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Martha Tsutsui Billins (host): Hello, and welcome to Field Notes, a podcast about linguistic fieldwork. I’m Martha Tsutsui-Billins, and today’s episode is with Michelle Kamigaki-Baron. Michelle is a PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of British Columbia. She was born and raised in Hawaii into a family of coffee plantation laborers in Honaunau, Hawaii. Her research primarily involves speech production and perception, how these processes are changed in the context of bilingualism or bidialectalism of languages that exist in diglossia, and the continuous nature of language. She works primarily with the Secwepemc community in British Columbia, and also with her own community in Hawaii with speakers of Pidgin and ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi. In her free time, Michelle enjoys swimming in the ocean, spending time with friends and family, eating out, thrifting, and trying to kidnap her dog friends.
I really loved conducting this interview. I appreciated so much how Michelle gave so much nuance to the complexity of the language stigmatization and stigmatized communities that she works with and that she is a part of, and also, I’d like to thank Michelle for giving space to some of these ideas surrounding language identity, language attitudes, and the impact that these things have on language research and revitalization. One thing that she mentioned that I found really striking was how, as language documentators and researchers, we have so much power when there is such a lack of documentation in so many language communities. So she gives a story of one Dutch researcher who wrote a dictionary, and basically, this one dictionary is one of the few resources that one of the communities, the Secwépemc community, uses, but because of there only being one dictionary, it’s become the go-to, and it’s not necessarily the most inclusive sampling of data, and some of her research has found that maybe some of the findings were a bit off. So yeah, I really appreciated Michelle giving some nuance to these ideas and just the reminder of how important diversity in language documentation and language research is.
MTB: Well, thank you so much for giving your time to the podcast. I really appreciate it, especially since I know you’re so busy, like the semester is wrapping up, everything is crazy. But the first thing I wanted to ask you is, can you share with us your linguistics background and how you first became interested in linguistics?
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: Right. So I’m currently a PhD student in linguistics at the University of British Columbia, right? I took my first linguistics class in my master’s, which was at the University of Hawaii. Yeah. And before then, I actually didn’t know what linguistics was. I heard that it was a major, but I didn’t actually realize that people were doing this kind of work with it. I just kind of thought it was just like, I don’t know, something that old linguists did with this literature kind of thing. And I didn’t really get it. And when I saw that it could be experimental or actually more practical, like language documentation, these things, it was a lot more exciting. And suddenly, I was like, “Oh, my gosh.” I really just… I was doing something else. I was totally in a different field, and then when I realized that this existed, I went to the department and was like, “Please, can you accept me?” And then, for some stroke of luck, she did, and yeah, Andrea, the professor at University of Hawaii, let me in.
MTB: Oh, Andrea Berez-Kroeker?
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: Yeah, it was really… Yeah, yeah, and I owe so much to her because I wouldn’t… I don’t know. I mean, if she had given me a year to sit with that impulse, I don’t know if… I don’t know what would have happened. So I just had a lot of luck, and people believe in me for no reason. And yeah, I guess it’s like one of those funny things where you’re like, “I kind of think I always wanted to do this, even though I didn’t know it existed.”
MTB: Yeah.
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: Yeah, it was kind of like one of those things.
MTB: That sounds like fate.
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: Yeah.
MTB: Like, just right place, right time.
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: I think so, and I never looked back. It was just like, suddenly, I was like, “I found it.” And it was one of those shiny moments where you’re just like, “Oh, like, it’s here. Like, that’s it.”
MTB: Yeah.
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: And it was so nice. It just, it was such a relief to finally have something that kind of just like really sat well, and I can wake up every morning being like, “Yeah, I’m doing something that makes me happy.”
MTB: Yeah, that’s awesome. I think a lot of people have that experience where like one person kind of like gives them an opportunity or like one person believes in them, and then it completely changes the trajectory of your career, really.
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: Yeah.
MTB: Like, if Andrea hadn’t been the…
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: I think she was a graduate advisor at the time, yeah.
MTB: Okay. Yeah, so, like, if it hadn’t been Andrea, like maybe like somebody else wouldn’t have been as interested in what you wanted to research, and then like, maybe you’d be a different major right now. So crazy.
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: Yeah. Yeah. I could have just been doing what I was doing before, and…
MTB: What were you doing before?
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: I was doing a bunch of, so I was, I was in biology and I was working in wet labs, and then I also, I was like taking a break from that because it was really stressful, and I was teaching English abroad. But then I was like, “I am going to go back to biology because this isn’t sustainable for my life forever,” and it was still really stressful. And I think I was thinking about like linguistics things without thinking about or like knowing that it was there. Like while I was, you know, kind of learning like research skills in a different place, like in my head, I was just like, “Oh, like research is only, like science research is kind of always just like either biology or chemistry,” you know, like these kinds of things that were always presented to me. But then it was really interesting to kind of like, I would sort of think about these language things without, like I guess with that framework of what how I learned it in biology, right? Without realizing that like people were answering those questions in linguistics. Yeah. So that’s kind of where the transition kind of made sense.
MTB: Yeah. Can we talk a little bit about Pidgin and like your experience as a Pidgin speaker and like what Pidgin is? And yeah, like, I think a lot of people will want to know about that.
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: Yeah. So I guess first disclaimer with positionality or whatever. Yeah, I’m from the community, and my mom is a Pidgin speaker, and her family is from Japanese origin, and they moved to Hawaii for the plantations. My mom actually was a coffee farmer for most, a lot of her childhood, and I also like was just… I think I’m the first one who didn’t have to do that in my lineage for several generations. So there’s that. It’s so hard for me to talk about Pidgin without talking a bit about the history because so much of it is just, yeah, like explaining what it is is just historical in general, right? Or like as it is. So Pidgin is a creole language, right? And so in linguistics, we talk about creole languages, right, as like this… It’s basically like a contact language that kind of emerged over time as like a first language. Pidgin came about because, again, going back to plantations, there was this kind of absence of a common language for laborers to speak with each other, and this was kind of situated on purpose, because the plantation owners were like, “If we’re going to have as much control as possible, we just need these people to not speak the same language. Maybe they could uprise against us, right? There’s more of them, right?
MTB: Like people can’t organize if they don’t have a common language.
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: Yeah, yeah, it was hard. So that was actually something that was in place in plantations in the States with African slaves that were brought to plantations as well, right? And they were saying, “Okay, well, we’ll have them from different places, they can’t speak the same language.” And so they’re actually the same players that were the plantation owners there. And when slavery was abolished, they’re like, “We’re going to move to someplace where we can have cheaper labor,” which was Hawaii at the time. So it’s really interesting, just these connections. But yeah, it was kind of a common tactic of just how to control. Yeah, just like have the most control as possible, right?
It kind of backfired, though, right? Because then a language kind of emerged from this, right? So you had plantation workers from… So Indigenous people from Hawaii, then there’s people from Japan, there are people from Portugal, there are people from China, Philippines, Korea, many others, many other groups were there. And at first, right, I guess they could only kind of speak just, you know, a bit of their own language and try to, you know, speak as much as the other language as possible. Like, you know, they’re just in this place of just trying to make what’s best of that situation.
But over time, like, this language basically emerged, right? And then the people started to use this language to speak with, you know, someone who’s from a different community, and then they could bring that in the home when they’re just having relationships with one another, and they can, you know, their children were speaking this language at schools with their peers. And so over time, this became a first language that was brought into the home and then spoken. And then what comes with that is just, you know, it has some kind of grammar system eventually, right? You’ll have these rules without anyone saying, “Okay, this is…” No one wrote a book and said that “These are the ways that you speak the language,” but over time, the systematic nature of the language kind of emerged, right?
So that’s kind of the story of Pidgin. Yeah, but I think one thing that I often like to talk about is just that the way that it exists today is just, it’s so innate with our culture, I think, in terms of just this, this story of as soon as the language emerged, right, it did enable the plantation laborers to uprise or I guess demand for better rights as plantation workers. And so there’s this kind of strange, I guess, the way that exists now is that it’s still a place of pride in our culture, right, but it’s still, it does have some stigma that is associated with it, and that’s kind of all just kind of wrapped up in history, right?
So in the ‘20s, there was something that was called the English standard school system. And so basically, this was, again, a group of white people that were from the States that came in, and they said, “We don’t want our children to be going to school with people who are speaking this language, looking this way,” and so they wrote a formal letter to the Department of Education, the States, and they said, “We don’t want our children to be taught by these kinds of… The teachers that are the least American in blood, we don’t want them to be associated with these kinds of classmates,” and so they created this English standard school system, which was basically this way to racially segregate people without blatant mentions of race, and language was the core of that, right? So they’re saying, “Okay, if you speak English to this standard, you can go to this elite school, but everyone else,” which is kind of code for Pidgin and non-whiteness, “would go to these other schools.” And this kind of would pave the way of your future where if you were able to kind of break through this kind of language, you know, barrier, if you will, right, you could succeed in ways that other people could not. And so that’s kind of like, that’s really seen in today’s, I guess, impression of Pidgin, right? So in one way, it’s really great, because you can kind of, you can kind of express your values. And you know, “I’m a part of the community, I speak this language, I’m not like those people who exploited us,” right? But at the same time, it’s like, it’s kind of like, if you’re speaking this language in schools, or in professional settings, it’s kind of like, “Oh, what family are you from? Like, are you educated? Like, are you…” It’s seen as like improper, and a lot of people are hesitating, or like, would be hesitant to teach their kids the language, even if they speak it, or be embarrassed to speak in certain settings because of the stigma, right? It’s kind of seen as like, a barrier to acquiring proper English, and then what is going to happen, you can’t make money later, you can’t go to school. And yeah, so it’s just really, it’s like this really complex story, I think.
MTB: Yeah. Yeah, like, maybe this is a super personal question, but like, do you see that conflict in your own family?
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: Oh, yeah, for sure. For sure. My grandfather told me at one point, he was just like, “You should listen to” — what was it — “Daniel Inouye speak, because he speaks proper English, and one day, if you speak like him, you can go to college, and you can graduate high school.” Like that’s like… “You can be a doctor.” Like, you know, like, this was really, you know, this is just kind of like reinforced, and it’s because they were speakers of the language themselves and experienced so much discrimination and barriers because of being speakers of the language. I think my mom also had these kinds of thoughts of just, you know, even though she’s a speaker of the language, right, I was kind of raised in this mixed family as well. So my dad’s family is not from Hawaii, and so my dad would always be like, just don’t, like, “Don’t speak that. That’s wrong. You know, learn how to speak like me.” And my mom would kind of have this like, “Ahh…” Like, it was just so it’s like a strange, like conflict, right? Because if I did speak like my dad’s family with my mom’s family, then they would be like, “What is this white… What is this haole thinking? You know, like, does she think she’s better than us?” And you kind of learn at an early age, “Okay, this is where I speak the language. This is where I need to… And this is where I can’t. And if I if I adopt a more like, accent, like, it sounds like I’m from somewhere else, like in the U.S. mainland, then I get better grades, and then people tell me I sound smart.” You know, so it was just like, really, I think this was such a common theme of just like, okay, in high school, I didn’t, you know, like, sometimes I wanted to be… If I wanted to, like, you know, show that I was from Hawaii, I would, you know, try to speak one way, and then try to be like, try to mock my at the time boyfriend who was from California. “Oh, he speaks such a… Like, he sounds so smart when he speaks,” so I started to like change my accent. And I think, yeah, that’s all just wrapped up in this complexity of language attitudes.
MTB: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. That’s so interesting. Do you do any research on language and identity like that?
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: Yeah.
MTB: It’s something I’m really interested too.
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: I think it’s like, so it’s an aspect of my research. So a lot of people have done a lot of work with, I think, Pidgin attitudes, so I tend to focus more on, I guess, the perception, like the, like, acoustic side, and these things, like, phonetic side, but I think there’s a lot of importance in, like, also understanding both. So I think a lot of… So I had run an experiment for one of my qualifying exams, I guess. And it was an aspect of it, because you’re, I guess, your language dominance is often associated with your language identity and these things. So I would ask these kinds of questions in the, you know, before they began this, like, identification task, basically, where they were asked these questions of, like, “Do you like to do these kinds of things? Like, what are your attitudes on, you know, on this language?” And like, there’s some roundabout ways of getting to that question of basically how you feel about this language. So I guess to answer your question in a shorter way, I do, I am really interested in that question, more specifically how it interfaces with language perception and bilingualism.
MTB: Yeah, that’s really cool. And what about like, just English speakers in Hawaii? Do they also have, like is Pidgin now kind of a contact language for people who maybe don’t speak Pidgin, but they speak like the Hawaiian variety of English? Do people also…
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: Yeah.
MTB: Are there like also some, is there also input from Pidgin into English in Hawaii?
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: Pidgin… Yeah, I think that there’s input from Pidgin to English, like Hawaii English, right? The English… Yeah, the Hawaii variety of English, but so you’re asking if like people who are coming from outside?
MTB: Like, like let’s say, like someone who’s not, I guess there’s like so many different situations. [laughs] Like, if you don’t speak Pidgin in Hawaii, but you live there, and you’re, like, an English speaker, are there like phrases or tokens that you also see from Pidgin, like that people would say?
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: Yeah, I think that… So that’s a really interesting question. Anecdotally, I’ve seen this happen. But I wonder if it has to do with also just like how much you are willing, or like your attitudes towards the language itself.
MTB: Definitely.
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: Right? And also the utility for you in your everyday life. So I know, like I have a friend who her husband is from the Philippines, and he moved here, he moved to Hawaii, and he’s working in this, like in carpentry, and all of his co-workers, a lot of them, you know, some, like, maybe half of them are from Hawaii, and this is the way that he was explaining it to me. He was just like, “Half of us are from Hawaii, and half of us aren’t, but we speak Pidgin, because it’s like, easier, and also, it’s like what you do when you’re in Hawaii, right?” Especially if like, if maybe the half of the other people are Hawaiian or local, like local people who come from that heritage, right? So, like, maybe in that context, it’s just very natural, and you’re not in a situation maybe where it’s as stigmatized, right? Kind of due to that diglossia situation that I was describing earlier. But I feel like maybe other, maybe some people who are just coming for grad school are less likely to want to, and less likely to be exposed to it, right?
MTB: When I went to the ICLDC conference a few years ago, before the pandemic, I noticed that even people who, like white people in Hawaii would say aloha, and like use like, mahalo. And I remember thinking like, “Oh, that’s really nice. Like, even, like maybe they don’t speak Hawaiian at all, but they like, have some words that like…” It just felt like, like the language could be used by anybody to me. Like, as an outsider, that was my perception.
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: I think another thing to be said with this is that… There’s, so there’s Hawaiian, and then there’s like, there’s Pidgin, right? And so sometimes that line is not really clear, right? So if they’re saying aloha, and mahalo, I think that they’re speaking, maybe, maybe it’s more of like a Hawaiian input, in a sense.
MTB: Yeah. Oh, definitely. Yeah. But I wondered if there was something like that with Pidgin too, like, that I just couldn’t recognize.
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: I guess one thing is also that like, this Pidgin space, and the language space in Hawaii is so complex in these ways that it’s not as divided as maybe we would try to present in linguistics, right? Because in linguistics, in order to make these kind of, to study these things, right, we kind of treat these languages as, like, mutually exclusive. But like, the way that kind of the language, I guess, landscape looks like in Hawaii, and as well as many other places, right, but like, is kind of more complex than I think I tend to, or we would like to describe it as, especially when we’re, you know, drawing like this, this kind of like, making this experiment where we have three languages, right? But like, I think there’s a lot of intersection anyway. And so I think like, even if like then the case you’re giving where, you know, they’re saying like, “Aloha, everybody, like, you know, this, welcome to, you know, the University of Hawaii at Mānoa,” right, like, something like that, like, I think there is like, mixture in the Pidgin space, at least where, you know, you’re using English and Hawaiian words, you’re using like, kind of that mixture anyway, of like, other kinds of communities as well, right? So the question of whether that is Pidgin, or English, or Hawaiian, or… You know, like, it’s kind of all of them, I guess. So I guess I wanted to say that maybe, maybe there is space, but it’s like, it’s sometimes it’s hard to even draw those distinctions in the first place in a multilingual community is kind of diverse as Hawaii is. Obviously, it would take like a whole other episode in order to like entirely get the complexity right, but I didn’t really get a chance to like, and I won’t get the chance to kind of dive deep into like, you know, the Hawaiian language and its history and this whole story of colonial occupation in Hawaii, because that’s its own thing. But right, like the two languages, Hawaiian and Pidgin, are really invariably connected. And I did want just, I guess I kind of wanted to say that Pidgin and Hawaiian are both languages that Indigenous people in Hawaii speak, right? So placing bans on these languages or holding on to negative beliefs on either language, right, ultimately harm Indigenous people, and Hawaiian does need to be prioritized in the islands, I think, particularly because it was a language that was spoken directly before colonial occupation. And learning Hawaiian and speaking it and fighting for the language to have space and have value in Hawaii is really important, kind of as this like, cultural thing, right, to counter, kind of like this American assimilation. But, likewise, Pidgin kind of emerged as a language that was also kind of like a counter-hegemonic strategy to kind of fight against plantation owners, right? So they have like, even though each language has its own histories that are, you know, in some ways really different, right, Pidgin is quite different in some ways of like, the history of stigmatization and devaluation of Hawaiian, but they both have similar histories in the sense that, right, like Hawaiian, the Hawaiian language is also spoken, and then there was some kind of like, bans, which kind of were placed to kind of control Indigenous people. And this was these kinds of… You know, this kind of control was placed in not just, it’s like the legal system and the education system, as well as kind of ultimately in social spaces. So yeah, this story is paralleled in the history of Pidgin as kind of like, I had, you know, more time to explain in this episode, but I think that yeah, there’s space to advocate for both languages, I guess is what I’m trying to say. And I think that like, maybe it comes down to kind of debunking this misperception of monolingualism being the status quo. For a long time, Pidgin was kind of expressed as kind of like this, sorry, like a language that prevents the acquisition of English, right? But I think that is kind of rooted in this American idea that, you know, monolingualism is the norm. And, you know, there’s a lot of people who will kind of argue with me and say, “Well, you know, English is really important, and it’s more important than Pidgin or Hawaiian, because, right, it’s such a global language,” but I think that this conception is, once again, kind of going back to this idea of monolingualism being the norm, right?
MTB: Yeah, like there’s only space for one.
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: Exactly. And studies don’t support that, right? Like, and also just like, globally, we don’t see that around the world, right? Like maybe that’s like something that we see a lot in the States, right? But globally, it’s not at all the case that like monolingualism, or yeah, for monolingualism to be the norm, right? So I guess my point is that, well, at least I’m under the impression that there’s ultimately space for, you know, languages that we do speak as is, and then there is also space for, you know, kind of taking back languages that, you know, to kind of bring back languages into our lineage, or kind of bring back, or, I guess, learn languages that you want, like to advocate for, for whatever reason, right? And there’s space for that. It’s not, I don’t know, like, yeah, I think, yeah, sometimes I just see those kinds of… That’s often a counterclaim when I kind of make these kinds of, when I kind of have these kinds of discussions. And, yeah, I think it’s something that you can see worldwide, you know. Kind of, there’s just like this concept that languages need to be pit against each other or something like this, right?
MTB: Yeah, for sure. Thank you for that context. I do want to talk about your other research, your PhD research, but very quickly, can we talk more about your psycholinguistic and descriptive research and like what that looks like?
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: Yeah, so, basically, by at this point in my PhD, I’ve done like two major projects, and I’m still kind of working on both of them in a large way, so they’re not exactly complete and wrapped up projects, right? So, the first one is with Pidgin, and so I’m interested in Pidgin-English bilinguals, and how they will basically pay attention to different dimensions of the acoustic signal. So, it’s kind of like if you were to be a Mandarin speaker, right, you would have to learn how to be really sensitive to tones, right? But then if you’re speaking English, you would maybe have to turn that off, because if you were listening to… If you’re paying really close attention to the tones of every, every syllable, then it would not, it would be too much information, it will actually confuse you more, right? So you have to kind of generalize the tones when you’re listening to English, as opposed to when you’re listening to Mandarin, right. And so the same thing is kind of potentially occurring with Pidgin speakers, and Pidgin-English bilinguals, because there are certain vowels that overlap in spectral space in Pidgin that are separate in English, but the only kind of remaining cue that’s there is duration. So you would think that in this context…
MTB: Like vowel lengthening?
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So this is kind of something that I’ve seen in somebody else’s production study, and so I’m trying to replicate this on basically the perception side and see if it’s true that Pidgin-English bilinguals are basically, in certain contexts, like when they have their Pidgin mode activated when they’re, okay, they’re told, “This is Pidgin mode,” and they are listening to a Pidgin speaker at that time, right, are they going to be more sensitive to duration? So I have like, an experiment where I manipulated, like, “beat” and “bit” and basically kind of like, manipulated them on the spectral continuum and then also on the duration continuum. And then I had one of the professors at UH who’s a Pidgin, who teaches Pidgin, did this for me where he said “beat” and “bit” in Pidgin, and then said it in English, and then so I took those two and put them in two different blocks, and had listeners basically listen to that and to see if they were more sensitive to duration or to spectral cues in certain blocks and if there are differences between the blocks. It’s still kind of… Don’t want to say things yet about it, because it’s still kind of a complex story, but that’s kind of what I’m looking at. It’s really interesting, because Hawaiian so yeah, like, like, I guess, because Pidgin is kind of this in between this of Hawaiian and English in some ways, right? English has duration as a cue to differentiate these two somewhat, but Hawaiian, but in English, I guess it’s not… like vowel length is not contrastive, but in Hawaiian it is. Right? And so it would be really cool if Pidgin had this sort of between this in that regard. So yeah, I think that would be really interesting.
MTB: That is really cool. Can you give us a minimal pair of like a short vowel and a long vowel in Pidgin?
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: Yeah, yeah. Um, so… Oh, in Pidgin or in Hawaiian? Oh, yeah., in Pidgin?
MTB: Either one, either one, like whichever one you’re studying.
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: So if you’re saying wahine, that means like, a single woman, like one woman, not a, like one woman, and then wāhine is like “two women.” And so that’s like that contrast. I’m not very good at Hawaiian, so I also hope that I’m not mispronouncing that, but in Pidgin, I guess an example would be… So the word pair that you’re looking at is “beat” and “bit” in English, right? But then in Pidgin, it’ll sound more like [bit] and [bɪ], right? So da beat ste a little bit off. Right? And so like, you have, it’s a very slight duration difference. And so I actually can’t even detect… When I listen to it, and I measure it, they are different, but perceptually, when I listen to it very quickly…
MTB: They sound the same.
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: Yeah, it’s not as far apart as the Hawaiian duration, the distinction between the vowels.
MTB: Yeah.
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: So I guess if I were to say that again, so da beat ste a little bit off. So like one is like the “bit” is faster. Basically, it’s like a shorter duration. Yeah.
MTB: So in English, “the beat is a little bit off.”
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: Yeah, exactly, so then there’s that spectral difference.
MTB: Oh, that’s cool.
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: Yeah. I think it’s interesting territory to be into because I think, um, I mean, obviously, I’m really passionate about Pidgin, and so that’s kind of my main motivation of working with this population, but I think that like, in broader linguistic scope, I think it’s pretty cool, because we don’t know that much of like, it’s just this weird in-between space, right? And we’re talking about this, like, these special continua and duration continua, right? But then, this language itself lies on a continuum, right? Because it’s like this mixed language, right, between these two other languages, basically. And, you know, kind of that evolution process is pretty, it makes it kind of this continuum. And then there’s, there kind of exists this continuum of, like, if you’re from this one area, and you’re going to be speaking a variety of Pidgin that’s very much Pidgin-like, and then if you’re having more contact with English, and you’re speaking, you know, Pidgin in town, then you’re oftentimes, your Pidgin itself will be more English-like. So there’s this kind of this spectrum in itself. So there’s just so much grayness in this, with this like space, yeah, there’s just so much to kind of uncover, I think. And I think that’s really cool when it comes to just, I think, the idea of bilingualism. And also just like, yeah, what does it mean to code-switch when it’s like this kind of like, like, messy space in the first place?
MTB: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. In your bio, you talked about bidialectalism. And that’s not a term I, I don’t know why I’d never thought about it because of course, people speak multiple dialects. But can you speak a little bit about that? Like, is that like a new term or…
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: I don’t know if it’s a new term. I’ve come across it, but not as frequently at all, to bilingualism, it’s much less frequent, but I’ve seen it somewhat. And I think it’s just kind of this, I really haven’t… Maybe I haven’t seen it that much. But I think that I adopt this usage of this term because I think that there has been work that has kind of looked at people who will speak two different, like varieties of what is known to be the same language, right? And in some cases, Pidgin, and English falls into that space, right? It’s sometimes, in like certain usages, or like in certain contexts, right? Like, the two languages might sound really mutually intelligible, and oftentimes, I think just like the way that Pidgin is expressed is like broken Eng… Like people will call it broken English, or just like a variety of English, right. And so sometimes because it fits that category… It does borrow a lot of words from English, right? So there’s this innate relationship to English that is not as disconnected from like, if you’re saying, I don’t know, two very, very distinct languages, right? So there has been studies done with bidialectals where it shows that they will do different things in different just like varieties of the same language, right? Like, if you’re perhaps, I’m not sure if this is a study in itself, but just to kind of like, give an example, right, if your mom speaks like British English, right, and your dad speaks like American English, and like, if you are capable of speaking both, right, that’s an example of bidialectalism. And then even if you aren’t able to speak both, right, you have a significant exposure to both, right? So, like, what does that speaker do in different contexts, right? Like, that would, that’s kind of like code switching, but at a smaller level, right?
MTB: Yeah, I think about that a lot, because my husband is British, and we lived in the UK before.
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: Oh, that’s…
MTB: Yeah, we lived in the UK before we moved to Seattle, and sometimes I get confused, like what I’m trying to say, like the other day, actually, yesterday, I was in Trader Joe’s, and I saw this woman wearing this like, crazy Christmas sweater. And I like, wanted to, I started saying like, “I love your jumper,” and then I was like, “Oh, like, back up! It’s a sweater here, don’t call it a jumper.” Or like, we just moved, so some of the parts of my house are just a disaster, and my sisters were over and I was like showing them around the house, and I was like, “Oh, this room is an absolute tip,” and that means a dump. But they didn’t… I was like, “Oh…” Like, it’s so annoying because it’s like you just sometimes you just want to talk, and you don’t want to have like a conversation about the words that you’re using.
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: Yeah.
MTB: So I do try to use the word that people are used to, but then, like, I feel like I’m always like tripping over my words or… But then when I’m home with my husband, I can say “tip” and “jumper,” so that’s why it’s not getting any better.
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: Yeah, it’s that’s really interesting. I think it’s meaning that you’re Yeah, like in the home, right? There’s like, potentially…
MTB: Like home domain.
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: Yeah, there’s some code-switching going on. It also kind of speaks to like, so like, similarly with language dominance, right? Like this is really similar to how you’re like, people will express I think, like their experience with like, “Oh, well, you know, I speak this language at home, and then when I’m outside, I almost forget, like, how to say like, you know, the word in my own, this other language,” even if it was my native language, right? Like, this happens a lot when you’re just like in this context where you’re meant to speak one language in one place and one in another place, right? And so like, maybe your language dominance shifts a bit. But then it’s really cool, because I think people, there’s just been so much less work done on like, this space, which I feel like is actually more common in some ways, right? Maybe not, maybe it’s not more common. But maybe in some ways, I think that it’s just, there’s so much more to look at, and I think it’s like a very, it’s not a far off concept, I think, right? When you’re thinking about that experience being really similar. So like, cognitively, it must be quite similar in terms of the processes, right?
MTB: Yeah.
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: So that’s like an interesting question to kind of look at.
MTB: Yeah. Okay, so let’s talk about your work with the Secwépemc community. How did you start working with this community, and are there any parts of your research that you’d like to share?
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: So I got involved with this language community, because I took a class at the University of British Columbia. It’s a required course with our graduate degree to take field methods, and so every year, when they have field methods, they get in contact with another language community, and there’s so many in B.C, right? There’s just a lot of Indigenous groups here. There’s a lot of languages here, and a lot of them are underdocumented, right? So there’s just a lot of space in B.C. for doing work like this. And so that’s how I got involved.
MTB: Can you talk a little bit about what you’re working on?
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: So basically, this is like a another, I’m really passionate about both of these projects. So this language, Secwepemctsín, right, maybe currently has fewer than 50 first-language speakers. So it’s a very small, at the moment is a very small language community, right? In the ‘70s, this person made this dictionary for the language, and he kind of invented this orthography system, but since then, there was not much work done with the language at all, and he only did this kind of descriptive, like impressionistic work on the language. And so he described this vowel system of having stressed and unstressed vowels, and he said something in one of his papers that said that unstressed vowels will reduce to schwa and so all of them will sound the same. But then when I was, you know, working with these consultants in the beginning and trying to think of a topic, they were saying that… I said, “That sounds really weird. Does that sound right to you?” And they were like, “No, they don’t all sound the same.” And so I basically recorded them say, you know, these words and have these vowels in different contexts, and I measured the vowels with like, just, yeah, took an acoustic measure, so I measured the F1 and F2 and duration. And yeah, I found that he wasn’t really right, but it was really interesting because so you’re not… You are seeing that the non-high vowels are kind of getting closer to schwa, but the high vowels are moving away from schwa, so they’re actually raising.
MTB: Oh, cool. Okay.
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: And that’s something that you’re seeing in languages like Spanish and Russian, and so it’s really interesting because that yeah, that’s a process that you’re seeing in other languages. I think Bulgarian was another one. And so it’s really interesting. There was a study done with Bulgarian, I think Wood and Pettersson, and they found that vowel reduction in Bulgarian is, like will consist of the vowel, sorry, the jaw instead of the tongue, and so this like jaw movement instead, when it comes to just like expressing stress, right, would just result in different things happening, right? So you’re… Like in English, I think it’s a kind of common thing to go to schwa, and this person who wrote this dictionary was Dutch. And I was told… I don’t speak Dutch, but I was told that this happens in Dutch as well, where it’s kind of reducing to schwa, right, that central space. And that’s with this tongue, kind of relaxing kind of process, right. But yeah, it’s another kind of interesting space where, you know, this kind of… This work with documentation, it really kind of intersects with like acoustic studies, articulatory studies, and it’s really weird, because it’s also just one of these things where the community uses this dictionary, right, with like every day, and kind of when people are trying to learn the language in terms of, right, like maybe they belong to the community, but they weren’t exposed to the language growing up, right, and they’re trying to relearn the language for themselves, right, like these orthography things, and these like theories, and how they are, I guess, written, right, like these theories are kind of expressed in like the orthography system in a large dictionary, right. Like that actually has… That potentially does have a lot of repercussions, right, if you’re not exploring these things, and just kind of taking this one guy’s word for it.
MTB: Yeah, yeah, like taking one dictionary as gospel, and then new learners are using that too.
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: Yeah.
MTB: Yeah, that’s, oh, yeah, that’s really interesting.
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: It’s so tricky, because it’s like, ethics-wise, right? There wasn’t an orthography system before. And so, this person in the ‘70s, right, he doesn’t have these like acoustic tools, but he’s like, “Okay…” I don’t know what his motivation was, I guess. I think, I don’t think he was a religious person, but I think that he was like, he had something to do with like, I guess, maybe more linguistic-oriented, but like, there are just like a lot of repercussions of like maybe sloppy work done by linguists. And I don’t know, I don’t even mean to say like, like I don’t know what to say, because I also feel like maybe somebody in the ‘70s, like I don’t want to like really badger on this person that I don’t, you know, have much, like all this context about like, just to say, but like, yeah, there’s just a lot of things like this. And this is just one little topic that I was studying. Like, there’s just a bigger, like, picture when it comes to just like, I’m sure there’s a lot of this stuff happening in this language, around the world, where like one person is basically… If it’s such a small language context, right, you’re like, okay, this is one person, that’s the guy who wrote the dictionary, that’s the same guy who wrote the orthography system, that’s the same guy who, you know, has made all these theories about this, right? So, it ends up being, yeah, this one person will be very influential on how people will learn the language to come, and sometimes they take authority over people who are first-language speakers of the language because of, like I was saying with this history, right? Like, this kind of stuff with like language colonialism happens everywhere, right? And language attitudes kind of interact with that, right? Where you’re like, “Oh, well…” Even though I think like, a lot of people are very… I mean, the community I work with, they’re very proud of their language, but I think at the end of the day, sometimes it’s still like this, “Oh, well, this dictionary is like the Bible basically, like, this is like the way that it is spoken, and that is more legitimate than what I have in my mind because of like, just like the,” I don’t know, the school system and like, the Western school system and like, how that was imposed on… Like, I just think that like, this is like, the same story that’s happening. You can see it in Hawaii, you can see it in like B.C.
MTB: Like, just because, yeah, like, there’s this feeling that just because something is published in a book, it’s more legitimate than native speakers’ intuition.
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: Right.
MTB: I think that really speaks to kind of the danger of like the issue that we’re all facing in documentary linguistics where there’s so much work to be done, there’s not enough people to do it, and so often, like you said, all over the world, there’s like, one dictionary or one, you know, a few texts, and, you know, this issue of underdocumentation, or like fragmentary documentation, yeah, it’s a big problem, because then there’s just not enough research really to see like, “Okay, is this the case?” Or… Because, you know, maybe this guy like, genuinely believed because of like, his own native language, like, “Yeah, okay, everything reduces to schwa,” but if there’s only one guy working on it, like… You know.
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: Yeah, there’s so many biases that we have to confront, right? Like, as especially as members that are coming outside of the community that are working within the community, like within, I guess, with the language system, right? Like, I think, like, yeah, there’s just, yeah, like you say, that it’s just like, there’s so much power in like, it’s just, it comes with just so much of a, just a need to be very careful with what you say, and to kind of like express it in the way that you’re saying, I like contextualize what you’re actually, like, what you’re studying and how you’re documenting it, right? Like, if you’re only working with a set amount of speaker, speakers, right, like, perhaps you have to be really clear that this is one dialect, this is like one age group, and like, you know, like, be very clear about all of these things. And maybe also be clear about your positionality, right? Like, oh, you know, they, like, I, coming from the university, you know, studying, you know, this language, right, with these consultants, like already puts me in this maybe different position, if they were speaking this language with like their students, right? And, right, like, that in itself, like, puts just, like, imposes some bias that I think needs to be really clear when perhaps, when you’re writing these kinds of things.
MTB: Yeah.
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: But I, yeah, I think about this all the time. Like, I’m just, I’m curious what the best solution is, because there’s just so much… Like I think that I’m doing something better than he did, right, in the ‘70s, but like, I’m only using the tools that I have, and also, like, you know, coming from this, with like this language, like the linguistic motivation, and yes, like, I think that, like, maybe I’m more aware of some of these biases than we were in the ‘70s. Or, you know, maybe, but like, I’m also one person doing like this acoustics analysis, right? And that’s also just working with a very small subset. And I don’t know, it just sometimes it feels like, yeah, I just… I don’t want to make too strong of a claim in any direction, but it just…
MTB: For sure.
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: Yeah, it’s really hard to know, I think, the best approach other than trying to reinforce with like the consultants that their intuition is so much more important than this dictionary.
MTB: Well, thank you, Michelle, so much for coming on the pod. Where can people find you online if they want to learn more about your work?
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: So if you look up my name, Michelle Kamigaki-Baron, my ResearchGate will come up, and I think my website for UBC will come up and you can look at some of my papers in there.
MTB: Awesome. Thank you so much.
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: Thanks a lot.
MTB: All right, bye.
Michelle Kamigaki-Baron: Bye.
You’ve been listening to Field Notes, a podcast about linguistic fieldwork. This podcast is hosted and produced by Martha Tsutsui Billins with production help from Laura Tsutsui. Our music is by Lobo Loco, and our logo is by E.Vill Designs. If you have a question or a fieldwork experience to share, you can email us at fieldnotespod@gmail.com. You can also follow us on Twitter and Instagram @lingfieldnotes. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please leave us an Apple Podcast review. Thanks for listening!
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