Contact with a Contact Language

Vanuatu is a highly multilingual country, with more than 110 Indigenous Oceanic languages, as well as an English-lexifier creole, Bislama, which is used as national contact language. Speakers of Vatlongos, one of Vanuatu’s Oceanic languages, use a high rate of borrowings from Bislama. This article discusses Bislama borrowings in a corpus of Vatlongos monologues, making comparisons with studies of five other Vanuatu languages. The effects of word class, text genre, community membership, education level, age group and gender on the rate of Bislama tokens in the corpus are investigated. Word class and text genre are highly significant in a mixed effects multiple regression model of the likelihood of borrowing. Although the rates of borrowing in Vanuatu languages pattern with indicators of language shift in each community, there is limited evidence for this relationship within the corpus. Despite individual and group differences, there are signs of shared norms for use of Bislama borrowings between different Vatlongos speaker communities, and across language communities in Vanuatu.