Dobu. As seen in table 24, there is no significant difference in lexical similarity between adults’ and young people’s wordlists as compared to Dobu.
57
Table 24. Similarity percentages—youth to Dobu and adult to Dobu
Youth with standard Dobu Adults with standard Dobu
Sebutuya 63
64 Momo’awa
64 64
Basima Lauoya 57
53 Ulua
53 50
Gameta 50
49 Because the youth wordlists are not consistently more similar to Dobu than the adult lists, it appears
that the youth have not borrowed more Dobu words than the adults. It may be that the youth are borrowing Dobu words that are not in the basic 170-item wordlist used, or that the comparison of five
wordlists is not a sufficiently wide sample for the results to be significant. However, from the above percentages, it is not evident that there has been any significant change towards Dobu in the
vocabularies of Galeya, Basima, Ulua, and Gameta within the last generation.
3.4.3 Language change: Conclusions
Given the differences in methodology, it is difficult to come to a firm conclusion based on either the wordlists compared from different years, or the youth to adult comparison. However, taking the
explanations in the previous sections into account, it seems most likely that Basima, Galeya, and the other dialects in the chain are not continuing to become more like Dobu lexically, at least not on a large
scale, and Galeya and Basima may have changed to become, to some extent, less like Dobu since 1989.
We now answer the initial questions: 1 What is the relation of the Galeya language and its dialects to Dobu?
The dialects of the Galeya language show between 49 percent and 64 percent
58
lexical similarity with Dobu. The greatest similarity with Dobu is shown by the southern wards Momo’awa and Sebutuya, and
the least by the northern wards of Gameta and Ulua. 2 Has language change continued so that the dialects have become lexically more similar to Dobu?
It is clear that Galeya and Basima became lexically more like Dobu between 1964 and 1989. Such change was greater in the southern areas than in the northern. However, it is not clear that the change
continued after 1989.
3 If such change is taking place, is it still continuing at the same rate? Neither the results from the diachronic lexicostatistical comparison, nor those from the youth and adult
comparisons in 2004 show that the dialects are continuing to become more like Dobu. In fact, the results point towards the stabilisation or even reversal of such a trend. While many conditions are still
conducive to language change, the relative prestige of Dobu has decreased as English and the vernacular have become more important in education, which may explain the recent stabilisation of language
change.
57
According to Simons’ tables of significance, the difference between 53 and 57 is not significant in wordlists of 100 words, and that is the largest difference in table 24.
58
Comparing wordlists elicted on this survey with the Dobu wordlist taken at Budoya on Fergusson Island.
3.5 Bilingualism
