Based on a corpus collected during recent fieldwork on the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, this paper is a description of the sound system of Cocos Malay, highlighting, in particular, a characteristic Cocos intonation pattern, as well as the inter-generational differences observed.

Cocos Malay, a little known and scarcely researched variety of Malay, is spoken by the 450-strong community of Malays which has been resident on the Cocos (Keeling) Islands for the past two centuries. It is a unique contact variety as, due to geographical and historical circumstances, it has been isolated from other Malay varieties, and has been heavily influenced in its history by Chinese and Javanese, and, only more recently, English and Bahasa Indonesia. Patterns found in such a variety shed light on processes on language contact, and provide a good control for comparison in investigating other 'mixed' varieties of Malay such as Bazaar Malay and Baba Malay found in Singapore. Previous work concentrated mainly on socio-historical aspects, and syntax, with only passing mention of the sound system - as with most language descriptions which provide minimal details of their phonetic properties, leaving an important aspect of their grammar undescribed (Maddieson 2001). This aspect is in fact particularly significant in this case because, until less than three decades ago, Cocos Malay had been almost exclusively a spoken language, with Arabic script used only for religious purposes, and Roman script predominantly for basic work-oriented communication, the latter being English-based and resembling the pre-ejaan baru ('new spelling') system of Standard Malay, but also incorporating major concessions to local pronunciation (Adelaar 1996). The recent introduction to the Islands of English-medium education as well as Bahasa Indonesia as a second language has had radical effects on the language, including its pronunciation, evident in the younger generation.

References

Adelaar, S. 1996. Malay in the Cocos (Keeling) Islands. In B. Nothofer (ed.) Reconstruction, classification, description. Festschrift in honor of Isidore Dyen. Hamburg: Abera Verl.

Maddieson, I. 2001. Phonetic fieldwork. In Newman, P. & M. Ratliff (eds). Linguistic fieldwork. Cambridge University Press. 211-229.