Dialect development in Nain, Nunatsiavut: emerging English in a Canadian aboriginal community
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation is a case study of the English spoken in Nain, Nunatsiavut (Labrador), \nan Inuit community in northern Canada. Conducted within a variationist sociolinguistic \nframework, it offers a quantitative analysis of a majority language as spoken in an \nAboriginal community, an understudied area of research. Nain is an ideal location for this \ntype of study because Labrador Inuit are experiencing rapid language shift as the \npopulation becomes predominantly English speaking, with few people learning Inuttitut \nas their native language, creating an opportunity to examine an emerging variety of \nEnglish. \nIn this dissertation, I contrast Nain Inuit English with the variety spoken in \nNewfoundland, the English-speaking region with which residents have historically had \ncontact. I survey three sociolinguistic variables that typify Indigenous English and/or \nNewfoundland English—one phonological (the realization of interdental fricatives, e.g., \nthis thing pronounced as dis ting), one morphosyntactic (verbal -s, e.g., I loves it), and \none discourse (adjectival intensification, e.g., very happy vs. really happy vs. so happy)— \nto test notions of diffusion and transmission while also looking for evidence of transfer \nfrom Inuttitut. I also consider theories of new dialect formation and models of \npostcolonial English and how they apply to Nain. Complicating this comparison is the \nfact that some interviewees overtly self-identify as not being Newfoundlanders, raising \nthe possibility that they may try to avoid Newfoundland English variants. \nResults indicate that Nain Inuit English shares some traits with the English spoken \nin the rest of the province but has also developed in different ways, though few of these differences can be attributed to influence from Inuttittut. This study also contributes to \nthe growing body of work on majority languages in indigenous communities, in addition \nto deepening our understanding of English in Labrador.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it