Gender, mobility and contact: Stability and change in an Acehnese dialect

Abstract

We examine variation in a rural variety of Acehnese spoken in Aceh Province, to better understand the impact of long-term contact with Indonesian and increasing urbanization. The Great Aceh variety is charac- terized by variable realization of word-final (t) as a dental vs. glottal stop. Analyses of over 2,000 tokens of this variable from a corpus of spontaneous speech from 35 speakers indicate that the variability is relatively stable among men, and among women of high mobility, measured in terms of edu- cation, occupation, and time spent outside Great Aceh. Women with low mobility produce the lowest rates of [t̪ ], and in this group we observe a higher rate of [t̪ ] by younger than older women, suggesting change over time. We thus find both stability – among those who have long enjoyed high levels of mobility – and change – among those most affected by recent social changes, namely low-mobility women. Show more