This paper investigates variation in possessive marking in Abui, a language spoken in a minority bilingual community in eastern Indonesia. Abui youngsters grow up acquiring both Abui (Papuan) and Alor Malay (Austronesian), but only become active speakers of Abui when they reach adolescence. Due to this delay, their Abui is expected to show signs of both imperfect acquisition and contact-induced effects. This language background makes them an interesting population on which to carry out a cross-sectional study on contact-induced variation. Abui distinguishes between a reflexive and non-reflexive possessive marker, while Alor Malay makes no such distinction. Combining methods from descriptive linguistics, bilingualism research, and variationist sociolinguistics, and using both a production and a comprehension task, we study the variation between four age-groups of Abui-Malay bilinguals: (pre-)adolescents, young adults, adults, and elders. Our results reveal that (pre-)adolescent males are the drivers of variation, and generalize the non-reflexive possessive marker to reflexive environments. This suggests that over the next decades the reflexive possessive prefix may be lost in Abui. This paper is a direct answer to a call by Ross (2013) to conduct in-depth variationist studies to establish more synchronically informed approaches to the study of language contact. In addition, by combining production and comprehension studies and applying them to an indigenous minority language, it expands the empirical support for a prominent hypothesis of bilingual processing: the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis (Prévost & White 2000b).

This paper studies the effect of ongoing contact on the Abui reduplication system. Abui, a Papuan indigenous minority language of eastern Indonesia, has been in contact with the regional lingua franca, Alor Malay (Austronesian), for around 50–60 years. Throughout this period, contact with Alor Malay has affected different age groups in different ways across various levels of grammar. Here we compare Abui reduplication across four age groups: (pre)adolescents, young adults, adults, and elders, and show how the function and distribution of reduplication in the Abui spoken by younger speakers is affected by a combination of morphological PAT borrowing and lexical borrowing from Alor Malay. The changing patterns are first applied to the domain in which the two languages overlap: existing Abui verb reduplications become more Alor Malay-like with respect to their function, form, and productivity. The borrowing of an additional function of reduplication is analyzed as a type of complexification in Abui, while at the same time, Abui reduplication itself is demonstrated to also show simplification in terms of form. We argue that this change is induced by decades of stable bilingualism, and is further enhanced by the fact that reduplication is a universal morphological operation and can emerge spontaneously in language contact situations. Thus, the emerging trends reported here are explained by both borrowing from Alor Malay as well as incomplete acquisition of Abui.

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