Book Review: South Pacific Englishes: A Sociolinguistic and Morphosyntactic Profile of Fiji English,Samoan English and Cook Islands English

Turn a globe so that the Pacific Ocean faces you and you’ll see how the blue vastness pushes the major landmasses to the edges of your field of vision. This huge ocean, about a third of the total surface area of the Earth, looks empty, but is dotted with over 20,000 islands. Over several thousand years these islands have been populated with the ancestors of the Micronesian, Melanesian and Polynesian peoples, today totaling two million speakers of 450 Oceanic languages (Lynch, Ross & Crowley 2002). With the arrival of Europeans over 200 years ago, English has been a significant language of cultural colonization in the Pacific.

Carolin Biewer’s South Pacific Englishes is the first major study of the Englishes of second language speakers of English in the Pacific. Her book focuses on three nations in the Central Oceanic region: Fiji, Samoa, and the Cook Islands where, respectively, Fijian, Samoan, and Cook Islands Māori are the three indigenous Oceanic languages. Biewer’s study examines Fiji English (FijE), Samoan English (SamE), and Cook Islands English (CookE) as second language varieties of English in these locales (rather than first language, or English as a foreign language varieties). That is, these varieties are regarded as contact varieties of English, influenced by the substrate languages.

While FijE and SamE are the two largest second language varieties of English in the South Pacific their histories and sociocultural circumstances differ greatly. Fiji has the largest population of any Central Oceanic state and is home to many ethnicities, with Indian descendants of indentured laborers comprising 38 percent of the Fijian population of 830,000. Samoa has a medium sized population (180,000), but is part of an island group which includes American Samoa, leading to a potential influence from American English (AmE). The Cook Islands has a small population (20,000) and while being an independent state it is in free and close association with New Zealand. FijE is the only variety which has received much scholarly attention, but Biewer positions hers as the first study to focus exclusively on second language speakers of English rather than first language varieties (which have small numbers of speakers in each of the three regions under study).

South Pacific Englishes is a corpus-based study comprising data collected by Biewer in interviews conducted in all three countries in 2007. The resulting SaFiRa-s (Samoan, Fijian, Rarotongan) corpus is a corpus of spoken acrolectal South Pacific Englishes (SPE) and is a sister corpus to the SaFiRa-w written corpus, also compiled by Biewer (2009). The spoken corpus comprises interview and sociolinguistic questionnaire data from seventy-two participants: twenty-four from each language. As far as possible an equal number of male and female participants from three age groups and a range of rural and urban locales were recruited, allowing for analyses according to a range of social variables. As a white woman interviewer Biewer understandably encountered difficulties in collecting data and these issues are discussed frankly in chapter 4, which contains comprehensive and useful detail about her field methods. Although the SaFiRa-s corpus is a spoken one, Biewer’s is a morphosyntactic analysis, in contrast to work on Pacific Englishes (termed Pasifika Englishes in New Zealand) which has largely focused on acoustic analysis of consonants and vowels (Starks, Gibson & Bell 2015).

Besides eliciting information on family and cultural backgrounds the interviews also include discussion with participants about attitudes, beliefs and practices in the use of both English and the local language in the home and wider communities. Thus the SaFiRa-s corpus provides a good basis for both quantitative and qualitative analysis. Interview topics and a copy of the sociolinguistic questionnaire are provided in the book’s appendices, thus providing helpful information for researchers who wish to undertake similar studies. An important feature of Biewer’s book is that she does not just focus on linguistic variables in her analysis. In chapter 2 she provides comprehensive details on the different historical, geopolitical and sociocultural situations of the three countries and their languages and insists that these facets are not only important, but essential to understand the variety of English in each country. These attitudinal and cultural aspects are also further elucidated and included throughout the book in discussions of her results.

Chapter 3 focuses on the theoretical framework for the study. Biewer notes that Kachru’s (1992) influential model of inner circle, outer circle and expanding circle varieties of English does not reference the situation of Pacific Englishes. She argues that the model assumes that the distinction of English as a native language, second language (ESL) or foreign language is nation based, which is not useful in post-colonial situations such as Pacific countries where all three speaker groups exist and distinctions between the groups are not well defined.

Biewer implements Mufwene’s feature pool model (2001) as her framework for analysis. Despite being developed to describe the evolution of colonial koinés and creoles Biewer argues that the model is “useful to describe the general process of language evolution in the case of postcolonial Englishes” (83). In contending that a wide range of factors, including socio-cultural motivations come in to play in the evolution of South Pacific Englishes, Biewer develops a detailed dynamic model for SPE based on Mufwene’s model (114).

One of the main aims of Biewer’s book is to argue that the title South Pacific Englishes refers to a distinct grouping of the Englishes of Fiji, Samoa and the Cook Islands. Chapter 5 gives details on the thirteen most salient morphosyntactic differences between Standard British English (StdBE) and the three varieties. The three most frequent differences (beside past tense non-marking) in all three varieties are:

Biewer’s analysis demonstrates not only that these Englishes are second language varieties but that they have similarities in their differences to StdBE, hence justifying the unifying term South Pacific Englishes. Nevertheless there are also differences between the varieties which Biewer argues are due to a range of factors including the substrate languages, but also including attitudes and differences in culture and custom between the three locations.

Chapter 6 provides an in-depth analysis of the most prominent morphosyntactic difference, verbal past tense non-marking (for example, “ten years ago they usually have the storyteller” (214)), a phenomenon influenced by the fact that the substrate Oceanic languages use preverbal particles rather than verb affixes to indicate tense/aspect. Biewer’s analysis reveals that one of the strongest manifestations of zero marking in SPE is as a habitual marker, a result previously only found for creoles. Her analysis emphasizes not only the importance of substrate influence but also that “cultural differences in the conceptualisation of time also lie behind the preference for zero marking for habitual events in the past” (258).

Another aim of the book is to test the epicenter model (Leitner 1992), which posits that varieties can be influenced from a (typically) geographically close variety of English from a country which wields political and commercial power as well as cultural prestige. Chapter 7 presents a range of strong extralinguistic evidence for New Zealand’s having epicentric influence on standards of English in the Pacific in light of New Zealand’s geopolitical and cultural influence in the Pacific. These factors include the fact that New Zealand is the most geographically close Western nation to these island states as well as being a favored migration destination. New Zealand is a major trading partner for the Cook Islands and Samoa, and with its large Polynesian population New Zealand is perceived by Biewer’s participants as being a nation with a strong Pacific identity. However, Biewer’s analysis of plural existentials (for example, “there’s marine life / there’s food crops / there’s so many things there” (283)) found little structural evidence that New Zealand has epicentric influence, with results for FijE suggesting an older form of StdBE as the operative norm, and results for Samoa showing a more likely influence from AmE. Nevertheless, the results do suggest that the closer relationship a Pacific Island state has with New Zealand strengthens the impact of New Zealand English on the ESL variety.

Biewer concludes that the epicenter theory is hard to prove on structural grounds in second language varieties unless “that influence has become stronger than other factors and is only detectable in features in which the new norm differs from the parental norm and other potential candidates of eipcentric influence” (305). Instead, she argues that perhaps “we should view norm reorientation rather as an attitudinal influence independent of structural influence . . . [which] would be a different concept of epicentre which would facilitate a different methodological approach” (306).

Varieties of SPE are still developing. Biewer’s interviews show that there is awareness of the local varieties in each country and that these varieties are becoming an identity marker amongst younger speakers. There is also evidence that these Englishes are becoming nativized, especially in the Cook Islands where on the main island of Rarotonga intergenerational transmission of Cook Islands Māori is threatened (Lewis, Simons & Fennig 2016).

South Pacific Englishes is a significant work and is insightful, comprehensive, detailed, and readable. Biewer’s original contribution is fourfold in providing:

Biewer briefly mentions the importance of researcher reciprocity when undertaking this type of interview-based study (125). Indeed, the idea that research should benefit communities and/or the individuals involved is increasingly required when working with indigenous peoples. It would have been good to have heard more about how her research might benefit the communities involved.

In looking towards the future it is hoped that the SaFiRa-s corpus could be used for other analyses, in particular an acoustic analysis which would provide important comparative information about the nature of the links between South Pacific Englishes, Pasifika Englishes in New Zealand and Māori English.