Contact and obsolescence in a diaspora variety of Japanese: The case of Palau in Micronesia

要旨

This paper presents a variationist analysis of the Palauan Japanese negation system with two specific aims.The first aim is to highlight that the variety of Japanese spoken on Palau appears to be a koine which shows many of the characteristics of contact varieties demonstrated by Trudgill in his 1986 book Dialects in Contact.The second aim is to examine some methodological and theoretical issues involved in language death studies.We ask the following questions: With what should the use of * We would like to thank all those in Palau who kindly extended their warm hospitality during fieldtrips in 1997,

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