Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper investigates the outcomes of small-scale egalitar-ian language contact in an attempt to address whether differentlinguistic domains exhibit different degrees of stability and re-sistance to convergence among cohabitant speakers of Jahaiand Jedek, two closely related Aslian (Austroasiatic) languagevarieties spoken in northern Peninsular Malaysia. Using non-parametric Bayesian mixture models, we find that basic vocab-ulary items show a signal that strongly matches the linguisticidentity of individuals, while data from other domains do not.This result is in agreement with other findings from the studyof language contact: basic vocabulary is said to be a domainwhere distinctions in linguistic identity are often emphasizedand maintained, while other parts of the vocabulary may beless salient for the purposes of indexing speaker identity, andare thus more prone to the effects of convergence. We demon-strate that this finding is an artifact of neither data coverage normodel choice; at the same time, we are able to identify varia-tion in basic vocabulary items across linguistic groups which issuppressed by the model we use, and outline alternative meth-ods for analyzing data of this sort.