After studying Polynesian high school students’ speech patterns, Professor Lisa Johnson says belonging manifests in language—here’s how.
Sometimes, you can guess an individual’s age by simply listening to them speak: Did they say “lit” instead of “cool”? Did you hear them say “groovy” or even “dope”? Though generational vernacular can distinguish age groups, an individual’s pronunciation of certain words can reveal the social groups he or she associates with. Professor Lisa Morgan Johnson (Sociolinguistics, Varieties of English) wanted to better understand how this phenomenon applies to the Pacific Islander community in Utah and, over the course of two years, began documenting the distinguishing speech patterns in Polynesian high school students and studied how their dialect correlates with belonging in their community.
Welcome Back to High School
To find volunteers for the study, Johnson collaborated with two Salt Lake County high schools. The first school had a population of students congruent with Utah’s overall demographic: though a predominantly White school, 1.27% of their student population identifies as Pacific Islander. The second school, on the other hand, had an 8.71% population of Polynesian students.
At both schools, Johnson attended club meetings, joined classrooms, and spoke with teachers to spread the word about her research. Johnson then organized interviews in groups of 2–3 students where she would ask students about their experiences as a teenager, about group interactions around campus, and in which groups they felt a personal belonging. She explains, “I would go into the interview and say, ‘I want to learn about your experience. I want to learn about your culture. You’re the teacher here, and I want to learn from you.’”
She also recorded samples of Polynesian teenagers speaking and then took acoustic measurements of vowel frequencies to compare the vocal patterns found in the western US and Canada with the students on each campus. By doing so, Johnson hoped to uncover some groups’ linguistic markers. After analyzing each interview, Johnson found one main difference in pronunciation. As she explains, “One of the things that’s been happening in a lot of places in the West is that you have those front vowels being lowered so that [words such as] ‘bit’ are pronounced a little more like ‘bet.’ Many of the Euro-American students were matching this shift . . . and the Pacific Islander students were doing less of that.”
I would go into the interview and say, ‘I want to learn about your experience. I want to learn about your culture. You’re the teacher here, and I want to learn from you.’
Finding Linguistic Identity
Johnson quickly recognized that the adoption of different vowel pronunciations was a direct reflection of the students’ background. She noticed that “people who have mixed heritage or [are] connected with multiple cultures have to navigate different cultures, different societies, [and] different groups of friends. And, so, different parts of identity [and speech] can come out in different groups.” She continued, “Because people are in contact with a lot of different groups, there is more reason to identify yourself and draw some sort of linguistic boundaries—not necessarily because you’re opposed to some other group but because it’s part of figuring out who you are.”
However, as Johnson interacted with students across campus, she also found that the linguistic markers common among Pacific Islanders don’t exclusively manifest in students of a particular ethno-racial group—they can be found in any student with an understanding of the Polynesian community. She found that some “students [were] picking up some of these pronunciation differences, and they were showing this kind of connection with the [Pacific Islander community].” In essence, Johnson discovered that students’ linguistic identity often mirrored the groups they most closely identified with.
Variation in language reflects variation in experience.
Johnson believes that being open to different varieties of language and ways of speaking brings different communities together by encouraging respect and understanding. She says, “Variation in language reflects variation in experience, and the more we can learn about somebody else’s perspective, the more we can understand what it is to be part of this overall family [as] children of God.”
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