Investigating Accommodation and Endonormativity: TH/DH-stopping and postvocalic /r/ in Malaysian English
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Abstract
This exploratory study examines the endornormative stability of Malaysian English features through the lens of accommodation in natural speech. This paper reports data from L1 Malaysian English and compares rates of TH/DH-stopping and postvocalic rhoticity between a baseline task with an in-group L1 Malaysian English experimenter, and an critical condition task with an out-group L1 Canadian English experimenter. The results show that postvocalic rhoticity undergoes convergence and towards the exonormative standard, while TH/DH-stopping is maintained between both tasks. In addition, evidence from both the baseline and critical tasks indicate that TH/DH-stopping are regular features used almost categorically by all speakers, while postvocalic rhoticity is more variable both between speakers and within speakers. Drawing from previous evidence of norm orientation as a factor of accommodation and convergence, I argue that maintenance of TH/DH-stopping is indicative of its status as a stabilized, endonormative feature of MalE, while convergence of postvocalic rhoticity towards an exonormative standard points towards ongoing sound changes in Malaysian English from a non-rhotic standard to a rhotic or more mixed variety.