Haidee V Eugenio

Pacific Daily News

What makes English spoken in Guam distinct or sound a bit different from, say, Saipan or Kosrae? A Switzerland-based team of graduate students doing research on English spoken in Micronesia will try to answer this and other questions, and need Guam residents’ help.

“Since Guam has been under the influence of the United States for many years, the English spoken by the locals sound almost American...but not quite” said Eva Kuske, a graduate student at the University of Bern in Switzerland. “So far, no one has ever extensively described the Guamanian English accent, and that is why I am here.”

Kuske is part of the team conducting a research study titled, “English in paradise: Emergent varieties in Micronesia.”

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The team is set out to investigate five previously undescribed varieties of English that are developing in Micronesia, an area of the world that the team said has a complex colonial past under Spain, Germany, Japan, Britain, Australia and the United States, but which now has English as an official language and a language of school instruction alongside local languages in some cases.

Kuske on Wednesday said she is still looking for born and raised locals from Chamorro families in Guam who would be willing to participate in the study.

For those interested, she said she can be reached via email at english.guam@gmail.com or by visiting their website, English-in-micronesia.weebly.com.

Kuske studied English and philosophy at the University of Bern. In 2016, she completed her M.A. in English languages and literatures with a special focus in linguistics and is currently completing her teaching degree.

Besides Guam, the team of researchers will also closely examine English spoken in Saipan in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Kosrae in the Federated States of Micronesia, as well as Kiribati and Nauru.

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“These have been chosen because they have quite distinct colonial histories; they have different intensities of Japanese contact in the first half of the 20th century, they have followed different postcolonial paths, they have different indigenous substrate languages that might shape emergent new Englishes, and they have different experiences of postcolonial demographic change,” the team said on its website.

The Micronesia Projects are supervised by professor David Britain, who has worked in the English department at the University of Bern since 2010 where he leads the Modern English Linguistics section. Before coming to Bern, he worked in the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand and in the Department of Language and Linguistics at the University of Essex in England.