In this paper we investigate incipient rhoticity—the realisation of postvocalic /r/—in the English of Nauru, an equatorial Micronesian island of the Western Pacific. Despite its small size, Nauru has a complex colonial history: Germany, Japan, the UK, Australia and New Zealand were all implicated in exploiting Nauru’s phosphate reserves in the 80 years before independence in 1968. Its Anglophone rulers were all nations whose citizens were overwhelmingly non-rhotic, and whose teaching models were non-rhotic too. Older Nauruans, born during the economic boom enabled by phosphate mining, are indeed largely non-rhotic, but rhoticity is now becoming increasingly common among the young on the island. Our article begins with a variationist analysis of Nauruan English rhoticity, based on a subsample of 16 recordings from a 34-hour corpus of informal conversations with islanders. We extracted 250 tokens of postvocalic /r/ from the recordings of each speaker for a total of 4000 tokens. These were then coded for age and gender, as well as for a range of internal linguistic constraints, such as, following Nagy and Irwin (2010), the morphological and phonological position of /r/ in the lexeme, the preceding vowel, word stress and word frequency. Results show a statistically significant increase in the use of rhoticity across apparent time, led by younger female Nauruans. The morphological and phonological position of /r/ in the lexeme, the preceding vowel and word stress also significantly shaped the likelihood of rhoticity. But why is Nauru, previously non-rhotic, with strong connections to Australia, also overwhelmingly non-rhotic, now acquiring post-vocalic /r/? In an attempt to account for this, we consider the roles of migration to Nauru, transnational contact with the Nauruan diaspora, contact with incipiently rhotic Pasifika communities in Australia and New Zealand, substrate influence from Nauruan, and the influence of international social media.

David Britain, Shaip Jemini and Laura Mettler. 2025. The emergence of rhoticity in a Pacific variety of English: the case of Nauru. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: selected papers from NWAV-52. 31(2): 41-49. https://repository.upenn.edu/handle/20.500.14332/62198