Substrate effects in the phonetic realization of Pidgin vowels

Abstract

Hawai'i is home to an English-lexified creole, known locally as Pidgin. While much research has focused on the structural development of Pidgin (e.g., Bickerton & Odo 1976), little work has investigated acoustic phonetic variation in the Pidgin vowel system. This talk presents results from an analysis of 854 tokens of /a/ produced by 32 speakers of Pidgin from two corpora—one from the 1970s and one from the 2000s—and investigates factors that contribute to differences in realizations of this vowel. Results indicate that /a/ in Pidgin exhibits a raised nucleus over real time for female speakers (p<0.001) but not male speakers. Additionally, analysis reveals that the youngest group of Pidgin speakers in the 2000s corpus realize /a/ in words of Hawaiian origin as higher in the vowel space than words of English origin (p<0.0001). Possible reasons for the emergence of this fine-grained phonetic difference in the youngest speaker group are discussed, including the role played by Hawaiian language education and the apparent valuation of Hawaiian. Taken together, results suggest that a combination of factors influences the realization of /a/ in Pidgin, including age, gender, and whether a word derives from the superstrate language ( = English) or a substrate language ( = Hawaiian).