The Flint recordings

The 17 tape recorded dialogues were obtained under conditions stimulating customary Norfuk usage, i.e. two or sometimes more informants, with no interviewer present, engaged in a semi-spontaneous conversation on topics that would be expected to elicit Norfuk vernacular usage. The dialogues were partly scripted, but largely spontaneous. The conversations obtained were, for the most part, natural sounding, expressive, and seemingly unselfconscious.

Flint produced two transcriptions of each dialogue with the assistance of the informants, directly following the recording session: an H(igh register) form, English translation, and a broad phonetic transcription of the actual speech in the Norfuk L(ow register) form. The phonetic transcription was obviously allophonic, rather than phonemic, but it was informed by Flint’s extensive knowledge of Norfolk Island and Pitcairn vernaculars.

Some analysis of the material had been undertaken and reported previously (Flint 1961), and we made use of this in selecting the materials on which the present paper is based. Flint was interested in the relative impact upon intelligibility, of phonological, lexical and syntactic features of the Norfuk Vernacular for English listeners. He employed a linguist, with considerable experience transcribing English contact vernaculars, but not specifically with Pitcairn or Norfuk, to attempt an utterance-by-utterance English translation, under controlled listening conditions. In this way an intelligibility score for each of the 17 dialogues was obtained. There was considerable variation in the intelligibility scores, reflecting a complex of factors, one of which was the ‘depth’ of Norfuk usage sustained by the participants in a given dialogue.

For the present analysis, we selected the dialogue with the lowest intelligibility rating for detailed phonetic analysis, in order to obtain the ‘broadest’ or most authentic samples of Norfuk vernacular, with least contamination by code-switching or interference from the standard English or H variety. The two speakers were a 60+-year-old male and a 60+ female. The dialogue provided approximately 500 words for each speaker. The dialogue was originally recorded on a reel-to-reel tape recorder and subsequently dubbed onto a gramophone recording (LP 33rpm) by Flint. The gramophone recording was digitized for the present analysis. The dialogue may be accessed on the accompanying CD-ROM.