Advances in Sociophonetics

Chapter 1. The sociophonetic orientation of the language learner 21

Percent

Caretakers

4 year olds

8 year olds

12 year olds

æi a a

^ æY u. ü,(o:)

Figure 2. Development of local phonetic forms for (ow) in goat, go, road etc. in Milton
Keynes by age. From Kerswill and Williams (1994).

2.3 The future in Tok Pisin

A dramatic view of the disconnect between parents and children is found when
a pidgin language, with no native speakers shifts to a creole as a generation of
children grow up with this as their first language. Bickerton (1981) treats these
as linguistically orphaned, forced to use their naked language learning ability
because they do not recognize their parents speech as legitimate language. Sankoff
& Laberge (1973) studied this process in the development of the future marker
BAI of Tok Pisin (derived from baimbai). Adults tended to give this formative
secondary stress, realizing ‘He will go’ as /em bai i-go/, while children tended to
reduce /bai/ to [bə] in [embəigo] or even [embigo].

(1) Parent Child
em bai i-go em b(ə) i-go

Figure 3 shows the maintenance of secondary stress of bai on the vertical axis
with age on the horizontal axis. As a whole, parents are very different from their
children: 35 to 70% bai with secondary stress and children at much lower levels: 5
to 45%. However, when Sankoff added to her original diagram the lines connect-
ing parents to children, we observe that they are largely parallel. As the King of
Prussia study in §2.1 showed, the influence of the parental input is not completely
eliminated even when children have absorbed the new community norm.