, unlike in Micronesia, where contact was later and fleeting. Whilst many studies of postcolonial Englishes have examined varieties largely in isolation from others, a recent model by dialectologist Edgar Schneider has proposed a socially, historically, politically and linguistically developmental trajectory that all postcolonial varieties of English follow, but again only the Philippines represent US-based postcolonial Englishes in this model. The study of these Micronesian Englishes allows us to test this model, analysing communities that experienced American control, but little American settlement or social contact.
Three PhD students will carry out dialectological fieldwork in these three islands of Micronesia, collecting recordings of local people speaking English. Together with an existing, recently collected corpus of English from the Republic of Palau, west of the FSM, a large transcribed corpus of spoken Micronesian English will be built, supplemented by appropriate written texts in English from the islands.
ArchiveDecember 13-15 2018 – Conference
Languag, dialect and periphery (University of Bern, Switzerland) > Event website November 2-5 2017 – Conference New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV 46) (University of Wisconsin-Madison, Wisconsin, USA) > Event website August 7-11 2017 - Conference Methods in Dialectology XVI (University of Tokyo, Japan) > Event website June 6-9 2017 – Conference International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE9) (University of Malaga, Spain) > Event website May 08 2017 - Phil.hist. Forschungstag 2017, University of Bern, Switzerland The development of English varieties in Micronesia (Poster) (Hess, D., Kuske, E., Leonhardt, T., Lynch, S., & Mettler, L.) > Event website May 4-6 2017 – Conference Approaches to migration, language and identity (University of Lausanne, Switzerland) > Event website March 16-18 2017 – Conference Fourth International Conference on Language Contact in Times of Globalization (LCTG4) (University of Greifswald, Germany) > Event website March 9-10 2017 – Conference Studies of Paradise: Where language meets culture in the Pacific (University of Bern, Switzerland) > Event website November 3-6 2016 – Conference New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV 45) (Simon Fraser University & University of Victoria, Vancouver, Canada) > Event website September 2016 – CUSO Workshop Big data bad data (University of Lausanne, Switzerland) August 2016 – Talk, University of Cambridge, England Sounds of the South Seas: Insights into three acoustic variables July 2016 – Conference Sociolinguistics Symposium 21 (University of Murcia, Spain) > Event website > Blog entry June-July 2016 – Fieldwork in Micronesia
April 22-24 2016 – Conference New Ways of Analyzing Variation in Asia-Pacific (NWAV-AP 4) (National Cheng Chung University, Taiwan) Interface between sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics. > Event website > Blog entry Forum Graduate School of the Humanities (GSH), University of Bern, Switzerland English in paradise?: Emergent varieties in Micronesia (Poster) > Event flyer October 08-10 2015 – Conference Conference of the International Association for World Englishes (IAWE) (Istanbul, TUR) > Event website > Blog entry June-August 2015 – Fieldwork in Micronesia
March 27-29 2015 – CUSO Workshop Conducting sociolinguistic research on Englishes near and far (Schloss Münchenwiler, Switzerland) > Blog entry |
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