Performing Pasifika English in New Zealand

Abstract

bro'Town is a popular animated comedy whose language is that of stylized performance. It deals with the adventures of a group of five teenage Pasifika boys growing up in Auckland, New Zealand, and showcases performances of the Englishes spoken by Polynesian immigrants and their descendants. A range of varieties are performed on the show by a handful of actors. We analyzed several linguistic variables in the speech of three of the main characters -the 14-yearold twins Vale and Valea, and their father Pepelo. Pepelo produces high levels of the vernacular features of DH-stopping and TH-fronting, consistent with his biography as a second-language speaker whose pronunciation is influenced by his native language, Samoan. His sons, as second-generation speakers, have these features too but at lower frequencies. The twins also differ from each other, with the streetwise Valea, who is more aligned with Pasifika youth culture, producing higher levels of the variables than the studious Vale. Pepelo produces unaspirated initial /p/s, again a Pasifika language feature, while his sons do not. Linking-/r/, however, appears to index a youth identity but not adult immigrant status. We conclude that performed varieties can reflect the linguistic production of a community in their selection of specific features. The quantitative patterns can be quite variable, but here succeed in indexing salient identities for their audiences.* We acknowledge Elizabeth Mitchell (producer) and the cast of bro'Town for their openness in discussing this research with us. Earlier versions of this paper were presented

Flight of the Conchords: Recontextualizing the voices of popular culture1

“…Bret and Jemaine's phonetic style in these songs will be compared to the phonetic style of the singers being imitated, by conducting an acoustic analysis of four vowels. This method extends previous work on performance, such as Gibson and Bell's (2010) study of the New Zealand animated comedy bro'Town, and Gibson's (2010) analysis of the difference between singing and speech for three NZ singers. These prior studies analyzed cases of stylized performance, but without any analysis of the targets of those stylizations.…”

“…This is a reality for Flight of the Conchords: in 2009, they appeared (voicing themselves) in an episode of the New Zealand animated sitcom bro'Town (cf. Gibson and Bell 2010), where the lyrics of ‘Business Time’ are fused with the tune of the Crowded House song ‘Weather with You’ in a cartoonized singalong between Jemaine, Bret and Crowded House's Neil and Tim Finn. More recently, Flight of the Conchords have broken through to one of the most prolific and richly intertextual parodic cultural products, The Simpsons .…”

“…Dentith (2000: 32) states that 'one of the typical ways in which parody works is to seize on particular aspects of a manner or a style and exaggerate it to ludicrous effect'. These exaggerations, which may include phonetic overshoot in the stylization of a voice (Gibson and Bell 2010), still cue the targeted persona, but allow the voice of the performer to come across simultaneously. 2 Aside from the use of exaggerated style, deauthentication and the creation of role distance can be achieved through a range of means, both linguistic and non-linguistic.…”

Staging language: An introduction to the sociolinguistics of performance

“…Comparing the characteristics of these performed stylizations with everyday realization of the varieties, we can identify four kinds of sociophonetic processes (Gibson and Bell 2010):…”

Origins and development of New Zealand English

“…Over the past 40 years or so, New Zealand has looked less to its historical past in the United Kingdom (which has become increasingly Europe-centered), and more to its neighbours in south-east Asia and the Pacifi c. As well as immigration from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea and other Asian nations, there has been a dramatic increase in immigration from the Pacifi c islands, and recent studies have accordingly looked at the development of Pasifi ka English varieties in New Zealand (Bell & Gibson, 2008;Gibson & Bell, 2010;Starks & Reff ell, 2006;Starks, Thompson, & Christie, 2008). …”