We examine variation in a rural variety of Acehnese spoken in Aceh
Province, to better understand the impact of long-term contact with
Indonesian and increasing urbanization. The Great Aceh variety is characterized by variable realization of word-final (t) as a dental vs. glottal stop.
Analyses of over 2,000 tokens of this variable from a corpus of spontaneous
speech from 35 speakers indicate that the variability is relatively stable
among men, and among women of high mobility, measured in terms of education, occupation, and time spent outside Great Aceh. Women with low
mobility produce the lowest rates of [t?], and in this group we observe a
higher rate of [t?] by younger than older women, suggesting change over
time. We thus find both stability – among those who have long enjoyed high
levels of mobility – and change – among those most affected by recent social
changes, namely low-mobility women. |