with Dr. James Grama

Title: Quantifying the creole continuum: A sociophonetic approach to variation and change in Hawaiʻi Creole vowels

The creole continuum (DeCamp 1971) is a model that accounts for variation in many creole contexts, whereby speakers (and linguistic features) vary along a continuum bounded between two polar lects: a more creole-like lect, structurally dissimilar from the main lexifier (the basilect) and one that shares more in common with the main lexifier (the acrolect). Over time, these creoles are predicted to undergo decreolization (cf. Bickerton 1980), wherein basilectal features are gradually replaced diachronically with those from the acrolect, bringing the creole structurally closer to its main lexifier. While this model has been foundational in circumscribing variation in many creole varieties (see, e.g., Patrick 1999), it is very rarely represented as analytically continuous, nor is it typically applied to phonological or phonetic based variation.

In this talk, I discuss my attempts to quantify and operationalize the creole continuum in a study of vowel change in Hawaiʻi Creole—an English lexified creole spoken by some 700,000 people in Hawaiʻi. While linguistic documentation of the language began in earnest in the 1960s and 70s (cf. Reinecke 1969; Bickerton & Odo 1976) and persisted through to the 2000s (e.g., Sakoda & Siegel 2003), no work has yet investigated change in the vocalic system, despite attestations that the language is both decreolizing (Bickerton 1980; Odo 1971; inter alia) and highly variable (cf. Sakoda & Siegel 2008). To begin to circumscribe this variability, I analyze seven Hawaiʻi Creole vowels that are reported to vary along the creole continuum, using two corpora of speakers whose birthdates span approximately 90 years. The creole continuum is operationalized using a Density Measure (e.g., Van Hofewegen & Wolfram 2010), where higher instances of morpho-syntactic features are taken as evidence of more basilectal speech. This metric is then used as a predictor of vowel variation. I argue that while decreolization is a fitting way to describe some of the changes to the vowel system, it insufficiently captures others. Instead, the data suggests a model where Hawaiʻi Creole exists as a variety in its own right separate from a direct relationship with English, and that decreolization is only one available avenue in a larger spectrum of possible directions of language change.

Zoom event: https://msu.zoom.us/j/91929271197

Passcode: MSU