Norfuk speech

Reliable observational evidence on Norfuk speech and its changing characteristics are scarce. By far and away the best source of evidence – a window on Norfuk vernacular – at a time when the language was more actively used in the community, is provided by a set of 17 tape-recorded dialogues obtained by Elwyn Flint on a field trip to Norfolk Island in 1957. Elwyn Flint was a linguist at the University of Queensland from the 1950s up to the early 1970s. Flint had an abiding interest in peripheral varieties of English and language contact situations. He was a diligent collector of speech recordings from diverse communities throughout rural Queensland. Around the time when Flint was conducting his field work, Norfolk Island was coming under the influence of a second wave of massive external influence, primarily from Australian and New Zealand English. Subsequent work by Harrison and Laycock in the 1970s indicates that the stable diglossia that pertained up until Flint’s investigations no longer exists. Flint himself noted its loss, which is apparent from even cursory examination of the 17 recorded dialogues.

The following sketch represents an attempt to isolate some salient phonetic and phonological characteristics of Norfuk vernacular as it was in 1957, and to document some of the changes which have taken place up to the present day. The analysis is based on a finite corpus of data (the 17 dialogues: approximately 40 minutes of continuous recorded speech), supplemented by keyword lists of seven present-day speakers of Norfuk vernacular. From this data base, it is possible to: a) convey in some detail the flavor of Norfuk phonetics, b) to lay a basis for further investigation into the evolution of Pitcairn-Norfuk Creole(s), c) to provide something of a yardstick for evaluating the current state of sociolinguistic variation on Norfolk Island today and d) to provide guidelines for those concerned with language revival as to the properties of ‘authentic’ Norfuk vernacular as it was spoken some two generations previous to the present time. Clearly, it is not possible on this data base to reconstruct a comprehensive picture of the phonology of Norfuk. An attempt to do so for present-day Norfuk would probably be misconceived. Norfuk today may constitute a collection of individual speech registers that are parasitic upon the variety of standard Norfolk English which is habitually used in the daily discourse of Norfolk Islanders, outside of the circumscribed contexts in which they use the Norfuk register. Norfuk, as described here, represents a prominent feature in the topography of spoken language variation in Norfolk Island, but its linguistic significance needs to be assessed within a broader sociolinguistic context, the outlines of which are described elsewhere and are the subject of on-going research.

Two sets of speech recordings form the basis of the present analysis: (i) a selection from the Flint dialogues recorded in 1957 and (ii) an elicitation of a set of citation forms based on a key word list for comparison of English dialects (Wells 1982; Foulkes and Dougherty 1999) provided by seven regular speakers of Norfuk recorded in November 2002.