Indications of language shift from a public face of a Samoan speech community

Indications of language shift from a public face of a Samoan speech community

This article presents a quantitative study of code-switching in broadcast discourse from Radio Samoa, an Auckland-based radio station. A corpus was created with
transcriptions from over five hours of interactive broadcasting. The Radio Samoa corpus was then analysed with a scheme based on Muysken’s (2001, p.10) typology of code-switching and Clyne’s (2003) transference framework. Integrated lexical insertions were the most common type of code-mixing in the corpus, and there were relatively few instances of alternation and congruent lexicalisation. More detailed analysis of the integrated lexical insertions found indications of language shift typical of community languages in contact with English, such as a high degree of lexical transference and semantic expansion. Three aspects of linguistic integration are discussed and a focus on the articulation of place names illustrates details of how the process of integration works in the Samoan language. The study concludes that the language of the Radio Samoa speech community does not show significant signs of language shift, but there are definite indications of language contact.

c. Applied Linguistics Association of New Zealand.