Tavoyan: Language Contact in a Burmese Dialect

Abstract

Abstract:Language variation in the Greater Burma Zone—particularly Burma—remains under-described and under-theorized. Descriptions of language variation are caught up in taking language as a marker of ethnicity. Language variation, including the development of dialects, has come about in part through language contact, but the effects of language cannot be seen through the usual practices of historical or comparative linguistics and their projects to classify languages and ethnicities. Burmese dialect speakers tend to live in more highly multilingual contexts than do the majority of Standard Burmese speakers. Recognizing the unusual features of Tavoyan—especially aspects of its sound system—as the result of language contact sheds light on a history of linguistic, hence social, contact with speakers of Karen languages. This past of contact with Karen speakers and widespread multilingualism are precisely the aspects of social history that historical sources do not capture. Tavoyan epitomizes the situation in countless other speech communities in the Greater Burma Zone, whose pasts are largely absent from history. In its sounds and syntax, the Tavoyan dialect tells us of the social history of the speech community: Tavoyans tend to think of themselves as a local embodiment of the supra-regional Bamā identity. Despite such ties, the Tavoyan community is much like other groups in the Greater Burma Zone who "lack" history in the sense of written records. In such a context, the study of language itself can serve as a proxy for other kinds of history and can reveal something of the social past of a community.