ALS 2010 Annual Conference Programme - Australian Linguistic ...

Hendery
Rachel Hendery (Australian National University)
rachel.hendery@anu.edu.au
“The bush people, they speak proper English, and the beachfellas,
they just communicate by their language”: Quantifying variation in
Palmerston Island English.
Palmerston Island is a tiny island in the Cook Islands group, approximately 600 metres
across, and with a population of only 54. It was settled in the mid-1800s by
William Marsters from Northern England, and his three Cook Island wives. The inhabitants
today are the descendants of William Marsters and consider themselves
to be English. They speak a dialect of English that has phonetic features that can
be traced to Northern England, and also phonetic and grammatical features that
are common in Polynesian Englishes of the region and L2 English in general, as
well as features unique to Palmerston. Most current Palmerston Island inhabitants,
however, speak only English and no other language.
The island has been extremely isolated - there is no regular transport to or from
it, and it is 400 km away from the closest other inhabited island. In the lifetime
of current inhabitants, there have been decades-long periods with no outside
contact at all. There is one satellite telephone/internet connection, which is rarely
used. There is no television or radio connection with the outside world.
In the last five or six years since offshore moorings were built, around 30 yachts visit
in total each year for a few days each, and detailed records of these are kept.
This means that it is possible to (a) record every local speaker of Palmerston Island
English, and (b) track all external influences on the language. All of these factors
mean that Palmerston Island an almost unprecedented opportunity for studying
language variation and change in small mixed-origin communities.
This paper is based on data I collected during fieldwork on Palmerston Island in
2009. I recorded all adult speakers on the island but one. (The one exception is
blind, deaf and senile.) In each case I recorded three contexts: highly structured
elicitation tasks, natural conversation with me, and natural conversation with other
Palmerston Island English speakers. The recorded speech shows large amounts of
variation (phonetic, morphological and syntactic), not only conditioned by the
three different contexts, as we might expect, but also varying greatly from speaker
to speaker within the same context.
In this paper I will present the various factors that appear to condition the interspeaker
variation, including education-level, age, gender, and social group membership.
I will discuss the complexities of variation when all of these factors are at
play, as well as accommodation, hypercorrection and various degrees of fluency
in multiple dialects and/or registers.