ELL: Surinam Dutch (was: Flemish vs. French in Brussels)

[William J Poser]

A similar phenomenon may be observed in Korea among older people. Since
Korea was a colony of Japan from 1910 to 1945, the current older generation
was educated in Japanese. Some of these people continued to use Japanese
for business or professional reasons, but many did not, as they had no
such reason to and often were quite bitter about the colonial period.
When I visited Korea I spent considerable time with the mother of a former
student of mine. Since my Korean is poor, we spoke Japanese. It was
quite interesting. She had for all intents and purposes not spoken Japanese
since 1945, and her Japanese was frozen in that year. It was like talking
to someone out of an old movie. Also, her phonology shifted depending on
whether she was being careful or not. If she was paying attention to her
speech, she produced normal Japanese phonology, except that she, like other
Koreans, seemed to have a rather peculiar intonation, the nature of which
I  have never pinned down. But when she relaxed her phonology became
quite non-Japanese. I think that an accurate characterization is that
she applied in Japanese the post-lexical rules of Korean. For example,
Korean has no voicing contrast. It has a series of voiceless unaspirated
stops that are voiced between sonorants and otherwise voiceless. In her
relaxed speech she voiced the Japanese voiceless tops between sonorants
and she unvoiced the underlyingly voiced stops in word-initial position.
This makes the Japanese harder to understand as it neutralizes features
that are distinctive in Japanese.

This is actually an example of a peculiar sort of endangered language that
deserves study. Japanese, of course, is not endangered, but the variety
of it spoken natively by Koreans is. Few if any of them want to preserve
it for cultural reasons, but as my phonological example may show, there
may be points of scientific interest to be learned.

Bill
--
Bill Poser, Visiting Professor, University of Pennsylvania
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~wjposer/
billposer at alum.mit.edu
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