We /r/ Tongan, not American: Variation and the social meaning of rhoticity in Tongan English

Abstract

The current paper argues that speakers of Tongan English, an emergent variety spoken in the Kingdom of Tonga, may use rhoticity to construct a cosmopolitan and globally oriented local social identity. A variationist analysis of non-prevocalic /r/ in a corpus of 56 speakers reveals a change in progress towards rhoticity led by young females, whereas an affiliation with Liahona High School, a Mormon secondary school, predicts advanced adoption of the feature. I argue that rhoticity carries a positive ideological load for younger speakers as an index of globalness, modernity and Western cultural values, whereas for Liahona-affiliated speakers, an additional indexicality of rhoticity is Mormonism. Linguistic constraints on variation mirror patterns found in previous studies on L1/L2 varieties and are thus more universal, whereas social constraints on variation are best examined through a local lens.