Profile of Language Maintenance and Shift within the Tongan speech community in Wellington, New Zealand

Abstract

The Tongan community in Wellington, New Zealand, is a small, closely-knit, young community, made up, by and large, of recent immigrants to New Zealand. This study surveys language maintenance and language shift in 100 (approximately a quarter of all) Wellington Tongans. Most respondents were born in Tonga (a few were Tongan-New Zealanders). The survey took the form of an 84 question questionnaire (some of which were administered orally), and investigated the respondents' language proficiency in English and Tongan; their language choice in different domains, ie. work place, home, church, shopping and Tongan social gatherings, as well as language choice depending on the addressee, ie. spouse, children, Tongan friends, other Tongan people's children, parents/grandparents and other relatives; their language choice with Tongan friends and family when non-Tongans are present; and their attitudes to the Tongan language. Results showed that Tongan is the language by far the most preferred in all domains if the addressee understands Tongan. The respondents' passive knowledge of English was found to be greater than their active knowledge. There was a strong relationship between abilities in English and time spent in New Zealand. There was evidence of code-switching and code-mixing especially among the younger generation and among intimates. The respondents' attitudes to Tongan are extremely positive. The conclusions to the study are that there is little shift at this stage in the Wellington Tongan community and the very positive attitudes to Tongan are a good sign for continued language maintenance. However, there is an indication that Tongan may be already giving way under pressure from English. The study provides a thorough linguistic description and overview of a young community with strong language ties still to their homeland, yet experiencing some linguistic stress from the largely monolingual English majority. It provides several areas for further detailed investigation, eg. research into patterns of code-switching.