Linguistic characteristics of SpnCRL, a blended Carolinian language Since SpnCRL emerged directly from and only from other languages in the

Car-olinian continuum (with the exception of a number of loan words from colonial languages), the challenge has been to discover those points within the continuum from which linguistic features of SpnCRL were derived. In this section evidence is provided to show that WOL, SAT, and POL were the primary source languages of SpnCRL. It will be shown that SpnCRL did not inherit the vast majority of its linguistic DNA from just one of the three source languages – and certainly not SAT, the language in the middle, as one might expect and as so many believe.

What did develop is that the new language ended up being an amalgamation of all three of its primary source languages (as will be explained in Section 2.3). This is interesting because it provides another example of the variety of outcomes that can occur when two or more language and/or dialect communities become com-bined together at a new geographic and social setting.

Many examples of the fusion¹¹ of languages/dialects in other contact situa-tions were also presented at the 36th LAUD Symposium, including a report on Aragon, which is in a diglossic relationship with Spanish (see Abstract Hijazo- Gascón and Ibarretxe-Antunano), on Portuguese creole situations (see Abstract Nunes and Abstract Lee), on some 150 modern-day dialects of Aramaic, an an-cient written language (see Abstract Khan), and so on. The diverse outcomes of a wide range of previously studied language and dialect contact situations have been well covered by, for example, Weinreich (1953) and Trudgill (1986). A par-ticularly interesting domain of language variation under study in recent dec-ades is the phenomenon of “mixed languages.” A “mixed language” is one that is sourced from unrelated languages. The number of documented cases of “mixed languages” has continued to slowly increase since the seminal study on Michif, a language mixture of French and Cree.¹² But Saipan Carolinian is neither a Mixed Language nor is it a product of multiple dialects of a single language. Rather, it is a blend of several source languages in the center of the Carolinian continuum that are all closely related but are also clearly distinct.

To promote categorizing SpnCRL as something other than a “mixed lan-guage,” a creole, a pidgin, or as a merger of dialects from one language, SpnCRL is

11. See Auer (1998) for a restricted definition of “Fused Lects.”

12. In the Michif case the nouns tended to be absorbed from the one language and the verbs from the other (Bakker 1997).

186 S. James Ellis

referred to in this and other writings as a “blended language.”¹³ So now the ques-tion is, how is Saipan Carolinian structurally and lexically blended from three very closely-related but different source languages?

2.1 Lexical inventory of SpnCRL

As mentioned earlier, the SpnCRL grammar, particularly the morphology and syntax, is very similar to that of its three source languages, which is no surprise since the three, to a large extent, share a common grammar among themselves.

It is also true that SpnCRL has inherited a very large portion of its lexicon from a common pool of lexemes shared not by just the three, but by all the other languag-es in the whole Carolinian continuum. As languag-established by Quackenbush (1968), using a 585-word list built from a variety of sources including a modified ver-sion of the Swadesh 200-word list, and Jackson (1983), using a 200-word list of basic vocabulary designed specifically for Malayo-Polynesian languages (Jackson 1983: 273), all members of the Chuukic language family – which constitute the whole of the Carolinian language continuum – share close to 50% of their core lexicons in common. This is illustrated in Table 2 where the quantity and per-centage of lexical similarity between SpnCRL and each of the other Carolinian languages are shown. The source used for calculating the following figures comes from the first 300 words of the Quackenbush (1968) wordlist.

First, a note about word frequency. Using only the criterion of word simi-larity as the indicator of language simisimi-larity can give a false picture in language typology studies. This can especially be true in studies using large lexicons be-cause words of high frequency carry greater weight in judging similarity between languages than do words of low frequency.¹⁴ Standardized word lists used to de-13. It is not clear to me if a universal acceptance of the terms ‘pidgin’ and ‘creole’ exists such that any given speech variety can be clearly classified as ‘pidgin/creole’ or not. Concepts of

‘superstrate’ (a dominating language like English) and ‘substrate’ (the dominated languages like indigenous Papuan or Melanesian languages), at least, do not apply to languages in the Caro-linian continuum because no superstrate language has participated in the continuum and no substrate language exists there either; each is composed of a rich indigenous grammar that is very similar among all Carolinian languages including those on Saipan, which are of equal status to the other members of the continuum. A language like SpnCRL does not conform to pidgin, creole, or any other well-known nomenclatures. Thus, the term “blended language” is used to categorize its distinctive language/dialect relationships.

14. These comments on word frequency here are prompted by a reviewer’s note that frequency of word usage – not just quantity of similarity – must be part of the calculus in judging linguis-tic typology. The reviewer writes that the “English language lexicon is composed roughly of one third Germanic, one third Latin and one third French lexemes, but the first 100 most frequent

termine common heritage as used by Quackenbush and Jackson, however, are not selected at random but are, rather, selected on their likelihood of being stable over time. Such words are typically high frequency because they include common body parts, familial relationships, objects and activities encountered in daily life, and so on. The first 300 words in the Quackenbush study, which are the basis of this study, are all words of that nature.

Essential to the purposes of this study, however, are not the words of high frequency, per se. It is the words that are shared exclusively between SpnCRL and just one other of its source languages. Such words offer an indication that that particular word in the SpnCRL lexicon is sourced from the one respective source

words in that language are 90%+ Germanic in origin” thus implying, I assume, that German is more similar to English than the other two in spite of their equal amount of contribution.

Table 2. Percentages of similarities between SpnCRL and other languages (using first 300 items of the Quackenbush (1968) wordlist) (Ellis 2012)

Sonsorol 142.5 48%

Ulithi 160.0 54%

Woleai 213.0 71%

Satawal 237.0 79%

Polowat 227.5 76%

Pollap 187.5 63%

Namonuito 194.0 65%

Mortlocks 180.0 60%

Chuuk 180.0 60%

%

0

Sonsor

ol Ulithi Woleai Satawal Polo

wat Pollap

Namonuit o

Mortlocks Chuuk 10

20 30 40 50 60 70 80

Profile of outer-island lexical similarity with SpnCRL

188 S. James Ellis

language that has the same word in its lexicon – to the exclusion of that word in lexicons of any other source language. In fact, words of low frequency could be most useful for the purposes of this study since such words can be less widely known and more locally specialised, and thus, by extension, help to more securely establish the geographical source of human migrations to Saipan.

To make the point clear, Table 2 above displays the similarity between the 300 words in the SpnCRL lexicon, on the one hand, and the same words in the lexi-cons of other Carolinian languages, regardless of whether the match is exclusive or not.

Table 2 results suggest that SpnCRL has a lot in common with each of the Carolinian languages listed. However, to repeat, the high percentages of similarity are not necessarily a good indicator of which languages are the primary source languages of SpnCRL. What is particularly helpful to this study is finding those lexical items that SpnCRL shares with just one other Carolinian language since such exclusively-shared lexical items serve best to show which one or ones of potential source languages contributed a given lexical item to SpnCRL. Table 3 provides a few examples of exclusively-shared lexemes – which are also referred to here as form-meaning matches.

As mentioined above, my database of lexical form-meaning matches existing exclusively between SpnCRL and a given outer-island Carolinian language was built upon the first 300 words of the Quackenbush (1968) wordlist. Taking each of those 300 words, one word at a time, the SpnCRL lexicon was then searched thor-oughly for any lexical items that matched any of the 300 words in meaning, not necessarily in form. Often there were two or more SpnCRL words that matched Table 3. Lexical matches of both form and meaning shared exclusively by SpnCRL and a single other language

SpnCRL WOL, SAT, POL exclusively-shared lexemes

ppwatúr “leprosy” WOL bbatiur “leprosy”

schiyor “choke” WOL shiyor “be stuck in the throat”

yuumi “bow and arrow” SAT yumi “arrow”

olighát “group of children” or

occasionally, “child” SAT wonikaet “child”

alúl “color” POL yanúyan “color”

Examples from other outer-island languages fischi “shoot at (something)” PLP firhi “shoot”

wetil “break/crack” CHU wetin “be broken, shattered”

uleey “slice it” CHU wuneey “slice (it)”

peyas “the dust from which you

came” MRT payas “ashes” (partial match

semanti-cally)

a given word in at least one of the outer-island Carolinian languages. (For in-stance, from Table 8 below: one word for “hole” in SpnCRL is liibw. SpnCRL has three other words – synomyms – that mean essentially the same thing: ngaat, laas, and pwang. Dictionaries for five of the languages in the continuum also have a form-meaning entry that matches the SpnCRL ngaat. Only three have a match for laas and only two have a clear match for pwang.) Following that procedure yielded a total of some 550 lexical entries in SpnCRL that could be used as a database to search for exclusive matches between SpnCRL and any other language.

Starting with this 550 word database, all available dictionaries and wordlists in each of the outer-island Carolinian languages were then mined for lexical items that matched – in both form and meaning – any of the 550 words in the SpnCRL dictionary. Surprisingly, only forty-nine word-meaning exclusive matches were found, as displayed in Table 4. Note that only a half point was given for cases where there was not a strong semantic match. An example of that is the MRT word payas corresponding to the SpnCRL word peyas in Table 3. The MRT sense of the word,

“ashes,” does not seem at first to have much in common with SpnCRL, “the dust from which you came.” The Saipan Carolinians all became Christians, however, and at funerals the common phrase, “…ashes to ashes, dust to dust” could have been captured semantically by using the SpnCRL word peyas – thus the ½ point allotted to MRT in Table 3.

Following in Table 4 is the distribution of the 49 exclusive form-meaning matches. It is the profile of the chart in Table 4 that suggests WOL, SAT, and POL to be good candidates for being primary source languages of SpnCRL. In contrast, in the case of SON, for example, of the forty-nine exclusive matches only one word in the lexicon of Sonsorolese migrants – a word not used by Saipan migrants from other languages – made it into the permanent SpnCRL lexicon. It’s not likely, therefore, that many Sonsorolese became residents of Saipan during the century of migration – for if so, one would expect them to have made more of a linguistic impact. At the other end of the scale, seventeen words in the lexicon of Polowatese migrates made it into the SpnCRL lexicon (as per Jackson & Marck 1991; Ellis &

Fruit 2003–current). This would be unlikely to happen if, for instance, there were only intermittent Polowatese visitors to Saipan during the migration years – es-pecially since the Polowatese were not high in the social scale (Hunter-Anderson

& Zan 1996).

(The profile of the chart in Table 4 gives the impression that Chuukese stands out as another possible source language to SpnCRL. The Chuukese figure is mis-leading, however, because there are still no available dictionaries or comprehen-sive word lists devoted specifically for the languages of Pollap, Namonuito, or the Mortlocks. That Chuukese did not have a significant impact on Saipan speech during the years of migration – although there are a number of CHU lexical items