“They just had such a sweet way of speaking”: Constructed voices and prosodic styles in Kodiak Alutiiq

• Main Author: Fine, Julia Coombs
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: eScholarship, University of California 2017
• Subjects: Linguistics; Language; Native American studies; constructed dialogue; prosody; sociolinguistics; sociophonetics; stance; style; aleut; alutiiq; inuit; Yupik
• Online Access: http://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/6fx4t8c5

Recent research in sociocultural linguistics has increasingly focused on the interplay of prosodic style, interactional stance, and personahood (Bucholtz 2009; Kiesling 2009; Mendoza-Denton 2011; Podesva 2013; Starr 2015; Zimman 2017). Within this vein of research, indigenous languages remain understudied. Furthermore, those sociophonetic studies that do address indigenous languages tend to focus on segmental rather than suprasegmental variation. This analysis investigates the prosodic stylization of constructed dialogue in Kodiak Alutiiq, an endangered Aleut-Yupik-Inuit language spoken on Kodiak Island. Following Coupland's (1980) understanding of style as being comprised of multiple variables, I analyze each speaker's average F0, F0 range, voice quality, speech rate, and intonation contour across excerpts of constructed dialogue and non-constructed dialogue speech. The results emphasize the importance of considering interactional stance in conjunction with persona and of examining the interactions of prosodic variables rather than analyzing them in isolation. Finally, the results demonstrate the important role narrative has to play in language revitalization efforts both as a method for improving fluency and as a conduit for the transmission of polyphony.