Phonological Koinéization in Kathmandu Tibetan

Christopher Geissler

doi:10.3765/amp.v5i0.4242

Abstract

This paper tests the new-dialect formation model of Peter Trudgill (1986 et seq) by examining several phonological features of Tibetan as spoken in the diaspora community of Kathmandu, Nepal. Established by an influx of migrants from many dialect regions beginning in 1959, this presents a unique opportunity to study koinéization, new dialect formation, in progress. Trudgill’s model predicts that a new dialect should largely emerge in the second generation born in the new region, exhibiting both simplification, the failure of marked variants to transmit across generations, and focusing, the selection of particular variants as a new norm for the community's new variety.Data from seventy-three sociolinguistic interviews was coded for phonological and lexical variables known to differ across Tibetan-speaking regions, and NeighborNets were constructed in SplitsTree. Results indicate that regionally marked variables were not transmitted into the first or second generation of Diaspora-raised speakers, but Diaspora speakers exhibited a high degree of variation comparable to that of speakers from the numerically- and socially-dominant U-Tsang region. That younger speakers have not yet converged on a single new variety suggests a role for additional factors to affect the rate of koinéization.

Highlights

This paper tests the new-dialect formation model of Peter Trudgill (1986, 2000 inter alia) by examining the Tibetan language spoken in the diaspora community of Kathmandu, Nepal
Vowel harmony was only found in four speakers
Since none of the diaspora speakers exhibited vowel harmony, it can be said that this feature has not been transmitted past the first generation of migrants from Lhasa

Summary

Yale University

!1 Introduction This paper tests the new-dialect formation model of Peter Trudgill (1986, 2000 inter alia) by examining the Tibetan language spoken in the diaspora community of Kathmandu, Nepal. The first generation consists of the original immigrants to the new location, who bring with them the speech of their home regions As they interact with each other, some degree of accommodation takes place on the scale of individual conversations as well as over the course of speakers' lives (e.g. Giles and Powesland 1975 and subsequent work). Baxter et al (2009) attack the claim of determinism with reference to Trudgill's own observation that New Zealand English had largely crystallized in three generations, as manifest in the speech of the second generation of settlers born in New Zealand To do this, they created a mathematical model of speaker networks to estimate how long it would take for inter-speaker interaction to converge on a single, consistent form of a linguistic variable.

Phonological data

!5 Results

!References