Language attitudes on Pohnpei: Results from a survey analysis

Abstract

In this presentation, I present the results from a language attitudes survey of 1.3% of the adult population on Pohnpei, Federated States of Micronesia. The results include domain-based language choices and attitudes toward a variety of topics including multilingualism, education, and Pohnpeian identities. The presentation also includes results from a novel combination of statistical methods including Bayesian hierarchical poisson modeling, multidimensional scaling with partitioning around medoids clustering, and correspondence analysis with hierarchical clustering, as well as a brief discussion of the benefits of these analyses. The results overall show a high level of importance for Pohnpeian, English, and other local languages. However, rather than languages competing, the results show a high value of multilingualism and a complementary relationship among the languages. The results also show ideological differences on Pohnpei both within demographic groups and across them.

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Moore Hall 575, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, Honolulu, HI
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