Introduction

Although sociolinguistic studies of syntactic variation are quite common (see, for instance, Bickerton 1975; Labov 1972; Akere 1977; and Cheshire 1982), little attention appears to have been paid to the sociolinguistics of prepositional usage. In Nigerian English, previous studies of sociolinguistic variation have concentrated on phonology to the exclusion of syntax (Jibril 1982, 1986; Awonusi 1985). Since prepositions, even in ENL (English as a Native Language) settings, are known to be highly variable, it was decided to investigate the sociolinguistics of prepositional usage in Nigerian English for the present study.

Methodology

The instrument used for the generation of data was a 50-item linguistic questionnaire (see appendix). Each item on the questionnaire is a sentence which contains a blank space to be filled by a preposition. Three choices of preposition are then provided, only one of which is appropriate in standard (southern English) English.

The 50 sentences were not artificially constructed, nor were the prepositions arbitrarily chosen. Instead, authentic Nigerian texts provided the models on which the items were based. For example, Amos Tutuola, the Nigerian novelist, provided the frame for Variable 17 in his My Life in The Bush of Ghosts (1954: 117) with this sentence: ‘Even these evil works will appear as well on my “Will” …’ A Government document signed by a very senior official provided the frame for Variable 3 with this sentence: ‘The responsibility for running secondary schools lies on the Federal and State Governments.’

Introduction

Ottawa, the capital of Canada, is Canada's fourth largest city with a population of 819,263 inhabitants. It is bilingual, English (71 per cent) and French (29 per cent) and multicultural, situated on the bilingual belt which extends from Sudbury, Ontario to Moncton, New Brunswick. Ottawa and the area surrounding it, called the Ottawa Valley, was settled during the 1830s, 40s and 50s by Scots, Irish, English, Americans and French Canadians. Although there remains a great deal of interest in and popular writing about the ‘Ottawa Valley Twang’, a dialect derived from a mixture of the several Irish and Scots dialects, little of this ‘Twang’ can be found today as most of the surrounding area and all the city have assimilated to General English (Chambers 1975: 55–9).

Recently, the federal government has placed great importance on making its institutions bilingual. Although some 57,000 anglophone federal public employees have undergone extensive French language training and a much larger number of English-speaking school children attend total-immersion French elementary school instruction, the English in Ottawa remains representative of urban Canadian English. English in Ottawa, and in Canada generally, appears to be very little influenced by its contact with French, though research on this topic is sparse (see Chambers, this volume).

Introduction

The Pacific is a vast area containing a large number of indigenous languages, Asian mainland languages, half a dozen European languages and a number of pidgins and creoles. Here I will take the Pacific to include the island nations and territories of Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia (excluding Australia and New Zealand). These three areas are taken by geographers and others to comprise Oceania. Micronesia includes the island groups east of the Philippines and north of the equator. They include, for example, the Mariana, Marshall, Caroline and Gilbert Islands and have a land area of about 1,335 square miles. Melanesia comprises the island groups in the southwestern Pacific extending southeastwards from the Admiralty Islands to Fiji and includes such nations as Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and New Caledonia. Polynesia consists of a group of islands in the eastern and southeastern Pacific extending from New Zealand north to Hawaii and east to Easter Island.

This section includes papers representing two of the areas of Oceania, namely, Melanesia (Mühlhäusler on Tok Pisin, and Siegel on English in Fiji) and Polynesia (Sato on English in Hawaii). Despite the considerable interest in Oceania on the part of anthropologists and linguists (see Watson-Gegeo 1986 for an overview of research on the use of indigenous languages), to my knowledge no systematic studies have been done on the history and use of English (or any other European language such as German) in Micronesia, so this area is not represented here.

Introduction

Recent research in schema theory has demonstrated that background knowledge is a signficant factor in text comprehension. The theory proposes that schemata – dynamic abstract cognitive structures – are the basis of understanding. Comprehension is a constructive process integrating input from a message and the knowledge which is maintained in, and composes, schemata. It has been proposed that schemata contain slots or frames (Minsky 1975), which represent knowledge about a limited domain. These are instantiated with specific realisations as a text is comprehended (Anderson, Reynolds, Schallert and Goetz 1977), providing the reader the sense of having understood (Kuipers 4975). A schema also affects retrieval by providing a guide for the search process (Anderson and Pichert 1978).

The term ‘schema’ traces back to Bartlett (1932), who first demonstrated the effect of cultural membership on text recall. He had Englishmen read a North American Indian folktale, which was then recalled at increasing time intervals. From an English perspective, recalls were more coherent than the original story because subjects ‘rationalised’ exotic features of the text. Bartlett described remembering as an active process affected by ‘an interplay of individual and social factors’ (1932: 126).

Most recent work investigating the effect of cultural background knowledge on reading comprehension has focused on text structure. When Kintsch and Greene (1978) found that American college students read and recalled more of the propositions in a European fairy tale than an Apache folk tale, they proposed that there are cultural differences in story structure.

The social setting

In the urban centres of most of post-colonial Africa, Western languages have become permanently associated with those domains or spheres of social activity which symbolise Western influence, while the indigenous languages remain as symbols of family ties and ethnic identity.

In most monolingual communities, different varieties of a single language are employed to express every aspect of life; in post-colonial Africa, however, speakers generally use two or three different languages to express different aspects of their social identities. Research conducted in Kenya, notably that of Parkin (1977) and Scotton (1982), shows that ethnic identity in that country is expressed in one's mother tongue, transethnic solidarity (as Africans) in Swahili, and power, education and high economic status in English. In the Zambian urban setting, where both Western and traditional institutions are present, the choice of English rather than a local language, or vice-versa, in a given situation, carries certain habitual value connotations. These, in the long run, regulate the way in which the languages are used within the community. The aim of the present paper is to illustrate how the position of the mother tongue in the households of Lusaka is being encroached upon by the two major lingua francas, namely English and Nyanja. The paper also attempts to explain the social significance of language choice in the home domain.

Recent research on the forms and functions of English in Malaysia has tended to focus on the changing status of English there, particularly since the late 1960s, when Malay, renamed ‘Bahasa Malaysia’, became Malaysia's sole official language and began replacing English as the predominant medium of instruction in the schools. As a result, most analyses of Malaysian English (e.g., Platt and Weber 1980; Wong 1982) have concentrated on a predicted ‘deterioration’ in the English proficiency of younger Malaysians, which has accompanied diminishing needs to use English. In so doing, these studies have often ignored another outcome of this change in the relative status of English and Malay: the many domains of language use in which these two languages are now coming into increasing contact.

After a brief review of the history of English in Malaysia, this chapter will examine patterns of lexical borrowing from Malay into English and of code mixing and switching between English and Malay by the current Malaysian élites, who still use and set the standards for English usage in Malaysia. It will be shown that an analysis of the forms and functions of these borrowings, mixes, and switches can enhance our understanding of variation in contemporary Malaysian English.

The development of English in Malaysia

English during the colonial period

The sociolinguistic setting of Malaysian English began to develop during the British colonisation, from the late eighteenth until the mid twentieth centuries, of the Malay Peninsula and of present-day Sabah and Sarawak on the island of Borneo.

Introduction

In a previous publication, (Angogo and Hancock 1980) we traced the history of the English language in Africa and established that there were specific phonological and idiomatic features which distinguished East African English from West African English. In another publication (Hancock and Angogo 1982) we took a detailed look at the so-called Anglophone Eastern Africa, and attempted to give a sociolinguistic description of speakers of East African English. We proposed a breakdown of four varieties of English registers in East Africa. This paper continues along similar lines. My focus will be on the politics of the English language in Kenya and Tanzania. In other words, the question that the paper seeks to explore is whether different political systems necessarily cause differences in the variety of language use. To put it another way, is the English spoken in Tanzania different from that spoken in Kenya because the two countries have pursued different political systems?

Background

Kenya and Tanzania share a common border. They also share a history of British colonisation and the introduction of the English language (Hancock and Angogo 1982: 309). Alongside English, Kiswahili is the lingua franca of both countries. The politics and the use of the one language is inseparably linked to those of the other. Following independence, Kenya and Tanzania each adopted politics and language policies which differed radically from each other. Language, like choice of an economic system, was based on the country's politics.

Introduction

Most studies of creolisation have emphasised the massive qualitative changes accompanying the acquisition of a pidgin as a native language by a new generation of children. There are few reasons for doubting the importance of children in the development of some creoles, though the number of such ‘ideal’ (in a Bickertonian sense) creoles is probably quite restricted. More numerous and, arguably, equally important, are instances where the expansion of a pidgin occurs with a generation of adult speakers who change their primary language as they migrate to the new urban centres of the developing nations. Thus, in the southwest Pacific, in Papua New Guinea (Tok Pisin), the Solomons (Pijin) and Vanuatu (Bislama), this second type of creolisation is becoming increasingly common. Valuable general remarks about the transition from rural pidgin-vernacular bilingualism to urban (creolised) pidgin monolingualism can be found in the writings of Jourdan (1985). Referring to Tok Pisin, the Pidgin English of Papua New Guinea discussed in this paper, Elton Brash made the following observations about the linguistic adaptations accompanying the changeover from a rural to an urban environment (1975: 323):

Various previous studies have claimed that there are no regional differences within Australian English phonology. The main recent proponent of this view has been Bernard (1969: 62, 1981); see also Hammarström (1980: 42) and Turner (1966). Others, such as Mitchell and Delbridge (1965a, 1965b), while finding a different form of /ou/ in Adelaide, have generally agreed. Conversely, in an ongoing study (Bradley and Bradley 1991) quite a number of regional phonological differences have been identified, one of which, the lexical diffusion involving /a:/ and /æ/ in words such as castle or dance, is a popular regional stereotype and also shows social and stylistic differences. It may also reveal something about the process of lexical diffusion and the phonetic characteristics of the corresponding vowels in southeastern British English at an earlier stage.

Historical background and previous studies

It has been suggested, for example by Samuels (1972), that the eighteenth and early nineteenth century development of Middle English short a to long /a:/ rather than /æ/ before the fricative /f θ s/ (e.g. bath, class) as a reaction to the deconstriction of postvocalic r, preceded the development of /a:/ rather than /æ/ before a cluster of nasal plus obstruent (e.g., dance). The fact that Australian English varies, but tends more to /æ/ in the latter environment, as discussed below, is supportive of this view and may help to order and date the stages of lexical diffusion from /æ/ to /a:/ in England, as the koinéization (Trudgill 1986: 129–46) of Australian English probably took place, according to contemporary reports, in the very early nineteenth century.

Introduction

While there is a substantial body of literature on the general characteristics of Hiberno-English (HE), relatively little is known about grammatical variation within this variety of English, although the circumstances in which HE has evolved have varied in different parts of the country, depending mainly on the position and strength of the formerly dominant vernacular, Irish. Given the paucity of empirical research into spoken HE, descriptions of regional and social differences within HE have remained at a rather general level. For example Bliss (n.d.:5), setting aside the Scottish dialects of Ulster, simply makes a distinction between rural HE, urban HE and the speech of educated Irishmen (cf. Henry 1977: 20, for a some-what different view). Of these, the rural varieties are said to display most clearly grammatical features which go back to the corresponding features of Irish, whereas the educated variety is closest to standard English. Urban speech is characterised as being somewhere in between: while it has been influenced by contact with Irish, it has also been open to standardising and, perhaps, other influences from outside the country, especially from Britain (for further discussion, see Bliss n.d.).

English and Maori in New Zealand

At the end of the 1970s it was estimated that there were about 70,000 fluent Maori speakers in New Zealand (Benton 1979a), less than 20 per cent of the total Maori population (385,000 in 1981), or about 3 per cent of the population of the country as a whole. Practically all of the Maorispeakers would have been bilingual, and the majority of them middleaged or elderly. About half as many people again were thought to be passively bilingual (i.e., able to comprehend conversational Maori with little difficulty, but with limited speaking proficiency). A very much larger number of New Zealanders had some slight contact with the language – it had been included in the curriculum of many primary schools, for example, and had also obtained a foothold in radio broadcasting (although it did not feature regularly on television until the introduction of a five-minute daily news broadcast in Maori in 1986). However, for Maori and other New Zealanders alike, English has now long been the dominant language in most aspects of daily life.

The recent history of Maori and English in New Zealand has thus been characterised by a loss of functions by Maori on the one hand, and a corresponding expansion of functions (amounting often to an almost complete takeover) by English, on the other, within the former Maori speech community (cf. Metge 1964; Benton 1979a, 1979b, 1984a, 1986).

On August 14, 1983, a large gathering came together at Palimung, on the Kailge-Tega road, for the staging of the return compensation payment by the allied tribes Kusika-Midipu-Epola-Alya-Lalka (K-M-E-A-L) to Kopia-Kubuka. This was the second and final phase (on the K-M-E-A-L side) of a cycle of compensation payments resulting from the Marsupial Road War of September 1982 (see section 3.2.2 for details). The first phase, described in the previous chapter, had taken place three weeks before, on July 24.

An unusual feature of the Marsupial Road War, and of this second compensation event, was the part played by a local women's club, called the Kulka women's group. We briefly describe the formation and activities of these clubs in the western Nebilyer below, in section 7.1.

In an unprecedented initiative, members of the club marched out between the opposing sides on the battlefield, bearing the Papua New Guinea flag. With some support from provincial offices (which they had contacted), they made gifts of soft drink, cigarettes and 100 kina (from the club's accumulated money) to either side. They planted the flag and told the combatants to go home, which they eventually did.

This remarkable intervention at the battle resulted in some equally remarkable features of the compensation event, including public speaking by women. The way in which the club members represent their interests and themselves presents in some ways a startling contrast to other aspects of the event, which is otherwise dominated by segmentary, male-centered representations of social life.

Introduction

The following brief grammatical outline is provided to help the reader interested in examining the lines of Ku Waru text in Appendix A and Chapter 7. Ideally, those texts would include a third line of morpheme-by-morpheme glosses throughout, but length restrictions preclude that here. This outline is intended to facilitate the reader's efforts to identify noun and verb endings, and basic construction types at phrase and clause levels. Where possible, verb inflections are summarily presented as paradigms in tables. There is brief discussion of the meaning and functions of some categories of the noun and verb (especially the latter) where these would otherwise be particularly difficult to infer from the category labels alone. We include an inventory of Ku Waru phonemes, but only the briefest indications concerning pronunciation. Despite all its limitations, this outline should make the recognition of morphemes and construction types possible for the reader who wishes to use it as an aid in working through the texts included in this book.

While most of New Guinea's 700–1000 languages are spoken by fewer than 2000 people each, most of the 250,000 people in the Western Highlands Province speak dialects belonging to a single dialect continuum, which ranges east at least as far as Kujip, north to Ruti, west to the Kaugel Valley, and south to Ialibu in the Southern Highlands Province (see Map 1). People who live at extreme ends of the continuum cannot generally understand each other unless they have had enough exposure to become bi-dialectal. In the modern context, opportunities for such exposure have greatly increased.

Near the middle of the western Nebilyer Valley, in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, there is a large expanse of grassland locally known as Sibeka Sweet Potato Garden. Though the ground there remains fertile even after thousands of years of cultivation, almost all of it has lain fallow since 1979, when it was used as a battleground between people living to the northeast and south of it. We heard about that fighting when we first visited the area in 1981 and settled at Kailge, immediately to the northwest (see Map 2). The Kailge people told us they themselves had not got into the fight. Fighting commenced at Sibeka again in 1982. This time our hosts at Kailge did join in, on the side of their eastern neighbors. The opposing side called in their allies from further south, and the Kailge people, in turn, called in their allies from over the Tambul Range to the west.

The way in which the 1982 battle ended was remarkable, to us and our hosts. On September 13, onto the battlefield marched the members of a local women's group, one of several that had grown up in this area since around the beginning of 1982. Dressed in identical T-shirts which bore the national insignia, and carrying the Papua New Guinea flag, the women marched into the no-man's-land between the opposing lines and exhorted the men on both sides to lay down their arms. They carried with them onions, cabbages, money, cigarettes and bottled soft drinks, and offered these to the combatants if they would desist. Both sides accepted the offer, the goods were divided equally between them, and they dispersed.

The event to be examined in this chapter is the public payment presented on July 24, 1983 by Kopia and Kubuka – the first in the series of compensation payments arising from the Marsupial Road War of 1982 (see section 1.1 for summary of those events, and section 3.2.2 for details). Our general aim in this chapter is to exemplify and elucidate the discursive construction of segmentary social identities, and of transactions among them in the public sphere of intertalapi relations. In addition to the background material presented in Chapters 1 to 5 above, essential data for this analysis have included: (1) notes on our attendance at this (and other linked) events, in which we were generally spatially separated and in different company, hence viewing the proceedings from differing perspectives; (2) sound recordings of the speeches made at this event; (3) the full transcript of those recordings which is reproduced in Appendix A; and (4) extensive commentary about the speeches by participants and other observers at the event, much of it on the basis of (2) and (3).

Though it is based upon careful consideration of extensive evidence of all of these kinds, the analysis presented here does not purport to be a final or definitive one. To claim as much would be the height of arrogance, since the meaning of exchange transactions is chronically contested among the transactors themselves (as we hope to show). It should go without saying that the same is true among would-be analysts of those transactions.