Speaker Ethnicity, Language Background, And The Pronunciation Of Hawaiian Place Names

Abstract

Residents of Hawai‘i exhibit a great deal of variation in their pronunciation of place names that have a Hawaiian origin. Using wordlist data, we investigate whether the phonetic realization of Hawaiian place names is linked to speaker ethnicity (i.e., whether the speaker has Native Hawaiian ancestry) and/or language background (i.e., whether the speaker speaks Hawaiian). We focus on two linguistic variables: the glottal stop, which is phonemic in Hawaiian, and the realization of the vowel /o/. The results provide evidence that both factors are linked with which phonetic variants are used; speakers who are Native Hawaiian and speakers who can speak at least some Hawaiian produce more Hawaiian-like realizations of the place names compared with other speakers in the study. We 1 Acknowledgements: We would like to thank Bethany Kaleialohapau‘ole Chun Comstock for comments on earlier versions of this paper. We would also like to thank the In-Group (a sociolinguistic discussion group) for their assistance with the initial design. Of course, all errors remain our own. 2 569 Moore Hall 1890 East-West Road Honolulu, HI 96822 Dimensões e experiências em Sociolinguística 34 argue that the various phonetic realizations are indexed to social meanings, and that anglicized variants can make a claim that Hawai̒ i is Western and a part of the United States, whereas Hawaiian variants can reject this claim in what Herman (1999) refers to as reconquest. Further, we argue that variants can do the social work of anti-conquest and reconquest even when it is not the intent of the speaker.