Changes in progress: Voice onset times (VOT) in Kiribati and Kiribati English

Kiribati is politically independent since 1979. However, it is far from being economically self-sustainable. Internal sources are few and do not provide sufficient funds to cover all the needs so that Kiribati is indeed very... [ view full abstract ]

Kiribati is politically independent since 1979. However, it is far from being economically self-sustainable. Internal sources are few and do not provide sufficient funds to cover all the needs so that Kiribati is indeed very dependent on foreign donations. Moreover, the island nation faces numerous and urgent climate change issues, so much so that its government is forced to take many steps towards staged emigration. It is under these circumstances that climate change, cultural change and even linguistic change become connected.

My presentation is structured into two parts. Firstly, I list the many migration possibilities that the government of Kiribati has created and seeks to create. I aim to show how such strategies promote cultural reorientation processes and foster instrumental motivations towards learning and speaking the English language. Secondly, I present analyses of the voice onset times (VOT) of /t/ and /d/, an acoustic-phonetic variable that is subject to unconscious acquisition rather than conscious learning. The data for these discussions is comprised of recordings collected with Kiribati islanders over the last three years:

• unstructured sociolinguistic interviews conducted in English,
• focussed production tests containing Kiribati and English words,
• focussed perception tests containing non-words.

These analyses make apparent that, with respect to the production of English /t/ and /d/, there is age-related change in progress: younger speakers produce more standard-like values than older speakers. This key finding seems to be a linguistic manifestation of the larger socio-cultural process at hand: younger speakers have always been surrounded by climate change issues, the discourse that surrounds it, and are more likely to see themselves forced to make use of the migration possibilities that are created for them.