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New Guinea and Neighboring Areas: A Sociolinguistic Laboratory
Contributions to the Sociology of Language
24
Joshua A . F i s h m a n Editor
M O U T O N P U B L I S H E R S • T H E H A G U E • P A R I S • NEW Y O R K
New Guinea and Neighboring Areas: A Sociolinguistic Laboratory
Edited by S t e p h e n A . Wurm
M O U T O N P U B L I S H E R S • THE H A G U E • P A R I S • NEW Y O R K
ISBN: 9 0 - 2 7 9 - 7 8 4 8 ^ Jacket design by Jurriaan Schrofer © 1979, Mouton Publishers, The Hague, The Netherlands Printed in Great
Britain
Preface
The New Guinea area is not only the linguistically most complex and heterogeneous area of the world — but is, as a result of this situation, an area which o f f e r s a very rich field for the study of a seemingly endless variety of sociolinguistic phenomena. Problems of multilingualism, code switching, the questions of language boundaries, sociolinguistic phenomena observable in local languages in conjunction with certain features of culture, changes in indigenous languages in response to contact with the modern world, sociolinguistic factors involved in the transmission of information in chain-interpretation situations, the development and role of various types of lingue franche, the social roles of and the attitudes towards the various languages used in a multilingual society, facets and problems of language planning and engineering, contact between languages with associated phenomena and resulting problems are only a few of the fields of study inherent in this uniquely rich sociolinguistic laboratory. This volume of contributions authored by present and past members of the Australian National University, mostly of its Research School of Pacific Studies — all scholars with years of first-hand experience in sociolinguistic research work in the New Guinea area — addresses itself to some of the sociolinguistic problems listed above in a concise form. It is hoped that the few glimpses offered through these essays may prompt other sociolinguistically interested scholars to take a first-hand look at some of the numerous problems inviting study and research in the New Guinea area. S. A. Wurm
Contents
Preface
v
G E N E R A L STUDIES The language situation in the New Guinea area by S. A. Wurm
3
The language situation in the New Hebrides by D. T. Tryon
11
Remarks on the language situation in the Solomon Islands by D. T. Tryon
33
Some English-based pidgins in the southwestern Pacific by P. Muhlhàusler, J. A. Bennett, and D. T. Tryon
53
ETHNOGRAPHY O F SPEAKING Multilingualism: linguistic boundaries and unsolved problems in Papua New Guinea by Don Lay cock
81
Lexical expansion in a non-Austronesian language of Papua New Guinea by Graham Scott
101
The sociolinguistic significance of Barai possessive markers by Mike Olson
115
Development of a literary mode in the languages of nonliterary communities by Raymond Leslie Johnston
129
Code switching in Papua New Guinea: local languages versus New Guinea Pidgin, Hiri Motu and English by Peter Muhlhàusler
157
vili
Contents
Turning the talk: a case of chain-interpreting in Papua New Guinea by C. L. Voorhoeve
177
LINGUE FRANCHE IN PAPUA NEW GUINEA Papuan Pidgin English and Hiri Motu by Peter Miihlhàusler and Tom Dutton
209
Sociolects in New Guinea Pidgin by Peter Miihlhàusler
225
Attitudes towards New Guinea Pidgin and English by S. A. Wurm and P. Miihlhàusler
243
Language planning and New Guinea Pidgin by P. Miihlhàusler, S. A. Wurm, and T. E. Dutton
263
Some mission lingue franche and their sociolinguistic role by K. A. McElhanon
277
General Studies
S. A.WURM
The Language Situation in the New Guinea Area
1. INTRODUCTORY REMARKS
The area stretching from the Timor-Alor-Pantar islands and Halinahera in the west across the New Guinea mainland and adjacent islands to the eastern end of the Solomon Islands in the east is known as the New Guinea Area. This area is the linguistically most varied and complex of any comparably small part of the world, with over a thousand languages located in it. Of these, the greater part, about 760, are found in the newly independent country of Papua New Guinea.
2. INDIGENOUS LANGUAGES
The indigenous languages of the New Guinea area belong to two quite different language types, i.e. Austronesian and non-Austronesian (quite commonly called Papuan). The Papuan languages are predominant, both regionally and numerically, and also with regard to the number of their speakers: in light of the most recent findings, they number 726, with probably only very few additional languages yet to be identified, and the total number of speakers of Papuan languages is estimated to be in the vicinity of 2,248,000 (Wurm 1975). The Papuan languages are those of the original inhabitants of most of the New Guinea area — they were spoken in the region many thousands of years before the arrival of the Austronesians, though it appears likely that the speakers of Papuan languages themselves entered the New Guinea area in the course of a number of successive migrations (Wurm et al. 1975). At present, the Papuan languages occupy most of the New Guinea mainland, northern Halmahera, a sizable section of Timor, most of the Alor and Pantar islands, much of Bougainville Island, and some parts of New Britain, New Ireland and the Solomon Islands. The great majority of the Papuan languages are spoken by small to very
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small speech communities; quite a few of them by only a few dozen to a couple of hundred people. At the same time, a sizable number of them have many thousands of speakers, with the largest Papuan language, Enga in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, spoken by over 150,000. The Austronesian languages of the New Guinea area number over 300, with most of them spoken by small speech communities only. There are some very few exceptions to this, such as Tolai on New Britain which has 65,000, and Motu proper in the Port Moresby area, which has over 10,000 speakers. Some other numerically large Austronesian languages are located at the western fringe of the New Guinea area. However, the total number of speakers of Austronesian languages in the New Guinea area is only a comparatively small fraction of that of the Papuan speakers. The Austronesian languages of the New Guinea area constitute relatively recent immigrant languages from the west, and an ancestral form of them, proto-Oceanic, is thought to have reached the eastern part of the New Guinea area about 5,000 years ago, with the arrival of the Austronesians to its western part, especially the Halmahera Island area, probably antedating this by one or several millennia. The Austronesian languages occupy some coastal and hinterland areas on the New Guinea mainland, especially in the northwest, west and northeast, east, and southeast, and most of the small islands adjacent to it. They predominate in terms of geographical extent on the islands of New Britain, New Ireland, the Solomon Islands (except for Bougainville, which politically is part of Papua New Guinea), the Geelvink Bay islands and Timor, and take in the southern half of Halmahera Island. A large amount of pioneering linguistic research work has been carried out in the New Guinea area since the mid-fifties, especially in the Papuan languages. Most of this work has been under the auspices of the Research School of Pacific Studies of the Australian National University, and the Summer Institute of Linguistics, New Guinea Branch. Until a short time before the beginning of this work, it had been believed that the Papuan languages were largely unrelated to each other, and that only a few of the relatively small number of the Papuan languages then known could be combined into small groups. As a result of almost two decades of intensive work, it was established that the Papuan languages of the New Guinea area numbered a little under 750, and that they belonged to five large and six small phylic groups which were apparently unrelated to each other, with seven or eight unrelated language isolates remaining outside these groups (Wurm, ed. 1975). The five large phyla are: The Trans-New Guinea Phylum, with 4 9 3 languages, occupying more than four-fifths of the New Guinea mainland, and the Papuan speaking areas of Timor, Alor and Pantar islands;
The Language Situation in the New Guinea Area
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The Sepik-Ramu Phylum, with 98 languages, located almost exclusively within the Sepik and Madang Provinces of northern Papua New Guinea; The Torricelli Phylum, with 47 languages, located in the West Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea; The West Papuan Phylum, with 24 languages, located in the central and northern parts of the Vogelkop Peninsula in Irian Jaya, and on northern Halmahera; The East Papuan Phylum, with 28 languages, located in the Papuan-speaking areas of the island to the northeast and east of the New Guinea mainland. The six small phyla comprise a total of 28 languages and are the Sko phylum-level Stock (eight languages), the Kwomtari phylum-level Stock (five languages), the Arai (or Left May) phylum-level Family (six languages), the Amto-Musian phylum-level Stock (two languages), the East Bird's Head phylum-level Stock (three languages), and the Geelvink Bay Phylum (four languages). The first four of these are situated in the West Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea, and the last two in the western Irian Jaya. Details of the history of research into Papuan languages, the progress of their classification, their full listing and grouping, information on the features and characteristics of languages of the various groups and other information of relevance to Papuan linguistics has been published in a book edited by Wurm (1975). A large amount of work has been devoted to the study of the Austronesian languages of the New Guinea area, especially in very recent years. Their exact classification still remains to be worked out in full, though a considerable number of families have been established. Pawley (1977) suggests that New Guinea Austronesian can be regarded as a definable group within the Austronesian languages as a whole, and this view is shared by Tryon (1978). It would be beyond the scope of this paper to enumerate all the established Austronesian families of the New Guinea area — much of the relevant information, except for the Solomon Islands and the western fringe areas of the New Guinea area, has been published in detail in Wurm (1976). Tryon's paper on the language situation in the Solomon Islands in this volume contains information on the Solomon Islands Austronesian languages.
3. LINGUE FRANCHE
The extremely complex language situation in the New Guinea area has been a favorable background for widespread bi- and multilingualism as has been discussed in some detail in Laycock's paper on multilingualism in this volume. It is not at all surprising that this situation has also led to the emergence of a number of lingue franche in response to social situations requiring
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intercommunication across several language boundaries — especially intercommunication going beyond that with neighboring language communities only: the latter could be adequately served by bi- and multilingualism involving adjacent languages. In precontact days, such a social situation requiring intercommunication over wide areas or within communities located a long distance from each other was constituted by trading circles and trading expeditions. Such trading relationships existed along various parts of the southeastern coast of what is today Papua New Guinea, and gave rise to the development of lingue franche. One of these was the Hiri trading language used by the Motu during their annual trading expeditions t o the Gulf of Papua coastal areas and discussed in Muhlhausler's and Dutton's paper on Papuan Pidgin English and Hiri Motu in this volume. It was a pidgin language specifically created through this trading situation. Other such trade lingue franche were Dobu used throughout today's Milne Bay Province area in the so-called Kula trading circle (Lawton 1977;Malinowski 1922), and Suau used in the Mailu-East Papua-Aroma trading cycle further west (Abel 1977). Both of these have been mentioned in McElhanon's article in this volume. In contrast to the Hiri language, these two lingue franche were not pidgin languages developed specifically for trading purposes, but originally the local languages of tribal speech communities. However, in their lingue franche forms, they developed into somewhat simplified versions of the tribal languages. Both of them were later adopted by missions as missionary lingue franche. Other social situations leading to the development and spread of lingue franche in the New Guinea area have resulted directly from the impact of the modern world. One of these was the introduction of missionary activities which gave rise to missionary lingue franche through the adoption of given tribal languages by missions as missionary and church languages. This has been discussed in detail in McElhanon's paper in this volume. Another such social situation resulted from the introduction of colonial administration, with its far-reaching consequences for traditional indigenous life, and the establishment of plantations requiring indigenous labor. The rise of Police Motu, now renamed Hiri Motu, is directly attributable to the former. Its history and other facets have been discussed in detail in Muhlhausler's and Dutton's paper in this volume. New Guinea Pidgin (or Neo-Melanesian) owes its origin, on the basis of earlier forms of Pacific Pidgin English, largely to plantation activities in Samoa in the early 1880s and its introduction from there into the then German New Guinea, as has been shown by Miihlhausler (1976). Its spread and development to its present socially pervading and linguistically highly elaborate state are the direct consequence of the social situations brought into being by colonial and postcolonial administration. At the same time,its penetration into most parts of Papua New Guinea, especially in recent years, has been achieved almost exlusively through its use as an
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intertribal lingua franca in such new social situations, and not through its use in master-servant relationships. Detailed discussions of the origin and other sociolinguistically interesting facets of New Guinea Pidgin have been given in this volume in the following papers: in Miihlhausler's section of the general paper by Miihlhausler, Bennett, and Try on; in Miihlhausler 'Code Switching in Papua New Guinea' and his 'Sociolects in New Guinea Pidgin'; in Wurm and Miihlhausler 'Attitudes to New Guinea Pidgin and English'; and in Miihlhausler et al. 'Language planning and New Guinea Pidgin'. The sociolinguistic situation involving Solomon Islands Pidgin and other relevant facets connected with it which differ significantly from those associated with New Guinea Pidgin are discussed in this volume in Bennett's section of the general paper by Miihlhausler, Bennett, and Tryon, and have also been touched upon in Tryon's paper on the language situation in the Solomon Islands. The social situation conducive to the introduction of English as a lingua franca limited largely to certain aspects of elite activities, and to educational activities in general, has resulted from deliberate policies in the later years of colonial rule. Some discussion of the facets surrounding the role and standing of English in Papua New Guinea has been presented in Wurm and Miihlhausler, 'Attitudes to New Guinea Pidgin and English'. It is particularly interesting to note that, in spite of its high prestige, English is only little used, even by members of the educated elite, in ordinary face-to-face intercommunication situations of a nonofficial nature: one of the two major lingue franche, or sometimes tribal languages, are largely resorted to in such situations. As the sole language of secondary and tertiary education, of high-level administration and law, and for communication with the outside world, English has a magical appeal for many Papua New Guineans as the symbol and means of power and wealth. Parents are keen for their children to become proficient in it for that reason. At the same time, a proportion of the English-speaking elite, indoctrinated with the prejudices of their previous English teachers and of earlier administrators, against NGP and in favor of English, tend to overestimate the importance and potential of English for Papua New Guinea. Frequent disappointments of these expectations and outlooks are however slowly bringing about a gradual change in all these attitudes. In the western half of the New Guinea mainland which is today Irian Jaya, Bazaar Malay (pidginized Malay) had established itself as a lingua franca in parts of the region, largely as a direct result of the situation created by Dutch colonial rule. After the Indonesian take over, its use was discouraged, and Indonesian introduced as the lingua franca for general use in the light of deliberate government policy.
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4 . SOCIAL ROLES OF THE LANGUAGES
Some discussion of the social roles of the missionary lingue franche in Papua New Guinea, Hiri Motu, New Guinea Pidgin, and English, has been presented in this volume in the various papers referred to above. It may be added that the local indigenous languages have in many areas undergone drastic changes in their social functions in recent years. With the accelerating encroachment of cultural features of the modern world upon the traditional world in the New Guinea area, indigenes exposed to this modern influence tend to compartmentalize their use of languages: the local languages continue to be used in situations reflecting traditional life and values, but one of the two general lingue franche, New Guinea Pidgin and Hiri Motu, especially the former, are increasingly resorted to in intercommunication relating to facets of the modern world. For instance, indigenes sharing the same mother-tongue will use it in discussing the preparations for a local traditional feast, but tend to switch to New Guinea Pidgin when talking about the election of representatives to the Local Government Council or the purchase of some equipment for the village cooperative. Even if council discussions are held orally in a local language the minutes generally will be written down in New Guinea Pidgin. At the same time, the local languages continue to be used in day-to-day activities in village life, and (provided both husband and wife are from the same speech community), in the homes of families even if they are away from their home village setting, for instance have migrated to one of the towns for employment purposes. This use of the local languages, though still largely pragmatic, has emotional significance too in assuring and strengthening the internal cohesion of the families and their ethnic links with their home village and home areas. On the emotional level, the local language serves this same purpose for individual members of a speech community who are away from home and who use their local language as a powerful means for asserting and signalling the ethnic bond between themselves and with their speech community. In this, the local language has a growing importance with the increasing mobility of indigenes in Papua New Guinea: it helps them to maintain links with each other and their traditional culture and home — as long as their tradition and their culture do not succumb to the steadily strengthening influence of the modern world which in the towns has as one of its powerful manifestations the emergence of a new Papua New Guinea contact culture which lies between the traditional and the Western, and they do not replace their local language by New Guinea Pidgin, the specific language of this contact culture. New Guinea Pidgin and Hiri Motu also have strong emotional appeal to many Papua New Guineans — the former as a means of Papua New Guinean self-identification and the vehicle for nationalistic self-expression which
The Language Situation in the New Guinea Area
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culminates in the feeling of many of them that New Guinea Pidgin should be the national language of Papua New Guinea. On the other hand, Hiri Motu has become the rallying point for what is regarded by many as traditionally belonging to the orbit of the area that was formerly the Territory of Papua (the southern part of Papua New Guinea) and the vehicle of regional nationalism and a means of expression of regional self-identity. The missionary lingue franche also have some emotional appeal in serving as a means of expression of solidarity between members of a particular church organization and thus making it possible for their speakers to identify themselves with particular social groups. The emotional appeal of English is different: it is regarded by many as the sole key to wealth and power and gives its speakers high prestige in the eyes of much of the population of Papua New Guinea, but it lacks the feature of serving as a means of self-identification in connection with all that is typically Papua New Guinea.
5. CONCLUDING
REMARKS
The New Guinea area constitutes the linguistically most complex part of comparable size anywhere in the world, with over 1,000 indigenous languages, and a number of local lingue franche, some of them antedating the contact with the modern world. A few of these, and some local languages, have been adopted as mission lingue franche by various missions; most of them have declined in use in Papua New Guinea in recent years. In addition, two major lingue franche have developed in Papua New Guinea, one of them, formerly called Police Motu and now renamed Hiri Motu, being based on a local language and constituting a regional lingua franca restricted in currency t o much of the area of the former Territory of Papua, the southern part of Papua New Guinea. The other one, New Guinea Pidgin, is based on English. It has become the almost universal lingua franca of Papua New Guinea, coexisting with Hiri Motu in much of the area of the latter, and has assumed far-reaching social roles, especially in recent years. English has a special role as a lingua franca: it is the language of most of the educational pursuits in Papua New Guinea, and the general language of the elite in certain situations such as administrative settings, but is otherwise little used as a lingua franca, even by members of the educated elite. In Irian Jaya, the formerly widespread lingua franca Bazaar Malay (pidginized Malay), introduced under the earlier Dutch colonial administration, has in recent years been replaced by Indonesian as the general lingua franca.
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REFERENCES Abel, C. (1977), 'Missionary lingue franche: Suau', in New Guinea Area Languages and Language Study, vol. 3, ed. by S. A. Wurm, 971-988. Lawton, R. S. (1977), 'Missionary lingue franche: Dobu', in New Guinea Area Languages and Language Study, vol. 3, ed. by S. A. Wurm, 907-946. Malinowski, B. (1922), Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London, Routledge and Kegan Paul. Miihlhausler, P. (1976), 'Samoan Plantation Pidgin and the origins of New Guinea Pidgin: an introduction', Journal of Pacific History 11(2): 122-125. Pawley, A. (1977), T h e New Guinea Oceanic hypothesis'. Mimeographed. To appear in WPLUH. Tryon, D. T. (1978), 'The languages of the New Hebrides: internal and external relationships', in Second International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics: Proceedings, ed. by S. A. Wurm and Lois Carrington, 877-902. Pacific Linguistics C-61. Wurm, S. A. (1975), 'Language distribution in the New Guinea area', in New Guinea Area languages and Language Study, vol. 1, ed. by S. A. Wurm, 3-38. Wurm, S. A., editor (1975), New Guinea Area Languages and Language Study, vol. 1: Papuan Languages and the New Guinea Linguistic Scene. Pacific Linguistics C-38. - (1976), New Guinea Area Languages and Language Study, vol. 2: Austronesian Languages. Pacific Linguistics C-39. - (1977), New Guinea Area languages and Language Study, vol. 3: Languages, Culture, Society, and the Modern World. Pacific Linguistics C-40. Wurm, S. A., Laycock, D. C., Voorhoeve, C. L., and Dutton, T. E. (1975), 'Papuan linguistic prehistory, and past language migrations in the New Guinea area', in New Guinea Area Languages and Language Study, vol. 1, ed. by S. A. Wurm, 935-960.
D. T. TRYON
The Language Situation in the New Hebrides
1. INTRODUCTORY REMARKS
The New Hebrides archipelago consists of an incomplete double chain of between 80 and 90 islands stretching from northwest to southeast for a distance of some 550 miles. The group lies to the south of the Solomon Islands and to the north of New Caledonia, between 12° and 20° S. Lat. and 165° and 170° E. Long. The New Hebrides, including the Banks and Torres islands, covers an area of some 5,700 square miles. The only official census of the population w a s h e l d i n 1967.The total population at that time was 77,988 of whom 72,244 were indigenous. Latest estimates by the Condominium Department of Statistics put the total population at around 100,000 of whom more than 90% are indigenous. The language situation in the New Hebrides is partially a result of the events which led to the establishment of the present form of government. In 1825, an Irish seaman, Peter Dillon, found sandalwood at Port Resolution on Tanna, in the south of the group. Soon after, trading in this wood commenced on both Tanna and Erromanga. Unfortunately, the traders were not always scrupulous, and relations between them and the New Hebrideans were often torrid. In fact, this led directly to the massacre of the first European missionaries on Erromanga some little time later. However, the missionaries persisted, and by 1885 most of the islands had their own missions, which did much to ensure that the recruitment of labor for the cotton and sugar plantations in Fiji, Samoa and Queensland proceeded in a more humanitarian manner than when the blackbirders first began operations, the first shipload of islanders leaving Tanna for Fiji in 1864. In the meantime, the number of European traders and planters continued to increase in the New Hebrides. Most of the colonists were either French or British, who bought large holdings of land. Relations between the two nationalities became strained, with both parties aspiring to annexation for their own countries. Affairs reached an impasse, and in 1886 Britain and France finally agreed to set up a Joint Naval Commission t o safeguard order in the New
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Hebrides. However, the commission never functioned, as there was no civil law to enforce any kind of contract. So it was that in 1906, when German interests were doing their utmost to gain a foothold in the New Hebrides, the British and French agreed to form a condominium to administer the group. Thus the present government. By the time the condominium was proclaimed, almost all of the plantation laborers had been returned to the New Hebrides, not always to their own islands. After the First World War, there was a serious labor shortage in the New Hebrides, as the Melanesian population was on the decline, largely as a result of late nineteenth-century epidemics and the labor trade. So indentured labor was introduced from Vietnam, principally for work on French plantations, as British planters were not allowed to employ indentured Tonkinese until the late 1930s. The great majority of the Vietnamese labor force was repatriated from the New Hebrides in 1963 {Pacific Islands Monthly 1963:492). Apart from the Vietnamese, the only other nationality present in significant numbers, not counting the British and French are the ubiquitous Chinese, leaving aside the majority Melanesian population for the moment. The only other group to reside in the New Hebrides were the Americans, who during World War II constructed bases in Vila and Santo. The only linguistic legacy attributable to them was the adoption of the term meriken to signify 'axe', in the Melanesian language of Efate! Other minority groups will be listed in Section 2, below.
2. THE LANGUAGES
The languages of the New Hebrides will be treated under two heads, indigenous and nonindigenous.
2.1.
Nonindigenous
In the 1967 census (McArthur and Yaxley 1968:24), the nonindigenous population of the New Hebrides was reckoned to be 5,471 persons. Since that time, the population of the group is estimated by the Condominium Department of Statistics to have risen by approximately 25%, which would give a figure of roughly 6,800, for nonindigenes. The languages spoken by these groups, with approximate numbers of speakers are as follows: French English Chinese (Hakka)
1,300 (3,840 French subjects, as of May 1967) 900 (1,631 British subjects, as of May 1967) 300
The Language Situation in the New Hebrides Vietnamese Wallisian Tahitian Gilbertese Tongan Fijian
13
450 300
200 200 150 150
These figures total well under the figure given for the nonindigenous population, largely because the census figures and the Condominium Statistics Department estimates include a category termed 'Part European' and another 'All Other Mixed', which throw no light on linguistic affiliation. The figures given for English and French reflect only native speakers. New Hebridean metropolitan language speakers will be treated under Section 3, below.
2.2. Indigenous Although discussed below, the position of the New Hebrides indigenous languages is still not clearly defined with respect to other Melanesian island languages, apart from the fact that all 105 languages (see Tryon 1976), are incontestably Austronesian or Malayo-Polynesian. A brief look at the history of research into these languages will go some way towards explaining the still rudimentary state of knowledge in this area. In the nineteenth century there was considerable evangelical activity in the southwestern Pacific, accompanied by an active pursuit of the mastery of a number of local vernaculars for purposes of Scripture translation. In fact, translations were made in a relatively large number of New Hebridean languages, see Section 3, below. Naturally, then, the great bulk of language studies published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are directly traceable to the linguistic interest of mission personnel. For example, Von der Gabelentz' two volumes Die melanesischen Sprachen ( 1 8 6 1 - 1 8 7 3 ) were based on materials provided by Bishop Patteson of the Melanesian Mission. Codrington's The Melanesian Languages (1885) and Ray's The Melanesian Island Languages (1926) are also the work of missionaries, or based on the translation work of other missionaries. These three works constitute the major sources of linguistic data on the New Hebridean languages to this day. Other important mission contributions are Macdonald (1889-1891), Inglis (1882), Codrington and Palmer (1896). From the beginning of the twentieth century until approximately a decade ago, there was little effort made to complete the linguistic atlas of the New Hebrides, apart from Kern's phonological study of Aneityumese (1906) and the work of Ray (1926), referred to above. Until the 1950s, the only other
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publications of note came from another missionary, W. G. Ivens, who put together a series of sketch grammars of northern New Hebrides languages between 1937 and 1942, based primarily on Scripture translations. In 1954 Capell published A Linguistic Survey of the South-Western Pacific, which gave a summary of the state of knowledge up until that time. This work was subsequently revised and reprinted in 1962. Since that time, there has been an upturn in New Hebrides linguistic research, individual languages being studied by Walsh (1962, 1966), Kasarherou (1962), Hewitt (1966), Parker (1968, 1970), Schütz (1969a, 1969b), Paton (1971, 1973), Guy (1974), Charpentier (1974), and Lynch (1974). Since Capell (1962), the only survey which attempted to cover the whole of the New Hebrides was that undertaken by the present writer, beginning in 1968/1969, and culminating in New Hebrides Languages: An Internal Classification (Tryon 1976), the results of which will be discussed below. Previous partial classifications, based on only a few languages, include Grace (1955), Dyen (1965) and Pawley (1972). Mention should also be made of the comparative work of Lynch, 'Proto-South Hebridean and Proto-Oceanic' (1978), which covers seven languages in the southern part of the group. In terms of indigenous languages, then, according to the latest information available, there are 105 distinct languages, all Austronesian or MalayoPolynesian, spoken in the New Hebrides at the present time. Three of these languages are Polynesian Outlier languages, spoken in the south of the group. For a discussion of critical percentages used in determining the number of languages, see Tryon ( 1 9 7 6 : 7 7 - 7 9 ) . While the classification of languages presented below is based mainly on quantitative evidence, qualitative evidence was also adduced which confirmed the groupings reached. The internal classification of New Hebrides languages, in summary form is given in Table 1, following Tryon (1976) and taking the approximate number of speakers from Tryon (1978). The three Polynesian Outlier languages excluded from the internal classification presented are as follows: Fila-Mele Emae Futuna-Aniwa
on Fila Is., and Meie Village, Efate ( 1 , 8 0 0 + ) on Emae Is., Shepherd Group (200 ±) on Futuna and Aniwa Is. (600 ±)
While discussing the internal subgroupings of the New Hebrides languages, mention must be made of the effect of dialect chaining on the subgroupings. A 'dialect chain' would be made up of a series of speech communities so arranged that the speech of Community A is intelligible to Community B, and that of B to C, but not A to C, thus setting up an intelligibility chain. In the New Hebrides, not only are there 'dialect chains', but also what might be termed 'language chains' (see Tryon 1976:79-81), such that Language A
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Table 1. 1. East Santo Group (5 languages) Sakao Subgroup: SA* (1,000 Sakao Southeast Santo Subgroup Lorediakarkar SA (50 Shark Bay SA (150 Butmas-Tur SA (350 Polonombauk SA (100
±) ±) ±) ±) ±)
2. Malekula Interior Group (12 languages) Small Nambas Subgroup.: Letemboi ML (180 ±) Repanbitip ML (60 ±) Dixon Reef ML (50 ±) Nasarian ML (40 ±) Malekula Central Subgroup: (250 ±) Katbol ML Lingarak ML (120 ±) Vinmavis ML (140 ±) Litzlitz ML (200 ±) Larevat ML (100 ±) Maragus ML (10) Big Nambas ML (1,200 ±) Labo Subgroup: Labo ML (350 ±) 3. Erromanga Group (2 languages) Erromanga Subgroup: Sie ER (600 ±) ER Ura (10) 4. Tanna Group (5 languages) Tanna Subgroup: Kwamera TA Whitesands TA North Tanna TA Lenakel TA Southwest Tanna TA 5. Aneityum Group (1 language) Aneityum Subgroup: AN Aneityum
(1,100 (2,500 (2,000 (3,000 (1,600
±) ±) ±) ±) ±)
(320)
6. North-Central New Hebrides Group (77 languages) East New Hebrides Subgroup: (29 languages) Hiw TO (50 Toga TO (150 BA Lehali (100 BA Lehalurup (60 Motlav BA (850 Mota BA (270 Vatrata BA (100 BA Mosina (400 Nume BA (120 BA (70 Koro Wetamut BA (70 Lakona BA (80 BA Merlav (850 Marino MA (90 Central Maewo MA (350 MA Baetora (500 Northeast Aoban AO (3,000 Nduindui AO (3,000 Raga PE (2,300 PE Apma (3,000 Sowa PE (20 Seke PE (200 PF, Sa (1,200 N. Ambrym AM (1,900 Lonwolwol AM (400 (400 Dakaka AM Port Vato AM (500 AM (1,200 SE Ambrym (2,200 Paama PA West Santo Subgroup: (24 languages) Valpei SA (200 Nokuku SA (160 SA (150 Piamatsina SA Vunapu (250 Tolomako SA (350 Tasmate SA (100 Wusi SA (170 Akei SA (650
±) ±) ±) ±) ±) ±) ±)
±) ±) ±) ±) ±) ±) ±) ±) ±) ±) ±) ±) ±) ±) ±) ±) ±) ±) ±) ±) ±) ±) ±) ±) ±) ±)
t) ±) ±) ±)
(icontinued)
D. T. Tryon
16 Table 1
(continued)
West Santo Subgroup: (cont.) SA Malmariv (100 ±) SA Navut (100 ±) Lametin SA (100 ±) SA Wailapa (100 ±) Fortsenal SA (100 ±) SA Roria (100 ±) Amblong SA (100 ±) Morouas SA (100 ±) SA Tangoa (250 ±) Araki SA (70 ±) SA Mafea (50 ±) SA Tutuba (100 ±) Aore SA (1) Malo SA (1,500 ±) Narango SA (160 ±) (50 ±) Tambotalo SA Malekula Coastal Subgroup: (16 languages) (200 ±) Malua Bay ML (100 ±) Vovo ML Mpotovoro (120 ±) ML Mae (300 +) ML Vao (900 ±) ML
Malekula Coastal Subgroup: (cont.) Atchin ML (950 ±) Uripiv-Wala-Rano ML (2,300 ±) Unua ML (300 ±) Rerep ML (200 ±) Aulua (200 ±) ML Burmbar ML (350 ±) Port Sandwich ML (700 ±) Maskelynes ML (650 ±) Axamb ML (300 ±) Malfaxal ML (400 ±) (250 ±.,) South-West Bay ML Epi Subgroup: (5 languages) Lewo EP (1,000+) Bierebo EP (270 ±) Baki EP (200 ±) EP Maii (100 ±) Bieria EP (70 ±) Central New Hebrides Subgroup (3 languages) (2,000 ±) Namakura SH (2,500 ±) North Efate El'' (2,200 ±) South Efate EL'
*Abbreviations of island names = SA (Santo), ML (Malekula), ER (Erromanga), TA (Tanna), AN (Aneityum), TO (Torres), BA (Banks), MA (Maewo), AO (Aoba), PE (Pentecost), AM (Ambrym), PA (Paama), EP (Epi), SH (Shepherds), EF (Efate).
shares a relatively high percentage of common vocabulary with Language B, perhaps in the order of 70%, and that between Languages B and C the same situation obtains. Between Languages A and C the percentages would be considerably reduced, as with the 'dialect chains'. Further, the principle m a y b e applied to reveal 'subgroup chaining', where, for example, on lexicostatistical grounds, Languages A, B, C, D, E, F may form a subgroup, while Languages D, E, F, G, H, I also form a subgroup, using the same criteria. In Figure 1, presented here, the chaining effect observed within the larger subgroup has been indicated by overlapping rectangles. The subgroup chains set up appear to answer to some sort of sociological reality and to some extent provide a solution to the problem of sharp cut-offs noted in previous partial classifications, as in Tryon (1972, 1973). As far as the external relationships of the New Hebridean languages are concerned, it should be pointed out that, previous to the current internal classification just presented, there has been no attempt to classify more than
The Language Situation
in the New
17
Hebrides
EAST NEW HEBRIDES THIw Toga Lehali NORTH & CENTRAL Lehalurup NEW HEBRIDES Motlav Mota Vatrata Mosina Nume Koro Wetamut MALEKULA COASTAL Lakona Merlav Malua Bay Marino Vovo Central Maewo Mpotovoro Baetora Mae IVao I N.E. Aobanl Nduindui Uripiv-Wala-Rano Raga Apma Sowa Seke Sa N. Ambrym Port Sandwich Lonwolwol Maskelynes Dakaka Axamb Port Vato Malfax al South-West Bay S.E. Ambrym Paama
WEST SANTO Valpei Nokuku Vanapu Piamatsina
CENTRAL NEW HEBRIDES
Lorediakarkar Shark Bay Butmas-Tur 1 Polonombauk NEW-HEBRIDEAN
MALEKULA INTERIOR |LABO| SMALL NAMBAS Letemboi Repanbitip Dixon Reef Nasan an
TANNA
MALEKULA CENTRAL
Kwamera Whitesands North Tanna Lenakel S.W. Tanna
Katbol Lingarak Vinmavis Litzlitz Larevat Maragus Big Nambas Figure 1. New Hebrides language
classification
18
D. T. Tryon
a few of the languages, either internally or in relation to the Austronesian Family as a whole. Dyen (1965), in his family-wide lexicostatistical classification, employed wordlists from six New Hebridean languages, namely: Aneityum, Efate, Nale, Paama, Mota and Tanna. Dyen did not attempt to subgroup these languages, although he did assign both Mota and Efate to the Heonesian Linkage (1965: 37) and the remainder to the Austronesian Linkage. In the classification of all of the languages just presented, Mota and Efate (North and South) are assigned to the same group, as are Paama and Nale (presumably Atchin). Aneityum and Tanna (language unspecified by Dyen) are here assigned to different groups. The classification of Nale and Paama with Efate and Mota is explained by the chaining phenomenon described above. Dyen's New Hebrides material was insufficient for him to be able to discern any sort of chaining. Grace (1955), following the Oceanic hypothesis, divided the Eastern Austronesian languages into 19 major groupings. He classified all of the languages of the New Hebrides, together with the Polynesian languages, Fijian and Rotuman, and tentatively the nuclear Micronesian languages as a single group, which he terms Group 4. As with Dyen (1965), Grace did not have access to extensive or systematic materials on which t o base his judgements, at least as far as the New Hebrides is concerned. However, his groupings accord well with those of the present writer in terms of internal subgrouping. Pawley (1972), in his comparative study of 31 Oceanic languages, which he suggested formed a separate subgroup of Oceanic languages called 'Eastern Oceanic', linked the northern and central New Hebrides languages with those of the southeast Solomons, a view he has recently abandoned (Pawley 1977:1). Internally, Pawley deals with 14 New Hebrides languages, which he divides into Proto-Northern New Hebrides-Banks and Proto-Central New Hebridean (Pawley 1972:98). His groupings were based on comparative morphological and phonological criteria, rather than quantitative criteria. The present writer has merged the North and Central New Hebrides groups, the merger being made possible by the availability of geographically continuous data, unavailable at the time of Pawley's paper. The external relationships of the New Hebrides languages, then, are not clearly known beyond the preliminary studies of Dyen, Grace and Pawley. In a recent paper Tryon (1978) has shown that, on lexicostatistical grounds at least, the six higher order subgroups distinguished in his internal New Hebrides classification constitute six first order Oceanic subgroups, with the languages of the southeast Solomons being added to the North and Central New Hebrides subgroup (see Figure 1). While progress has been made in the areas of phonology and lexicon in the study of New Hebrides languages, Grace's remark that 'there is no satisfactory way to give a picture of the structural characteristics of the Solomons and New Hebrides languages' remains largely true (Grace
The Language Situation in the New Hebrides
19
1971:349). A preliminary sketch of the main structural characteristics which came to light in recent years was given in Tryon (1973 [1976] :311-351). Although preliminary in nature, it revealed structural and morphological patterning which accorded well with the subgroupings arrived at by a consideration of the quantitative and qualitative evidence presented in the latest internal classification (Tryon 1976). The comparative morphological study of New Hebrides languages is only in its infancy, and it is expected that it will be several years before the present situation will be significantly altered. The six major internal subgroups distinguished so far appear likely to be confirmed as comparative grammatical material becomes available. As for external relationships, any comments based on morphology would be gratuitous at this point.
2.3. Bichelamar Apart from the numerous Austronesian languages spoken throughout the group, and the metropolitan languages spoken by the expatriates, Bichelamar or New Hebrides Pidgin English occupies a very important place on the national stage. A detailed discussion of Bichelamar is to be found elsewhere in this volume. Remarks made here will be accordingly brief. Bichelamar is spoken by almost all male adults among New Hebrideans and by a very high proportion of female adults. Most children of school age speak Bichelamar. The only areas in which it is not spoken or understood very widely are the heathen areas where traditional culture is practiced (South Malekula, Ambrym and Tanna). It is used as a vehicle of communication between New Hebrideans of different languages, and between New Hebrideans and Europeanexpatriate administrators, planters and traders. It has occasionally been observed in use as a means of communication between French and Englishspeaking monolingual planters, especially in rural areas. Bichelamar is the first language of a rather small number of children born of marriages between partners of different languages, especially in the main urban centers of Santo (Luganville) and Port Vila. Its role will be more fully discussed below.
3. ROLE OF THE LANGUAGES
In as linguistically complex an area as the New Hebrides, it is no surprise to find that the roles o f , and attitudes towards, t h e various languages are many and varied. The order in which they are discussed follows the first part of the paper.
20 3.1. Nonindigenous
D. T. Tryon languages
As we saw above, there are nine nonindigenous languages in use in the New Hebrides at the present time, excluding languages, mainly European, with only one or two speakers. The two principal languages spoken are French and English, among the nonindigenous languages. There are slightly more native speakers of French than of English presently living in the New Hebrides. Figures are given above in 2.1. Both French and English are the official languages, with equal status, in the group. However, Bichelamar or Pidgin, has more recently been admitted as an official language of the various deliberative bodies in the New Hebrides. This appears to correspond to a change in attitude towards this lingua franca in the last decade. Both the French and the British administrations would claim that approximately half of the Melanesian population was more closely tied to their administration, and language, than to the other. While such a claim is probably near to the truth in administrative terms, the sociolinguistic position of the New Hebrideans vis-à-vis metropolitan languages is less clear, since before the middle 1960s neither the British nor the French government was responsible for education in these islands, the role of educator being left to the various missions. At the pregovernment education stage, there were numerically quite significantly more English-oriented than French-oriented Christians in the New Hebrides, the only French-speaking missions being those run by the Roman Catholic Church, staffed by French-speaking priests and nuns. The Englishspeaking missions, on the other hand, were represented by the Melanesian Mission, the Presbyterian Church, the Church of Christ, Seventh Day Adventists, and the Assembly of God Church. Numerically, this would indicate roughly a three to one distribution of influence and education, in favor of English. Until the mid-1960s, too, there were a number of areas which subscribed to no church in particular, often preferring the traditional religion to that introduced by Europeans. Since education was officially taken over by the two metropolitan governments, the picture has changed, in that the French have built a large number of schools, while the British have largely been content to use existing mission school buildings. The net result, apart from the occasionally strange existence of both an English and a French school in the same small village, is that most New Hebrideans under the age of twenty to twenty-five have some knowledge of either English or French. The chief education officers of both residencies have assured the author, however, that they consider the passive grasp of the metropolitan languages to be adequate, while an adequate active mastery of either spoken French or English is the exception rather than the rule. This situation is not surprising when one considers that metropolitan languages
The Language Situation in the New Hebrides
21
have no place in the home, where either the local vernacular or Bichelamar are used for everyday purposes. Among younger people, then, roughly fifty percent could be considered 'French-speaking' and fifty percent 'Englishspeaking'. Among older people, the knowledge of a metropolitan language, be it either French or English, depends much on how closely the individual has been associated with missions or even large trading firms, the main educators until recent times. People closely associated with such organizations are often found to have a reasonable command of a metropolitan language; others have little or none, the proportions being roughly as implied by the discussion of the pregovernmental education scene. As time passes, and more and more people pass through the school systems, the proportion of New Hebrideans with a knowledge of a metropolitan language will obviously increase. Apart from English and French, there are several other nonindigenous languages spoken by small groups in the New Hebrides. Two of these, namely Chinese and Vietnamese, are confined mainly to the business world. The Chinese in the New Hebrides, nearly all Hakka-speaking, number around 300. Almost all are traders, running the now traditional presupermarket multioffering stores so common throughout the Pacific. The Vietnamese are those remaining from the days of indentured labor, and are mostly store-holders like their Chinese counterparts. Some also are market-gardeners. The Orientals in the New Hebrides, then, are the traders par excellence of the group. There are also five Austronesian languages present in the nonindigenous component of the New Hebrides population, namely: Wallisian, Tahitian, Gilbertese, Tongan and Fijian. All of these groups, with the exception of the Gilbertese, have been imported as skilled labor, in the fields of motor engineering, carpentry, construction and travel operations. The Wallisians tend to have been employed as skilled labor in the manganese mine at Forari on Efate, while the Gilbertese work as plantation labor on south Santo, northeast Malekula, and on the north side of Efate. Their labor has been concerned almost solely with copra production. What of the interaction of these language groups with the indigenous and nonindigenous populations? Table 2 gives a sketch of the languages spoken by New Hebrides residents. The New Hebrideans are perhaps more multilingual than any of the other populations residing in the New Hebrides, interacting with all of the other communities to some extent or other. They all speak their native Melanesian or Polynesian language (Austronesian), and nearly all are fluent in Bichelamar, with the reservations made above. Added to this, many have some grounding in either English or French, but rarely in both, especially people under the age of twenty-five. Some, too, speak a mission vernacular, such as Mota (in the Banks Islands) or a neighboring Austronesian language. While no detailed research has ever been carried out on the subject, it appears to the author that
D. T. Tryon
22 Table 2. Languages spoken by New Hebridean
residents
Population
1st Language
2nd Language
3rd Language
4th Language
New Hebridean Fijian Tongan Gilbertese Tahitian Wallisian Vietnamese Chinese French English
Austronesian Fijian Tongan Gilbertese Tahitian Wallisian Vietnamese Chinese French English
Bichelamar English English Eng/Bichelamar French French French Eng/Bichelamar Eng/Bichelamar French/Bichelamar
Eng/French Bichelamar Bichelamar
Austronesian?
Bichelamar Bichelamar Bichelamar French?
very few New Hebrideans know more than one Austronesian language, actively at least, although a number 'hear' neighboring languages. This is perhaps surprising, in view of the amount of multilingualism attested in Australia and New Guinea (see Laycock's contribution to this volume). The Fijians and Tongans, apart from speaking their own native tongues, all have a reasonable grasp of English, and the men a mastery of Bichelamar. This is largely a product of the school system in Fiji and Tonga, where the language of instruction is normally English. The Gilbertese, less fortunate than their neighbors, have a much poorer control of English than the Fijians and Tongans,* and apart from Gilbertese speak only Bichelamar. The Tahitians and Wallisians, aside from their Polynesian tongues, have had their schooling in French, and almost all have a fair command of that language as well as Bichelamar. The Vietnamese are in the same category as the French-educated Polynesians, having Vietnamese and French, together with Bichelamar, while the Chinese, apart from their native tongue, tend to know mainly English rather than French, along with the all-purpose Bichelamar. The French residents usually have a smattering of English, at least, the urban residents having very little Bichelamar. The French planters in rural areas, however, usually speak fluent Bichelamar, as do their British counterparts. The urban dwellers whose first language is English are perhaps the closest of all groups in the New Hebrides to being monolingual. In terms of interaction, the contact is polarized around the three main languages, English, French and Bichelamar. The New Hebrideans deal mainly with other New Hebrideans or with any of the other language groups with whom they can converse easily. This means, in fact, that they interact with all groups except perhaps the French speakers in the case of those educated
The Language Situation in the New Hebrides
23
primarily in English and the English speakers in the reverse situation. New Hebridean parents are aware of the limitations of having an education in just one of the metropolitan languages, and now it is common to find that half of the children belonging to a family attend a French school, while the remainder attend a corresponding British institution. The Tongans and Fijians tend to associate mainly with the New Hebrideans, and occasionally with the British (English, Australians, New Zealanders), but rarely with the French speakers, except in the case of the Tongans who can communicate with the Wallisians to some extent. The Wallisians and Tahitians naturally prefer to associate with a French milieu when not in their own community, and, to a lesser extent, with the New Hebrideans. In fact, one might say that the Polynesian expatriates living in the New Hebrides (we may include Fijians for convenience here), remain fairly much within their own language community where possible, to the extent of avoiding much contact with the Melanesians, whom they tend to regard with a certain condescension. The Oriental population tends to be very much a closed community in the New Hebrides, and interacts very little, except for purposes of trade, with the other communities present. The British and French expatriates, as one might expect, tend to remain separate, largely because of linguistic factors, their contact with other communities being largely in the course of business.
3.2. Indigenous languages Leaving aside Bichelamar, let us examine the roles of the languages indigenous to the New Hebrides, the 102 Melanesian and three Polynesian Outlier languages spoken in the group. Apart from their primary function of ensuring communication between members of the same speech community, the local vernaculars have been widely used, especially in the past, as languages of evangelism. Scripture translations have been made, many of them very extensive, in the languages given in Table 3. From Table 3, it will be seen that two main churches were involved in translation work, mainly in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first few years of the twentieth century, namely the Church of Melanesia (Anglican), which concentrated in the northeast of the New Hebrides and the Banks and Torres islands, and the London Mission Society (and later the Presbyterian Church of the New Hebrides), which worked mainly in the south of the group, as well as on Efate, south Malekula, Epi, Ambrym and the coastal regions of Santo. The only other mission which undertook translation
D. T.
24
Tryon
Table 3. Island
Language
Church
Date 1st Transi.
Torres Mota, Banks Gaua, Banks Maewo Maewo Maewo Aoba Pentecost
Toga Mota Lakona Marino Central Maewo Baetora N.E. Aoban Nduindui Raga
Pentecost Pentecost Ambrym Ambrym Ambrym Paama Shepherds Efate Efate Epi Epi Epi Santo Santo
Apma Sa N. Ambrym Lonwolwol Dakaka Paama Namakura N. Efate S. Efate Lewo Baki Bieria Nokuku Tolomako
Santo Santo Santo Malekula Malekula Malekula
Tangoa Malo Sakao Vao Atchin Uripiv Wala-Rano Rerep (Pangkumu) Aulua Maskelynes Axamb Malfaxal South West Bay Labo (Mewun) Sie K warn era Lenakel Whitesands
C.O.M.* C.O.M. C.O.M. C.O.M. C.O.M. C.O.M. C.O.M. C.O.C. C.O.M. R.C. C.O.M. C.O.M./C.O.C. R.C. P.C.N.H. P.C.N.H. P.C.N.H. P.C.N.H. P.C.N.H. P.C.N.H. P.C.N.H. P.C.N.H. P.C.N.H. P.C.N.H. R.C. P.C.N.H. P.C.N.H. P.C.N.H. P.C.N.H. R.C. S.D.A. P.C.N.H. R.C. P.C.N.H. P.C.N.H. P.C.N.H. P.C.N.H. P.C.N.H. P.C.N.H. P.C.N.H. P.C.N.H. P.C.N.H. P.C.N.H. P.C.N.H.
1894 1864 1897 1882 1970s 1970s 1876 1913 1882 1914 1972 1970s 1900 1886 1893 18707/1898 1882? 1873 1864 1897 1883 1897 1901 1900 1906 1890 1892 1905 1900 1932 1893 1900 1892 1894 1904 1932 1918 1905 1905 1852 1845 1900 1969
Malekula Malekula Malekula Malekula Malekula Malekula Malekula Erromanga Tanna Tanna Tanna
(continued)
The Language Situation in the New Hebrides
25
Table 3 ( c o n t i n u e d ) Island
Language
Church
Date 1st Transi.
Aneityum Aniwa Futuna
Aneityumese Aniwan Futunese
P.C.N.H. P.C.N.H. P.C.N.H.
1849 1871 1868
* Abbreviations: C.O.M. Church of Melanesia (Anglican) R.C. Roman Catholic C.O.C. Church of Christ P.C.N.H. Presbyterian Church of the New Hebrides S.D.A. Seventh Day Adventist
of the Scriptures at that time was the Roman Catholic mission on Santo and Malekula. Within the areas following the Presbyterian and Roman Catholic churches, the local vernaculars remained local in application. In the Melanesian Mission area, however, the situation was rather different. When the Melanesian Mission school for the training of Melanesian priests was established at Norfolk Island in the 1860s, the school language was Mota, the language of Mota in the Banks Islands. Mota subsequently became the lingua franca of the mission, not only in the New Hebrides, but also in the Solomons. In fact, there was a mission newspaper, O Sala Ususur [The Story R o a d ] , written in Mota and distributed throughout the Melanesian Mission area from 1896 until after World War II. However, missionaries from the central training school on Norfolk Island were given the care of particular islands for six months of the year, the other six months being spent with new recruits back at Norfolk. During these six months, they learned at least one language in their area and did translation work — hence the translations noted in Toga (1894), N.E. Aoban (1876) and Raga (1882). Mota ceased to be the language of the mission in the Solomons in 1931,but in spite of its unofficial status continued to coexist as a lingua franca with English until the advent of Bishop Hill in 1954. Bishop Rawcliffe, the present bishop of the New Hebrides, has informed the present writer that when he arrived from the Solomons in 1958 the situation was that Mota was used throughout the Banks and on Maewo for liturgical purposes, Raga was used throughout Pentecost and N.E. Aoban (Lombaha) throughout Aoba, including the Nduindui area. He comments that the extent to which Mota was understood in the Banks apart from on Mota varied. In the- Torres Islands and Merelava they did not really understand. On Mota Lava and Vanua Lava almost everyone understood and nearly all spoke Mota (and still do apart from the children). On Gaua there seemed to be less
26
D. T. Tryon
understanding, while on Maewo a large number of people still spoke Mota because they had learned it at school; but the number was becoming less as the days of Mota schools became more remote. The small books which had been produced in the Banks and Torres languages mentioned above had long been out of print by 1958 and were scarcely even remembered. Bishop Rawcliffe reports (personal communication March 1977): 'At that time, Bislama (Bichelamar) had not been thought of for Church use; it was a plantation language, not fit for worship!' When Bishop Chisholm took over from Bishop Hill in the Solomons (which controls the New Hebrides diocese) in 1967, he reversed Hill's all English language policy. From that time on, there has been considerable translation activity in the Melanesian Mission area, leaving aside Bichelamar for the m o m e n t . Liturgical texts are now available, although small, in nearly all of the languages within the mission area. The only other language in the New Hebrides with any widespread evangelical application was a more or less artificial literary language, an amalgam of all of the dialects of what are now considered North and South Efatese. This was devised by the Rev. Daniel Macdonald who was stationed at Havannah Harbour on Efate from 1872-1906 (O'Reilly 1957:135-136). This literary dialect saw the light of day in 1 9 0 6 , b u t was never really satisfactory and was replaced finally in 1971 with a Ngunese dialect (North Efate) Bible translation, Ngunese being the dialect adopted by the Presbyterian Church on Efate for liturgical purposes. The indigenous New Hebridean languages, then, were used as vehicles of evangelism from the foundation of most missions, since the metropolitan languages were not understood and Bichelamar was considered unworthy. However, translation work virtually came to a standstill in the early years of this century and remained that way until the late 1960s, when translation was revived and initiated by the Church of Melanesia, the Church of Christ, the Seventh Day Adventists and the Presbyterian Church. At present there is a strong drive to make available evangelical materials in as many vernaculars as possible, as well as in Bichelamar, as will be discussed below. The role of the New Hebrides vernaculars, in summary, has been very much to serve as vehicles of communication for small speech communities with the notable exception of Mota, and to a lesser extent Ngunese. Apart from Mota, the languages of education have always been English or French. Attitudes towards the local vernaculars have changed significantly in recent times. Hence the renewed interest in Biblical translation. However, European residents on these islands still harbor grave doubts about the adequacy of the vernaculars to handle anything that is not of a concrete nature. As more translations are made, this image is slowly disappearing. It might be added that most criticisms in this domain are based on a total ignorance and bias on the part of the critics.
The Language Situation in the New Hebrides
27
Apart from devotional literature, such as Scripture translations, hymnals, school primers and the like, the only secular material to be produced, discounting the Mota newspaper mentioned above, was a translation of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, in condensed form, in Aneityumese, produced by the wife of the resident missionary, the Rev. J. Geddie, in 1868. In other mission areas, translations which were not strictly Scriptural were limited to Bible-type stories also. The situation remains much the same at the present time, for nearly all translation of a secular nature, destined for New Hebrideans, is written in Bichelamar.
3.3. Bichelamar Bichelamar or New Hebrides Pidgin English has been discussed in detail elsewhere in this volume (see the contribution by Mtihlhausler et al.), so that the historical account of its development will not be repeated here. The role of Bichelamar has always been that of the principal lingua franca of the New Hebrides, constantly in use between New Hebrideans of different languages, and between New Hebrideans and expatriates. Until very recently it was regarded by all as a dreadful corruption of English, a vulgar tongue used on plantations and socially most unacceptable. Most expatriates still consider it a form of broken English and not the full-fledged Melanesian tongue that it is. Until very recently it was an unwritten language, for the reasons suggested above and not because of problems in devising a suitable orthography. However, whereas Bichelamar was not spoken currently in all villages, and certainly not by many women until very recent times, the very nature of the condominium favored the spread and development of this lingua franca, for there have been and continue to be two competing languages of instruction, French and English, as discussed above. This has meant, of course, that the sole possible means of communication shared by all is Bichelamar, for hopes of bilingualism in both metropolitan languages have been unfounded. In the late 1960s, there was a boom period in the New Hebrides, with many new employment opportunities for New Hebrideans, who soon began to pour into the urban areas, throwing together people from all over the group. At the same time, the information services at the two residencies began to publish newssheets with many items written in Bichelamar, and to broadcast service messages in that language. Suddenly, the government agencies discovered that there was a need for a lingua franca so that their policy for development and government could be explained. At about this time, as politics was emerging as a preoccupation, there was an awareness among some that communication on a national scale was of great importance, and for the first time New Hebrideans began writing newssheets and political
28
D. T. Tryon
manifestos in Bichelamar, the first Bichelamar published by nongovernment agencies, used mainly to air grievances against the administrations. At this time too, the New Hebridean Christian Council decided that Bichelamar was indeed a worthy language for worship, and, largely due to the efforts of W. G. Camden, the Four Gospels in Bichelamar, Gud Nyus Bilong Jisas Krais, appeared in 1971. This volume is now in use throughout the New Hebrides, especially in the many areas where vernacular translations were either unavailable or considered in need of serious revision. At present, the translation of the full New Testament is being undertaken in Bichelamar. Bichelamar, then, has made great strides, both in acceptability and currency during the past decade, although it will always be regarded as a second-class vehicle of communication by the great majority of expatriates, most of whom have a poor grasp of the language and find it difficult not to regard it as 'broken English'. It is one of the three official languages of the Representative Assembly, although it is not listed as one of the official languages of the New Hebrides. The fact that there is no standardized orthography for Bichelamar is not seen as a hampering factor, as at least urbanized New Hebrideans appear untroubled by the often bewildering array of spellings for a particular word. The problem is graver in rural areas, however, and eventually must be solved if full communication between New Hebrideans, after independence, is to be achieved. In the meantime, the orthography used in the Camden translation is gaining in currency, at least in areas where the language of instruction is English.
4. THE F U T U R E
While the linguistic future does not give rise to concern in most communities, in the New Hebrides there exists a major problem, for independence has been promised by both colonial powers for 1980. Normally this would not be a problem, but New Hebrideans have been giving considerable thought to the question of a national language after independence. All parties agree on the need for a metropolitan language, and that Bichelamar or Pidgin should be reserved for internal communications. The problem is that both French and English are taught, and there is a considerable commitment to each by the respective colonial powers. The matter has entered the arena of political debate, and is the cause of strong feeling in certain quarters. At first, the potential New Hebridean leaders cast around for a New Hebridean Austronesian language which might serve as the national language in much the same way as Fijian. However, they soon realized that their search was bound to be fruitless, as none of the 105 indigenous languages has more than a few thousand speakers, and no party was prepared to give ground
The Language Situation in the New Hebrides
29
linguistically. A t a later p e r i o d , o n e o f the t w o major political parties p r o p o s e d that English be the national language and the sole language o f i n s t r u c t i o n in s c h o o l s , French being taught as a s e c o n d foreign language at t h e high s c h o o l level. S u c h a proposal, naturally, b r o u g h t f o r t h a storm o f protest f r o m b o t h t h e F r e n c h administration and t h e F r e n c h - e d u c a t e d N e w Hebrideans w h o w o u l d be severely disadvantaged b y s u c h a s c h e m e . A questionnaire circulated in urban areas b y t h e French returned a majority w h o o p t e d f o r a c o n t i n u a t i o n o f t h e present two-language p o l i c y after i n d e p e n d e n c e , an answer w h i c h m u s t o f n e c e s s i t y be h e e d e d if there is t o be a d e m o c r a t i c f o r m o f g o v e r n m e n t . T h e p r o b l e m s inherent in such a two-language p o l i c y are m a n y , n o t the least o f w h i c h is the d i f f i c u l t y o f creating a feeling o f nationalism in this already splintered s o c i e t y . Perhaps this is w h e r e Bichelamar will play its m o s t i m p o r t a n t and vital role, f o r it is seen as t h e sole u n i f y i n g m e a n s o f c o m m u n i c a t i o n a m o n g these islands u n f o r t u n a t e e n o u g h t o inherit the w e i g h t y legacy o f an Anglo-French condominium.
REFERENCES Camden, W. G., editor (1971), GudNyus Bilong Jisas Krais. Bible Society in New Zealand. Capell, A. (1962), A Linguistic Survey of the South-Western Pacific (second revised edition). South Pacific Commission Technical Paper 136. Noumea, South Pacific Commission. Charpentier, J. M. (1974), 'Langue de Port Sandwich'. Thèse de Doctorat de Troisième Cycle, University of Bordeaux III. Codrington, R. H. (1885), The Melanesien Languages. Oxford, Clarendon Press. Codrington, R. H. and J. Palmer (1896), /I Dictionary of the Language of Mota, Sugarloaf Island, Banks Islands. London, Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Dyen, I. (1965), A Lexicostatistical Classification of the Austronesian Languages. IJAL Memoir 19, Indiana University Publications in Anthropology and Linguistics 19. Gabelentz, H. C. von der (1861-1873), 'Die melanesischen Sprachen nach ihrem grammatischen Bau und ihrer Verwandtschaft unter sich und mit den malaiisch-polynesischen Sprachen', Abhandlungen der Königlich Sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, Philologisch-historische Klasse 3 : 1 - 2 6 6 , 1 8 6 1 ; 7 : 1 - 1 8 6 , 1 8 7 3 . Geddie, Mrs. J. (1868), Intas va natga O Kristian (Pilgrim's Progress). Aneityum, Mission Press. Grace, G. W. (1955), 'Subgrouping of Malayo-Polynesian: a report of tentative findings', American Anthropologist 57:337-339. - (1971), 'Languages of the New Hebrides and Solomon Islands', in Linguistics in Oceania, ed. by T. A. Sebeok, 341-358. Current Trends in Linguistics 8. The Hague, Mouton. Guy, J. B. M. (1974), A Grammar of the Northern Dialect of Sakao. Pacific Linguistics B-33. Hewitt, H. J. (1966), 'Aneityum of the Southern New Hebrides: Anejom segmental phonology and word list - a preliminary report', Te Reo 9 : 1 - 4 3 . Inglis, J. (1882), A Dictionary of the Aneityumese Language. London, Williams and Norgate.
30
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Tryon
Ivens, W. G. (1937-1939), 'A grammar of the language of Lamalanga, North Raga, New Hebrides', Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London) 9:733-763. - (1940-1942a), 'A grammar of the language of Lobaha, Lepers' Island, New Hebrides, Melanesia', Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London) 10:345-363. - (1940-1942b), 'A grammar of the language of Lotora. Maewo, New Hebrides, Melanesia', Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London) 10:679-698. Kasarhérou, J. (1962), 'Les changements vocaliques de trois préfixes en Motlav', Te Reo 5:32-34. Kern, H. (1906), 'Taalvergelijkende verhandeling over het Aneityumsch. Met een aanhangsel over het klankstelsel van het Eromanga', Verhandelingen dcr Koninklijke Nederlandsche Akademie van Wetenschappen, afdeling Letterkunde 8:1-146. Lynch, J. D. (1974), 'Lenakel phonology'. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Hawaii. - (1977), Lenakel Dictionary. Pacific Linguistics C-55. - (1978a), A Grammar of Lenakel. Pacific Linguistics B-55. - (1978b), 'Pro to-South Hebridean'in Second International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics: Proceedings, ed. by S. A. Wurm and Lois Carrington, 717-779. Pacific Linguistics C-61. McArthur, N. and Yaxley, J. I'. (1968), Condominium of the New Hebrides. A Report on the First Census of the Population 1967. Sydney, Government Printer. Macdonald, D. (1889-1891), South Sea Languages. Melbourne, Melbourne Public Library Trustees. O'Reilly, P. (1957), Hébridais. Paris, Musée de l'Homme. Parker, G. J. (1968), 'Southeast Ambrym verb inflection and morphophonemics', Pacific Linguistics A - l 5 : 2 7 - 4 0 . - (1970), Southeast Ambrym Dictionary. Pacific Linguistics C-17. Paton, W. i . (1971), Ambrym (Lonwolwol) Grammar. Pacific Linguistics B-19. - (1973), Ambrym (Lonwolwol) Dictionary. Pacific Linguistics C-21. Pawley, A. (1972), 'On the internal relationships of Eastern Oceanic languages', in Studies in Oceanic Culture History, vol. 3, ed. by R. C. Green and M. Kelly, 1 - 1 4 2 . - Pacific Anthropological Records 13. Honolulu: Bishop Museum. P.I.M. (1963), Pacific Islands Monthly. 34/2, September. Sydney. Ray, S. H. (1926), A Comparative Study of the Melanesian Island Languages. London, Cambridge University Press. Schiitz, A. J. (1968), 'A pattern of morphophonemic alternation in Nguna, New Hebrides', Pacific Linguistics A-15:41-47. - (1969a), Nguna Texts. Oceanic Linguistics Special Publication 4. - (1969b), Nguna Grammar. Oceanic Linguistics Special Publication 5. Tryon, D.T. (1972), 'The languages of the New Hebrides: a checklist and general survey', Padfic Linguistics A-15:41-47. - ( 1973[ 1976] ), 'Linguistic subgroupingin the New Hebrides: a preliminary approach', Oceanic Linguistics 12:303-351. - (1976), New Hebrides Languages: An Internal Classification. Pacific Linguistics C-50. - (1978), 'The languages of the New Hebrides: internal and external relationships' in Second International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics: Proceedings, ed. by S. A. Wurm and Lois Carrington, 877-902. Pacific Linguistics C-61.
The Language Situation
in the New
Hebrides
31
Walsh, D. S. (1962), 'The phonemes of Raga', Te Reo 5:57-60. - (1966), 'The phonology and phrase structure of Raxa'. Unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Auckland.
D. T. TRYON
Remarks on the Language Situation in the Solomon Islands
1. INTRODUCTORY REMARKS
The languages of the Solomon Islands are among the least well known in Melanesia, in spite of the upsurge in linguistic research since the beginning of the 1960s. The Solomon Islands became independent on July 7, 1978, after having been a British protectorate for some time. Rather like the New Hebrides, the Solomons comprise a double chain of islands lying between 5° and 12° S. Lat. and 155° to 170° E. Long. There are six major islands (Choiseul, Santa Isabel, New Georgia, Guadalcanal, Malaita and San Cristobal) and numerous smaller ones. The total land area of the whole group is 11,200 square miles (Census 1970:viii). As far as population is concerned, the official 1975 estimate was 178, 940 (Pacific Islands Year Book 1977:311). Current estimates put the figure at around 200,000. When the first full census was taken in 1970, 94% of the population was shown to be Melanesian, the next largest group being the Polynesians who have settled chiefly on small islands and atolls such as Tikopia, Rennell and Bellona and Ontong Java. The breakdown of population given in the 1970 census is as follows (1975 estimates in parenthesis): Melanesian Polynesian Micronesian European Chinese Others
149,667 (166, 640) 6,399(7,120) 2,362(2,610) 1,280(1,280) 577 (580) 713(710)
In terms of contact with other peoples, especially Europeans, the Solomons were relatively untouched until the second half of the nineteenth century. Before this there had been isolated visits from early explorers such as Mendana (1568), Quiros (1606), Tasman (1643), Carteret (1767) and La Perouse (1788). In the first half of the nineteenth century the first lasting contacts
34
D. T. Tryon
with Europeans were established with the arrival of the whalers. Bennett (this volume) reports that by the 1820s American, British and colonial whalers called regularly at several points in the Solomons. In the mission field, the French Marists landed on San Cristobal in 1845, albeit with disastrous consequences, while the Melanesian Mission (Anglican) extended its work to the Solomons in the early 1850s. The major outside influence from that time until the end of the century was the activity of the labor traders, who began recruiting for the plantations in Queensland and Fiji in 1870, continuing until 1904. During this time, it is estimated that 19,000 islanders were taken to Queensland and some 10,000 to Fiji. Approximately two thirds returned home at the end of their 'contract'. Because of the problems associated with the labor trade, Britain declared a protectorate over the Solomons in 1893, although the northern islands of what are the present-day Solomons were not added until a few years later. In the twentieth century, apart from the upheaval occasioned by World War II, the Solomons have been relatively free of outside influence apart from that of the ruling British administration. In the 1950s a number of Gilbertese were brought into the group to ease land pressure on their home islands. Most of these live on Wagina Island, in the northwest, although there are concentrations of Gilbertese in urban and semiurban areas. Apart from these and the expatriate administrators, the only other ethnic group from outside were the Chinese storekeepers and traders.
2. THE LANGUAGES
As stated above, the languages of the Solomons are among the most imperfectly known in island Melanesia. A detailed survey is currently in progress, the results of which should be available in preliminary form at least within a short time (see Tryon and Hackman forthcoming). In the only survey that claims anything like adequate coverage of the group, Hackman (1971) distinguishes 87 speech communities, inclusive of the intrusive Gilbertese, introduced since World War II. These will probably reduce to something less than 80 distinct indigenous languages once the current survey is completed. The only nonindigenous languages spoken by more than a few speakers, apart from Gilbertese , are English and Chinese.
2.1. Indigenous languages The indigenous languages of the Solomons may, for present purposes, be taken to number 86, following Hackman (1971). These will be discussed
Remarks on the Language Situation in the Solomon Islands
35
under three headings, non-Austronesian or Papuan, Melanesian Austronesian and Polynesian Austronesian. 2.1.1. Non-Austronesian Although nearly all of the languages of the Solomons are Austronesian, there are several Papuan or non-Austronesian languages spread throughout the group. They are the following, with approximate numbers of speakers: Language
Location
Speakers
Bilua Baniata Savosavo Lavukaleve Kazukuru Santa Cruz Nanggu Reefs
Velia Lavella S. Rendova Savo Is. Russell Is. New Georgia Santa Cruz Santa Cruz Reef Is.
4,300 1,000 950 700 9
3,030 200 3,500
The numbers of speakers for the first four languages are based on Hackman (1971), while the last three, in the eastern Outer Islands, are based on the study carried out by Simons (1977b). The non-Austronesian languages of the Solomons were not recognized as such by early writers, including Codrington (1885) and Ray (1926), although those that were known at that time were described as difficult to fit into the Melanesian mold. Until quite recently, only scrappy information has been available on these languages. For example, Codrington gives a brief sketch of Savosavo, stating that it is 'remarkably different from the Melanesian languages generally' (1885:559). Ray (1928) and Capell (1962a, 1969) have provided word lists and some comparative materials. The first four languages listed, Bilua,Baniata,Savosavo and Lavukaleve have been studied by Wurm (1972b: 171), who sees a genetic relationship between them and the Yele languages of Rossel Island. In that publication he groups them, along with Wasi of New Britain, as a subgroup of his East Papuan Phylum. The fifth language listed, Kazukuru, has not been classified for it is very poorly known. It is the first of three dialects, Kazukuru, Guliguli and Doriri, formerly spoken in the northwestern part of New Georgia Islands. For this reason no number of speakers has been given. Although this language is no longer spoken, it is hoped that some information can still be collected from elderly people who still remember it. More recently, Todd has made a fairly detailed study of the four northern non-Austronesian languages, classified by her as one language family, which she terms the 'Solomon Language Family', noting (1975:840) that subgrouping
36
D. T. Tryon
is not feasible at the present time, although Bilua and Savosavo appear to be more closely related than the remainder. She tentatively includes Yele in the Solomon Language Family, pending further studies. In recent years, the languages of the eastern Outer Islands have come under close scrutiny, being the subject of papers by Davenport (1962), Wurm ( 1 9 6 9 , 1 9 7 1 , 1972a, 1972b, 1975, 1 9 7 6 , 1 9 7 8 ) , Lincoln (1975, 1978), Green (1976) and Simons (1977b). When one considers that research into the Austronesian languages of the Solomons has advanced very little this century, this attention to a small number of languages situated at the southeastern limit of the Solomons may appear disproportionate. Sociolinguistically, however, the reason is of great interest, and lies at the root of much of the debate about the languages of Melanesia, since some scholars maintain that Santa Cruz, Nanggu and Reefs are originally non-Austronesian or Papuan languages, while others maintain that they are indeed originally Austronesian. Wurm represents the former view, assigning these languages t o the Reef Islands-Santa Cruz Family (Wurm, 1976:637), while Lincoln (1975, 1978) espouses the contrary point of view. Santa Cruz is the only language of the three to have received detailed study: it could be termed a 'mixed' language, for it exhibits a lexicon which contains many Austronesian items as well as a number which are not recognizable as such, whereas the morphology of both nouns and verbs, while undoubtedly endowed with many Austronesian features, manifests a number of others which strongly suggest Papuan features, both formally and syntactically. This historical situation of languages in contact will be further explored later in this paper. 2.1.2. Austronesian The Austronesian languages of the Solomons fall into two divisions, Melanesian and Polynesian Outlier. The Melanesian languages will be discussed first. 2.1.2.1. Melanesian As stated above, the Austronesian languages of this group are among the most poorly known in the Pacific. 'Melanesian' is not a valid genetic grouping within the Austronesian Family. However, there is a genetic subgroup considered valid by many scholars — Grace (1955), Milke (1958), Pawley (1972) — called Oceanic, which embraces all of the Melanesian languages but also includes all of the Polynesian languages as a relatively recent offshoot. The Melanesian languages of the Solomons, listed from northwest to southeast are the following: Language
Location
Speakers
Mono-Alu Tavula
Shortland Is. Choiseul
1,700 1,000
Remarks on the Language Situation in the Solomon Islands Language
Location
Rino Varese Mbambatana Katazi Avasö Sengga Kirunggela Ghanongga Lungga Nduke Simbo Roviana Kusaghe Hoava Marovo Ughele Mbareke Vangunu Kia (Zabana) Kokota Korighole (Laghu) Jajao Blablanga Maringe Hograno Gao Mbughotu Nggela Lau To'ambaita Mbaelelea Mbaengguu Ndai Kataleka Kwaia'ae Langalanga Kwaio Dorio 'Are'are Sa'a Oroha Ulawa Nggae (Visale) Ndi (Vaturanga) Nggeri (Savulei) Ghari Tandai-Nggaria Nginia (Honiata)
Choiseul Choiseul Choiseul Choiseul Choiseul Choiseul Choiseul Ranongga Is. Ranongga Is. Kolombangara Is. Simbo Is. New Georgia New Georgia New Georgia New Georgia New Georgia New Georgia New Georgia Santa Isabel Santa Isabel Santa Isabel Santa Isabel Santa Isabel Santa Isabel Santa Isabel Santa Isabel Santa Isabel Florida Is. Malaita Malaita Malaita Malaita Ndai Is. Malaita Malaita Malaita Malaita Malaita Malaita Malaita Malaita Ulawa Guadalcanal Guadalcanal Guadalcanal Guadalcanal Guadalcanal Guadalcanal
Speakers 18 1,900 1,900 400 950 1,500 140 1,320 700 1,500 950 4,100 950 600 2,880 650 590 290 950 190 3 250 170 2,300 1,800 550 1,900 5,300 5,500 4,500 4,000 2,300 ? 2,600 12,400 2,000 7,000 900 8,800 3,900 9
2,000 650 1,000 1,000 1,500 650 50
D. T. Tryon
38
Language
Location
Malango (Teha) Lengo (Ruavatu) Paripao Ghua Mbirao Moli Poleo Malagheti Koo (Inakona) Tolo Talise Longgu Marau Arosi Faghani Bauro-Ravo Haununu Uki Ni Masi Kahua Tawarafa Amba Asumboa Tanambile Vano Tanema Teanu
Guadalcanal Guadalcanal Guadalcanal Guadalcanal Guadalcanal Guadalcanal Guadalcanal Guadalcanal Guadalcanal Guadalcanal Guadalcanal Guadalcanal Guadalcanal San Cristobal San Cristobal San Cristobal San Cristobal San Cristobal San Cristobal San Cristobal Utupua Utupua Utupua Vanikolo Vanikolo Vanikolo
Speakers 1,800 4,400 600 150 3,200 1,300 1,100 650 550 350 550 750 700 2,800 9
2,600 830 9
1,700 2,200 150 20 50 50? 50? 50?
Population figures for all languages e x c e p t those o f U t u p u a and V a n i k o l o are taken from Hackman ( 1 9 7 1 ) ; for U t u p u a and V a n i k o l o , Green ( 1 9 7 6 ) , based o n Cashmore ( 1 9 7 2 ) , has served as the source o f i n f o r m a t i o n . As has already been p o i n t e d o u t , even at this late stage in the t w e n t i e t h century, t h e languages o f t h e S o l o m o n s are very imperfectly k n o w n . A l t h o u g h specimens o f vocabulary were collected b y early explorers and voyagers, such as Mendana and Quiros in the late s i x t e e n t h and early seventeenth centuries, the languages o f these islands remained virtually u n k n o w n until the s e c o n d half o f the n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y . During that period, writers such as V o n der G a b e l e n t z ( 1 8 6 1 - 1 8 7 3 ) a n d C o d r i n g t o n ( 1 8 8 5 ) published substantial materials in S o l o m o n s languages. Grace sums up the position well w h e n he says:
The nineteenth century literature on Melanesian languages concerned primarily the New Hebrides and southeastern Solomons, although the Loyalties and New Caledonia were somewhat involved, especially at the beginning, and Fijian was always a point of reference. The western Solomons and the Santa Cruz islands as well as the entire New Guinea area was almost totally excluded. (1971:353)
Remarks on the Language Situation in the Solomon Islands
39
Apart from the work of Ray (1926), which contains a number of grammatical sketches, based on Scriptural analysis, little has been added to the work of the nineteenth century pioneers. Those whose studies were based on work with informants, rather than on translations, include Ivens(1911 — Sa'a, 1913-1914 - Ulawa), Waterhouse (1928 - Roviana), Deck ( 1 9 3 3 - 1 9 3 4 Kwara'ae), Fox (1950, 1955 — Nggela), and more recently Whaley (1962 — Mbambatana), Fox ( 1 9 7 0 ( 1 9 7 8 ] - Arosi), Geerts (1970 - 'Are'are), Capell (1971 - Arosi), Fox (1974 - Lau) and Keesing (1975 - Kwaio). The most extensive general survey, current until about 1960, is Capell (1962a). In terms of language classification, because of the state of knowledge, or rather the lack thereof, we are not much further ahead than we were at the turn of the century. Grace (1955) divided all Oceanic languages into nineteen major groupings; within this framework, four of the nineteen groupings account for the Austronesian languages of the Solomons as follows: Group Group Group Group
3: 5: 6: 7:
Santa Cruz Southeast Solomons New Georgia Choiseul
Capell, while not offering a classification of the languages, suggests that the languages of the western Solomons (specifically Choiseul, New Georgia and neighboring islands, and the northern end of Isabel) differ very considerably from the general Melanesian island type and may preserve elements of an earlier non-Melanesian population (1962a: 166). Contact among languages appears to have been very important in the Solomons in particular, a point to which further reference will be made below, 2.1.2.3. Other partial classifications include those of Dyen (1965), based on lexicostatistical evidence, and Pawley (1972). Because of the fragmentary nature of the materials available to all of these scholars, the classifications themselves have been unsatisfactory. Hackman (1975) covers all of the known languages, but states (personal communication) that his attempted classification is impressionistic, rather than based on a close examination of the data. 2.1.2.2. Polynesian languages There are five Polynesian Outlier languages spoken in the Solomons area. They are the following: Language
Location
Speakers
Luangiua Sikaiana Pilheni Tikopian Rennellese
Ontong Java (Lord Howe) Sikaiana Is. Reef Is. Tikopia, Anuta Rennell, Bellona
1,100 220 800 1,800 1,800
40
D. T. Tryon
The Polynesian languages of the Solomons have received more attention than their Melanesian counterparts in recent years, as shown by the studies of Sharpies (1968) and Salmond (1974). Green (1976:51) considers that Luangiua, Sikaiana and Pilheni form a subgroup apart from the other two Polynesian languages, the ultimate source for the subgroup being the Ellice Islands. Tikopian and Rennellese are considered to belong to the SamoicOutlier subgroup of the nuclear Polynesian languages. 2.1.2.3. Languages in contact? Since the earliest days of research into the languages of Melanesia, their position in relation to the Austronesian languages of Indonesia and Polynesia has been considered somehow special. This results, in part, from an early awareness that the languages of Indonesia and Polynesia have much in common, giving rise to the term 'Malayo-Polynesian', while the languages of Melanesia, though related, did not sit easily between the two groups. This problem in classification gave rise to several schools of thought. The first of these believes that there is a distinct Melanesian race, represented today by speakers of both Austronesian and Papuan (non-Austronesian) languages. They consider that none of the Melanesians originally spoke an Austronesian language, and that the present-day Melanesian languages are in fact pidginized languages, the result of contact between colonies of Indonesians (Austronesian) and Melanesians (Papuan). Each Melanesian language, then,may be said to be a mixture of Papuan and Austronesian elements, the proportion of Austronesian to Papuan varying from language to language. This theory serves to explain why the lexicon and indeed morphology of certain Melanesian languages, including the languages of the Solomons, show close affinities with other Austronesian languages from other areas, while those of other languages show very little affinity at all. The 'pidginization' theory has been put forward mainly by Ray (1926) and Capell (1943, 1962a, 1962b) and taken up more recently by Wurm (1975, 1976, 1978) in a modified and more elaborate form, avoiding the term 'pidginization', with special reference to the languages of the Santa Cruz area. Whether one subscribes to the 'pidginization' theory or not, few would deny that some Melanesian languages are quite 'idiosyncratic', as Grace puts it. Many more cognates with other Austronesian languages can be found in some Melanesian languages than in others. Thus Zabana, on Santa Isabel, shows fewer cognates with other Austronesian languages than a more 'typical' language such as Fijian or Nguna. On the other hand, 'typical' languages, such as Fijian share higher percentages of cognates with remote Austronesian languages in the Indonesian area than they do with 'idiosyncratic' Melanesian languages. The idiosyncratic nature of the languages of Melanesia has given rise to several different and conflicting theories as to their development and spread. All agree, however, that the history of the languages of
Remarks on the Language Situation in the Solomon Islands
41
Melanesia, be they Austronesian or Papuan, involves frequent contacts between speakers of different languages at different times. It is only the extent and the results of the contacts that are under constant debate at the present time.
2.2. Solomon Islands Pidgin The pidgin spoken in the Solomons is rather different from that spoken in the New Hebrides and also from the Tok Pisin of the Papua New Guinea area. This may be summed up impressionistically by suggesting that much of the Solomons Pidgin lexicon is nearer to present-day English than that of either of the other two Pacific pidgins. Witness, for example, the use of diiim [to do, make] as opposed to the more widespread mekem,mekim encountered in the pidgins of b o t h the New Hebrides and Papua New Guinea. Since Solomons Pidgin is already being treated in detail elsewhere in this volume, it will be mentioned only briefly here, in the context of the languages of the Solomons as a whole. Pidgin is spoken by most male and many female Solomon Islanders. It is the lingua franca of these islands par excellence, since vernacular lingue franche are limited in geographical extent, being restricted, originally for evangelical reasons, to certain islands. The question of mission vernaculars will be taken up below. The problem of the status of Pidgin, both in the Solomons and in the New Hebrides is a vexed one. In the Solomons, Pidgin for a long time enjoyed little status in the eyes of administrators. Now, however, Solomon Islanders seem to be divided on the issue, for in the absence of the old expatriate administrators there is, under self-government, an educated elite, many of whom share an aversion to Pidgin in much the same way as the administrators whom they replaced. Others believe that Pidgin carries with it the stigma of the old masterservant relationship of the colonial era. It must be stressed, however, that opposition to the use of Pidgin as an official language comes largely from the urban areas, while in the remainder of the country it is used and accepted by all as the lingua franca of the Solomons. There are two other problems associated with Solomons Pidgin, apart from its status, being discussed currently. First, there is the problem that very little is ever published in Pidgin and no standardized orthography exists. This may to some extent be answered by the recent publication of the Gospel of Mark (1976) in Solomon Islands Pidgin. If one can judge from the New Hebrides experience, however, it is not at all certain that this publication will be understood and read throughout the group or that it will represent a real force in the struggle to achieve an orthographical standardization. The other problem, also paralleled in the New Hebrides situation, is that the Pidgin which is broadcast differs quite considerably from that used in the villages, in
D. T. Tryon
42
that the broadcasters are usually fluent English speakers and tend to be heavily influenced by this when they speak Pidgin, resulting in a 'sophisticated' Pidgin which the bulk of the population finds difficult to follow. Language engineering, too, has a long way to go in the Solomons context, for English technical terms, often associated with finance and self-government, tend to be introduced especially by educated Solomon Islanders, without explanation in Pidgin. This trend, noted in other developing countries in the South Pacific area, contributes largely to an adverse rural reaction to urban Pidgin, and indeed has even led rural communities to accuse those in urban areas, mainly Honiara, of an inadequate knowledge of that language. The formation of a Pidgin Committee within the Department of Education which is working with the Solomon Islands Christian Association (S.I.K.A.) towards resolving the problems outlined above will do much to boost Pidgin and help it achieve its full potential as the de facto national language of the Solomons.
2.3. Nonindigenous
Languages
The nonindigenous languages spoken in the Solomons number only three, English, Gilbertese and Chinese, ignoring for present purposes languages spoken by only a handful of expatriates. English is the official language of the Solomon Islands, and is spoken, with varying degrees of fluency, throughout the group. Since education has become a government concern, the teaching of English has become universal,leading to a situation where most young people have some knowledge of the language, and many have an active mastery of it. Among older people, much depends on whether they come from an area where the local mission taught English or not. Thus in the western Solomons the observer notes that many people speak English with ease and mastery, while in other areas, where Pidgin has been used exclusively for evangelical purposes, one notes that English is spoken with much less confidence than in the west. The number of expatriate English speakers is very small (approximately 1,300) compared with the total population, and most of these are centred around the capital, Honiara. Thus English is being taught, to some extent, in a vacuum. The future competence of Solomon Islanders in English, then, is seen as proportional to their distance from the main English-speaking center, the capital. In 1955 the British government arranged for a colony of Gilbertese to be resettled from those islands because of land pressure. This resettlement was centered on Ghizo, a small island in the Western District; a subsequent move also saw the establishment of a number of Gilbertese in the Shortlands, to the northwest. Later, in 1963-1964, a further resettlement of Gilbertese was made, this time from the Phoenix Islands, after a unsuccessful attempt to
Remarks on the Language Situation in the Solomon Islands
43
resettle them there. This later group of Gilbertese were settled on Wagina Island, south ofChoiseul. In recent years a number of Gilbertese have migrated to other urban and semiurban areas. At present the number of Gilbertese speakers in the Solomons is approximately 3,000. The only other expatriate group of significant numbers is the Chinese comm u n i t y , centered in Honiara and at regional headquarters, mainly as traders. The Chinese number around 6 0 0 , and have their own Chinese-language school in Honiara.
3. THE ROLE OF THE LANGUAGES
The role of the languages spoken in the Solomons is inextricably tied up with its history of evangelism and education, and will be discussed in this context so that an understanding of the present-day situation may be reached. Until after World War II, education was the exclusive province of the various missions, five of which have been established in the Solomon Islands, namely the Melanesian Mission (Anglican), the Methodists, the South Seas Evangelical Mission, the Seventh Day Adventists and the Roman Catholic Mission. Recently the Baha'i religion has also entered the Solomons. The first voyage to the Solomons made by Bishop Selwyn of the Melanesian Mission was in 1849. Later, the mission was divided into four districts, the Northern New Hebrides, the Banks Islands, Santa Cruz, and the Solomons. The language of instruction used by the mission was English until the early 1860s, when the central school was moved from Auckland to Norfolk Island under Bishop Patteson. Patteson decided that the mission lingua franca and language of instruction should be a Melanesian one, and Mota, the language of the island of the same name in the Banks Islands, was chosen. At the time of the move from Auckland, there were between 180 and 200 students attending the mission school, of whom roughly one third were Solomon Islanders. The use of Mota as the mission lingua franca was not without its problems, however, and in spite of the fact that there was even a mission newspaper, O Sala Ususur, written in Mota, the European mission staff challenged its suitability. After the turn of the century, Hilliard reports that 'everywhere the old prestige of its (the Mission's) Mota-speaking teachers was undermined by the influx of former labourers who spoke pidgin-English' (Hilliard 1966: 134). This fact refers to the return of the many thousands of laborers from the canefields of Queensland and Fiji. In 1911 at the diocesan meeting, there was a move to replace Mota with English as the language of the church and school. This motion was, however, defeated, although the use of English on an experimental basis at the Bungana
D. T. Tryon
44
school was approved. Pressure against the use of Mota as the mission lingua franca continued to m o u n t , with Bishop Wood opposing it as a 'dead language'. In fact in 1916 it was resolved that English be adopted as the medium of instruction at the local central schools and at Norfolk Island. The change was unsuccessful, however, because the Melanesian pastors did not know English. So it was that in 1918 Mota was reinstated as the mission language. The struggle over Mota continued for another decade, and finally in 1931 Bishop Baddeley found that Mota did not fit the Solomon Islanders 'for a fuller citizenship in a new world which is fast closing in on t h e m ' and persuaded the staff conference to abandon the use of Mota in favor of English as the medium of instruction in schools and missions. Since 1931 English has remained the official language of the Melanesian Mission, now called the Church of Melanesia. While Mota was the mission lingua franca for many years, the Melanesian Mission saw it was important to provide all its converts with at least the Prayer Book and the Gospels in their own tongue. Thus the following translations appeared in the period prior to 1931: Gospels and Acts of the Apostles — Nggela New Testament — Mbughotu (Santa Isabel) New Testament — Sa'a and Ulawa New Testament — Lau Complete Mota Bible
1883 1914 1911 1929 1912
The four Gospels were also available in Arosi (San Cristobal) and Vaturanga (Guadalcanal) by this date;by 1935 the translation work had been expanded to include versions of the Book of Common Prayer in Arosi, Mbughotu, Kwara'ae, Lau, Nggela, Sa'a and Ulawa, and Vaturanga. The Melanesian Mission, then, concentrated its efforts on Nggela (Florida) and Santa Isabel, with missions being established also on Malaita, Guadalcanal and San Cristobal. In the post-1931 period, one notes the formation of a number of district boarding schools conducted by the Melanesian Mission in English, Pidgin being despised as an unworthy language at that stage. By 1940 there were fourteen such schools, in which the sole medium of instruction was English; at the village level, however, it should be observed that the switch from Mota to English posed serious problems, for while the staff at the boarding schools was less hampered, the teachers in the villages had little or no English, having been trained in Mota. The Methodist Mission of Australasia began operations in the Solomons in 1902 with the establishment of a mission station at Roviana, New Georgia, in the northwest of the group. By 1904 they were holding English classes five mornings a week for eighty boys and girls. In 1912 they established a training
Remarks on the Language Situation in the Solomon Islands
45
institution at Kokenggolo, and by 1915 there were mission-trained teachers in the western Solomons. Roviana was used along with English, and also became the mission lingua franca. However, despite the position of Roviana as the mission's teaching language, printed translations were limited to four Gospels, one h y m n b o o k and a catechism, which appeared in 1932 (Matthew, Mark and John), 1940 (Luke) and 1953 (New Testament). This is rather surprising considering the mission emphasis on literacy and the necessity for vernacular literature. It should be noted, however, that there was also a good deal of time devoted to English in the central training institution. Before ordination, postulants had to pass a stiff English examination. The Methodists, then, maintained a consistent language policy almost from the foundation of the mission. The South Sea Evangelical Mission has a rather different history from the other four, since it has its origins in the Queensland canefields in 1882. It was known at that time as the Q.K.M., or Queensland Kanaka Mission, and its m o t t o was 'Salvation before education or civilization'. More than 19,000 Solomon Islanders went to Queensland during the recruiting period, and the mission was begun in the canefields themselves. With the end of recruiting, most of the Solomon Islanders returned home, leading to the formation of a Solomon Islands branch of the Q.K.M. in 1904. This was renamed the South Seas Evangelical Mission (S.S.E.M.) in 1907 and began work on Malaita with a ready-made lingua franca, Pidgin English, the first generation of S.S.E.M. teachers being former Queensland converts. Hilliard reports that by 1920 the mission training center at One Pusu 'took only those young men who had plantation experience, knew pidgin-English and displayed an aptitude for learning and leadership' (Hilliard 1966:386). The majority of S.S.E.M. missionaries relied exclusively on Pidgin as a medium of communication with the islanders, and showed a distinct disinclination to learn native languages, in spite of the fact that in the early years of the mission staff were stationed on appointment either at Malu'u or Taravania, where they could acquire To'ambaita as a basis for further linguistic studies. Constant transfers did little to assist language learning and in fact fostered a basic attachment to Pidgin. Like several of the other missions, the S.S.E.M. was not bothered educationally by the constant use of Pidgin, for they regarded education essentially as an evangelistic activity, aimed at producing fervent believers and dedicated teachers. Some S.S.E.M. staff members, however, did make serious efforts in learning and using local vernaculars. Notable among these was the Rev. Norman Deck who worked on Malaitan languages, especially Kwara'ae and To'ambaita. By 1923 a To'ambaita New Testament had been produced, and by 1924 the S.S.E.M. Question Book had been translated into eight languages. As with other missions, however, translation was often hasty.
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D. T. Tryon
The Seventh Day Adventist Mission was often in direct competition with the Methodists in the northwest of the Solomons, for in 1914 the Rev. G. Jones began work in the Marovo Lagoon area on New Georgia, an area adjoining the Methodist territory. Jones began by teaching English to schoolboys, and Hilliard (1966:436) passes the following harsh judgement on his evangelical strategy: 'It is beyond dispute that the Adventists used the widespread desire to learn English as a lever to gain entrance into a village'. English was in demand throughout the Solomons, a point to which further reference will be made below. When the Rev. Wicks arrived at the S.D.A. Mission in 1920 he was appalled by the makeshift nature of the mission's educational work, in particular the total lack of translations into the vernacular and the absence of a central school. He selected Marovo, very closely related to Roviana, as the mission lingua franca and undertook translation work himself, which, however, was not noted for its high standard. The translation work culminated in the appearance in 1951 of the Marovo Bible. While Marovo was the normal medium of instruction in the mission schools, English was taught in S.D.A. establishments. The Roman Catholic Mission attempted to begin its evangelical work in the Solomons in 1845, but, with the murder of Bishop Epalle in that same year and the logistic difficulties encountered by the other Catholic missionaries. Epalle's successor, Bishop Collomb, decided in 1847 to withdraw the mission from the Solomons. The Catholic mission returned to the group in 1898, and by that time, Laracy (1969:60) reports that 'among the islanders, many of whom were already Christian, there was a considerable knowledge of Pidgin English, Fijian and Samoan'. The mission, headed by Bishop Vidal, was centered on Guadalcanal from the time it was reestablished in 1898. The language which served more or less as the mission lingua franca was Ghari, although translations were made into a number of other indigenous languages. In 1911 a mission newspaper was started, called Na Turupatu in the Ghari language. This continued until 1958. According to O'Reilly and Laracy (1972), by 1939 700 copies of each issue were being printed. The Roman Catholic Mission, in spite of its successful use of Ghari (Tangarare) as a lingua franca, were embarrassed by a constant demand for English. They found themselves in a difficult position because very few of them were English-speaking, being mainly French. In fact, in a review for 1949 the missionaries bemoaned the fact that at that time the best that could be done in Catholic schools was to teach the children to read and write in their native dialects. Until 1957 the various missions were the sole educators in the Solomon Islands. Hilliard gives a succinct appraisal of their role and contribution:
Remarks on the Language Situation in the Solomon Islands
47
Although village and residential schools gave the islanders a limited acquaintance with the ways of the European, his values and techniques, they were essentially denominational institutions, aimed at the consolidation and extension of the Christian community. English was the language of commerce and civilization; the vernacular was the language of religious instruction. ( 1 9 6 6 : 5 4 5 )
The mission schools, apart from the S.S.E.M. perhaps, could all claim some considerable success in their teaching in the vernacular, although most reading materials were evangelistic in character, in keeping with their basic aims. In fact, since the arrival of European missions, there have been translations made in thirty dialects. As suggested above, the quality of the translations sometimes left a little to be desired, the result of haste in most cases. However, in defense of the missions it must be pointed out that much valuable work was carried out in the various mission lingue franche: Roviana, Marovo, Mota, Ghari and to a lesser extent Nggela and Mbughotu, not to mention Solomon Islands Pidgin. It is regrettable, though, that so little secular literature has appeared after so long. All that exists, apart from the Roman Catholic newspaper Na Turupatu referred to above, are abridged translations of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress in Mbambatana (Choiseul) and Nggela (Florida), if this could be termed a secular work, and a bilingual Roviana and English booklet entitled The Second World War in the Solomons. Attitudes to the Solomons vernaculars and their roles are largely predictable. The missions saw them as important vehicles for communicating their evangelical message. The fact that they saw this as synonymous with education is evident from the remarks of all commentators. The Solomon Islanders themselves, while having mixed feelings about Pidgin in some quarters, are almost universally proud of their local language and culture, but aware that it did not and does not hold the promise of material advancement that a knowledge of English is supposed to bring. As far as English is concerned, it has always enjoyed tremendous prestige in the eyes of the islanders, mainly as a means to the wealth and power that Europeans were supposed to possess. Most of those who have achieved fluency in English have been disillusioned fairly rapidly for they have realized that it is not the great provider in many cases. On the whole, however, English is seen as the language of the outside world and of education. It is noticeable even today that Solomon Islanders who come from the northwest, the Methodist and S.D.A. areas where English received serious attention in the classroom, speak English with much more confidence and poise than those from areas where only the local vernacular or lingua franca was emphasized. Since 1957 the government of the Solomon Islands has taken an active interest in education, although several of the missions have been reluctant to come under government control, naturally enough after more than fifty years
48
D. T. Tryon
and in some cases almost a century of being the sole educational agency in a given area. It was only in 1974 that three major churches relinquished direct responsibility for primary education, thus ensuring government control. The government sees the teaching of English as of cardinal importance, as essential for career development, although since the 1974 White Paper, which stressed that education in the villages should prepare children for life in an essentially agricultural and rural community, there has been some shift in emphasis.
4. LANGUAGE AND THE FUTURE
The Solomon Islands are committed to English as the official national language now since Independence in mid-1978. The status of Solomons Pidgin will probably remain much as it is at present, namely the unofficial national language spoken by all and considered a Melanesian creation. The emotional attachment to Pidgin on the part of Solomon Islanders is strong, much as it is in other Pacific territories where pidgins are spoken. Although it appears that progress is being made in the problem of standardizing the orthography of Solomons Pidgin, it is felt that, as long as the policy makers continue to come from 'elitist' backgrounds, the status of Pidgin will remain much the same as at the present time. Since the 1974 White Paper on education there has been some thought given to the possibility of instituting bilingual/bicultural education programs. Much will depend, however, on the financial position of the post-Independence Solomons. There has been some discussion, t o o , among Solomon Islanders of the possibility of making one of the Solomons languages, such as Roviana or 'Are'are the national language. Multilingualism is not at all common among Solomon Islanders, and local and insular rivalries ride high, witness the decentralized administrations already in operation under self-government. All or any of these factors would be sufficient to preclude the possibility of the adoption of a Solomons language as the national language. Thus the future of English is assured on educational and political grounds, while that of Pidgin is assured by the multilingual nature of these islands. The local vernaculars will in all likelihood remain strong, given the pride in local culture and the decentralized administrative structure, except in cases where only a few elderly speakers of particular languages remain, as in some parts of Choiseul and Santa Isabel. Linguistically speaking, then, Independence will not be accompanied by any significant change in attitudes to and use of language.
Remarks on the Language Situation in the Solomon Islands
49
REFERENCES Capell, A. (1943), The Linguistic Position of South-Eastern Papua. Sydney, Australasian Medical Publishing Co. - (1962a), A Linguistic Survey of the South-Western Pacific (second revised edition). South Pacific Commission Technical Paper 136. Noumea, South Pacific Commission. - (1962b), 'Oceanic linguistics today', Current Anthropology 3:371-428. - (1969), 'Non-Austronesian languages of the British Solomons', Pacific Linguistics A-21.1-16. - (1971), Arosi Grammar. Pacific Linguistics B-20. Cashmore, C. (1972), Vocabularies of the Santa Cruz Islands, British Solomon Islands Protectorate. Working Papers in Anthropology, Archaeology, Linguistics and Maori Studies 17. University of Auckland. Census (1970), Report on the Census of the Population of the British Solomon Islands Protectorate. Southampton. Codrington, R. H. (1885), The Melanesian Languages. Oxford, Clarendon Press. Davenport, W. (1962), 'Comments on A. Capell, 'Oceanic linguistics today', Current Anthropology 3:400-402. Deck, N. C. (1933-1934), 'A grammar of the language spoken by the Kwara'ae people of Mala, British Solomon Islands', Journal of the Polynesian Society 4 2 : 3 3 - 4 8 , 1 3 3 - 1 4 4 , 2 4 1 - 2 5 6 ; 4 3 : 1 - 1 6 , 85-100, 163-170, 246-257. Dyen, I. (1965), A Lexicostatistical Classification of the Austronesian Languages. Indiana University Publication in Anthropology and Linguistics 19. IJAL Memoir 19. Fox, C. E. (1950), 'Some notes on Nggela grammar', Journal of the Polynesian Society 59:135-169. - (1955), A Dictionary of the Nggela Language (Florida, British Solomon Islands). Auckland, Unity Press. - (1970), Arosi-Hnglish Dictionary. Pacific Linguistics C - l l . (Revised edition with English index 1978. Pacific Linguistics C-57.) - (1974), Lau Dictionary. Pacific Linguistics C-25. Gabelentz, H. C. von der (1861-1873), 'Die melanesischen Sprachen nach ihrem grammatischen Bau und ihrer Verwandtschaft unter sich und mit den malaiisch-polynesischen Sprachen', Abhandlungen der Königlich Sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, Philologisch-historische Klasse 3:1-266, 1861; 7:1-186, 1873. Geerts, P. (1970), 'Are 'are Dictionary. Pacific Linguistics C-14. Grace, G. W. (1955), 'Subgrouping of Malayo-Polynesian: a report of tentative findings', American Anthropologist 57:337-339. - (1971), 'Languages of the New Hebrides and Solomon Islands', in Linguistics in Oceania, ed. by T. A. Sebeok, 341-358. The Hague, Mouton. Green, R. C. (1976), 'Languages of the southeast Solomons and their historical relationships', in Southeast Solomon Islands Cultural History, ed. by R. C. Green and M. M. Cresswell, 4 7 - 6 0 . The Royal Society of New Zealand Bulletin 11. Hackman, B. D. (1971), T h e languages of the British Solomon Islands'. Mimeographed. - (1975), Map: Languages of the Solomon Islands. Honiara, Ministry of Agriculture and Lands. Hilliard, D. L. (1966), 'Protestant missions in the Solomon Islands 1849-1942'. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Australian National University, Canberra. Ivens, W. G. (1911), 'Grammar of the language of Sa'a, Malaita, Solomon Islands', Anthropos 6 : 7 5 5 - 7 7 3 , 926-940.
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Tryon
Ivens, W. G. (1913-1914), 'Grammar of the language of Ulawa, Solomon Islands', Journal of the Polynesian Society 2 2 : 2 8 - 3 5 , 96-103, 2 1 9 - 2 2 4 ; 23:21-27. Keesing, R. M. (1975), Kwaio Dictionary. Pacific Linguistics C-35. Laiacy, H. M. (1969), 'Catholic missions in the Solomon Islands, 1845-1966'. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Australian National University, Canberra. Lincoln, P. C. (1975), Austronesian Languages: Melanesia and South Melanesia. Honolulu, University of Hawaii. - (1978), 'Reef-Santa Cruz as Austronesian' in Second International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics: Proceedings, ed. by S. A. Wurm and Lois Carrington, 9 2 9 967. Pacific Linguistics C-61. Milke, W. (1958), 'Zur ihren Gliederung und geschichtlichen Stellung der ozeanischaustronesischen Sprachen', Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 83:58-62. O'Reilly, P. and Laracy, H. M. (1972), Bibliographie des ouvrages publiés par les missions maristes des Iles Salomon. Publications de la Société des Océanistes 29. Paris, Musée de l'Homme. - Pacific Islands Year Book, (1977), (twelfth edition), gen. ed. Stuart Indar. Sydney, Pacific Publications. Pawley, A. (1972), 'On the internal relationships of Eastern Oceanic languages', in Studies in Oceanic Culture History, vol. 3, ed. by R. C. Green and M. Kelly, 1 - 1 4 2 . Pacific Anthropological Records 13. Honolulu, Bishop Museum. Ray, S. H. (1926), A Comparative Study of the Melanesian Island languages. London, Cambridge University Press. - (1928), T h e non-Melanesian languages of the Solomon Islands', in Festschrift [P. W. Schmidt] Publication d'hommage offerte au P. W. Schmidt, 123-126. Vienna, Mechitharisten-Congregations-Buchdruckerei. Salmond, A. (1974). A Generative Syntax of Luangiua: A Polynesian Language, Janua Linguarum, Series Practica 152. The Hague, Mouton. Sebeok, T. A., editor (1971), Linguistics in Oceania. Current Trends in Linguistics 8. The Hague, Mouton. Sharpies, P. (1968), 'Sikaiana syntax: a transformational generative syntax of a Polynesian language'. Unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Auckland. Simons, G. F. (1977a), Bibliography of Solomon Island Linguistics. Ukarumpa, Papua New Guinea, Summer Institute of Linguistics and Cornell University. - (1977b), 'A dialect survey of Santa Cruz Island'. Working Papers for the Language Variation and Limits to Communication Project 3. Mimeographed. Todd, E. M. (1975), 'The Solomon Language Family', in New Guinea Area Languages and Language Study, vol. 1, ed. by S. A. Wurm, 805-846. Tryon, D. T. and Hackman, B. D. (forthcoming), Solomon Islands Languages: An Internal Classification. Waterhouse, J. H. L. (1928), A Roviana and English Dictionary. Guadalcanal, Melanesian Mission Press. Whaley, O. G. (1962), 'Babatana segmental phonemes', Te Reo 5 : 6 0 - 6 2 . Wurm, S. A. (1969), 'The linguistic situation in the Reef and Santa Cruz islands', Pacific Linguistics A-21:47-105. - (1971), 'The Papuan linguistic situation', in Linguistics in Oceania, ed. by T. A. Sebeok, 541-657. The Hague, Mouton. - (1972a), 'Notes on the indication of possession with nouns in Reef and Santa Cruz islands languages', Pacific Linguistics A-3 5:85-113. - (1972b), 'The classification of Papuan languages and its problems', Linguistic Communications 6:118-178.
Remarks
on the Language Situation
in the Solomon
Islands
51
Wurm, S. A. (1975), The East Papuan Phylum in general', in New Guinea Area Languages and Language Study, vol. 1, ed. by S. A. Wurm, 783-804. - (1976), The Reef Islands-Santa Cruz Family', in New Guinea Area Languages and Study, vol. 2, ed. by S. A. Wurm, 637-674. - (1978), 'Reefs-Santa Cruz languages: Austronesian, but...!', in Second International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics: Proceedings, ed. by S. A. Wurm and Lois Carrington, 969-1010. Pacific Linguistics C-61. Wurm, S. A., editor (1975), New Guinea Area languages and Language Study, vol. 1: Papuan Languages and the New Guinea Linguistic Scene. Pacific Linguistics C-38. - (1976), New Guinea Area Languages and Language Study, vol. 2: Austronesian Languages. Pacific Linguistics C-39.
P. MUHLHAUSLER, J. A. BENNETT, and D. T. TRYON
Some English-based Pidgins in the Southwestern Pacific
A. GENERAL SURVEY, PLANTATION PIDGINS, PIDGIN ENGLISH IN THE RECRUITING AREAS, AND NEW GUINEA PIDGIN by P. Muhlhausler 1. G E N E R A L SURVEY
The southwestern Pacific is an area of great linguistic diversification. Seven hundred languages are said to be spoken in Papua New Guinea alone and Laycock (1969) estimates that more than a quarter of the world's languages are spoken in this area. It may at first sight seem strange that in this Babel more linguistic systems have come into being during the last 150 years and that in this very same area perhaps the largest number of varieties of Pidgin English were and are spoken. However, the oddity is only apparent, since the main function of the various offspring of English has been to reduce the number of linguistic barriers and to allow people from various backgrounds to enter into communication and thus build new societies. One can distinguish between three main types of pidgins according to the social functions they have fulfilled in the various parts of the southwestern Pacific. They are as follows: a) jargons used in short-term communication between Europeans and South Sea Islanders, b) pidgins that sprang up in various plantation areas, and c) pidgins transported from plantations to the main recruiting areas (nativized pidgins). Such a division can at best be an abstract ideal, since in reality much more complex configurations of forces tended to shape the individual varieties. The distinction between jargonplantation pidgin and nativized pidgin is not just social but is also reflected in a number oflinguistic characteristics of these languages. Thus, one can conceive of a scale of both stability and complexity ranging from unstable impoverished jargons to fully fledged expanded pidgins. Whereas jargons constitute individual attempts at communication across linguistic boundaries (e.g. by means of baby-talk or ad hoc simplifications), true pidgins are socially sanctioned linguistic systems. (More details are given in Muhlhausler 1976a: 18-27.) The diverse character of the individual languages labeled 'English-based
54
P. Mùhlhàusler, J. A. Bennett, and D. T. Tryon
pidgins' has led to the failure of attempts to determine their number and to draw clear boundaries between them. This is particularly true of the jargons, which exhibit a great deal of fluctuation and instability and has led observers such as London (1909) or Churchill (1911) to subsume all such varieties under the label 'Beach-la-Mar'. Jargonized varieties of English have been reported from numerous parts of the southwestern Pacific including Micronesia (Hall 1945), the Gilbert and Ellice Islands (David 1899), and New Zealand (Baker 1941:71 - 9 2 ) as well as other areas such as Samoa, the New Hebrides and New Guinea, where the jargonized varieties were later supplanted by a true pidgin. Churchill (1911:8) speaks of ' . . . sporadic foci of evolution of some mongrel dialects, each narrowly restricted in essential conditions to one or at most two white men, and the few communities of islanders with which they were in intimate contact'. While at this stage we only have an incomplete documentation of jargonized English, work currently being carried out by Clark (1977) promises to lead to important insights. The pidgins that emerged in a number of plantation centers were not much better documented until recently. Some information on Samoan and New Caledonian Pidgin English can be found in Schuchardt's writings ( 1 8 8 1 , 1 8 8 9 ) , but little work was done until a recent study dealing with Samoa (Miihlhausler 1975a) and one on New Caledonia (Hollyman 1976). Both writers have scrutinized a large body of literature, in particular documents written in German and French which had been neglected by earlier observers. At the same time some linguistic rescue work has been carried out in Samoa. Similar work has been begun on Queensland 'Kanaka Pidgin', the remnant of the former Queensland Plantation Pidgin, by D u t t o n and Miihlhausler.
2. PLANTATION PIDGINS
2.1. Samoan Plantation Pidgin Plantation pidgins confirm the principle outlined in Hall's article on the life cycle of pidgin languages (1962), namely that they are called into being for a specific reason, thrive as long as their raison d'être remains, and either develop into Creoles or become obsolete thereafter. An illustration of this principle is the case of Samoan Plantation Pidgin (Miihlhausler 1975a, 1975b). The establishment of plantations on Samoa in the late 1860s and the recruiting of labor, first f r o m the Gilbert and Ellice Islands and later from the New Hebrides, the Solomons and New Guinea, appear to have led to a rapid stabilization of the former English-based contact jargon on a number of plantations around Apia. Lexical and syntactic and, to a lesser degree, phonological conventions enabled b o t h vertical communication between Europeans and black employees and
Some English-based Pidgins in the Southwestern Pacific
55
horizontal communication between the indigenous workers. Contract periods were usually three years and communication in pidgin was restricted to topics arising from the work on the plantations (planting trees, gathering nuts, work in the copra dryers) and the social activities of their inhabitants. One can conceive of this Samoan Plantation Pidgin as a rather crude and limited instrument and there is evidence that its users had considerable difficulty in coping linguistically with situations outside this limited context. Those who were employed for a longer period often acquired some knowledge of Samoan, since Pidgin was very much a caste language which the local Samoan seldom learned. As a result of the German policy to recruit a relatively large proportion of women workers as well as men, mixed marriages were common in the later years of German rule in Samoa. A number of children grew up speaking Pidgin as their first language. However, because of the limited usefulness of this language (no more than 1,000 laborers were employed at any one time and they were restricted geographically to three large plantations), those who remained in Samoa appear to have adopted Samoan as their principal language, and their knowledge of Pidgin is very restricted today. This clearly shows that creolization is a social as well as a linguistic phenomenon, i.e. linguistic expansion can take place only under conditions where the language is to become the speech of a viable community. A crucial point in the life cycle of Samoan Plantation Pidgin was the end of the import of contract labor from New Guinea and other parts of Melanesia after World War I. Only about 250 'blakbois' remained on Samoa, scattered over a number of plantations and in the capital Apia. Pidgin remained in use on some plantations until the 1930s but has since been replaced by either simple English or Samoan. Since then Pidgin has become more and more restricted in its functions. Until the 1960s it is said to have been used on the occasion of church services among the remaining 'blakbois'. In 1975, when Muhlhausler carried out fieldwork on Samoa, the language was functionally dead. The case of Samoan Pidgin is interesting because the same language was transported to New Guinea, where it grew into a highly developed lingua franca and is now used in numerous functions other than those defined by the original plantation pidgin (see below).
2.2. New Caledonian Pidgin English Whereas the study of Samoan Pidgin English is of particular interest for the insights it provides into the social side of the life cycle of pidgins, New Caledonian Pidgin English is of interest because of its subsequent replacement by a pidginized French. Hollyman (1976) discusses the view, expressed by a number of
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writers, that New Caledonian Pidgin French is a relexified Pidgin English. Arguing against this interpretation, Hollyman adduces historical evidence that English and French Pidgin coexisted for many years in different parts of New Caledonia and that the structural identity of French and English Caledonian Pidgin is far from obvious. Unfortunately, the historical documentation of the t w o languages remains incomplete in spite of Hollyman's valuable findings. A better knowledge, particularly of New Caledonian Pidgin English, would be of great help in tracing the complex history of Pacific Pidgin English.
2.3.
Queensland'Kanaka'Pidgin
The third area in which an important plantation pidgin developed was the Queensland sugar plantations. Comparatively little is known about this pidgin; undoubtedly a great deal of information is still tucked away in old documents and newspapers. A study of contemporary Queensland newspapers alone should prove a source of information. Some information about this language can be gleaned from research carried out by Dutton and from a paper by Rigsby and Crowley (1976). An earlier reference is Reinecke ( 1 9 3 7 : 7 3 3 - 7 3 4 ) . As in the case of New Caledonia and Samoa, the development of a plantation pidgin in Queensland was a direct result of the labor trade. There is disagreement among researchers as to whether Queensland Kanaka English was influenced by Australian Aboriginal English (the broken jargons spoken before 1860 in the Queensland area) or whether Queensland Kanaka English was passed on to the aboriginal peoples of the Queensland area. Work on Australian pidgins and Creoles has only begun in recent years (cf. Sharpe and Sandefur 1976) and it will take some time before the answers to these questions can be given.
2.4. Plantation Pidgins: Summary According to available sources no form of Pidgin English was spoken in the fourth big plantation area of Fiji. Instead, a simplified form of Fijian is said to have been in use among plantation workers. Such was the vigor of the language at the time that Schuchardt( 1889:182) acknowledged the possibility of a further spread of this Pidgin Fijian. Again, little is known about the pidgin scene in Fiji, and it is hoped that research begun b y Siegel (1975) will be followed by more detailed studies. The plantation setting of the southwestern Pacific differs from that of the Caribbean area in that the labor populations were not permanently displaced but, in the majority of cases, served for limited periods of time. This is reflected
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in the relative lack of internal coherence of the pidgin-using speech communities. While certain norms had to be adhered to to make communications possible, the linguistic stability of the nineteenth-century plantation pidgins may not have been very high (as can be seen from texts reflecting variation, if not fluctuation, in o u t p u t ) and it seems likely that the continuous shift of the recruiting areas was reflected in changing pressures of the substratum languages on the individual plantation pidgin. The continuous changes in the pidgin speech communities also prevented the development of creoles (first-language pidgins). Thus, employment of Melanesian labor came to an end in the early twentieth century in both Australia and Samoa (all but a few Melanesians having been repatriated b y 1920) while in New Caledonia the decline of the plantation economy and the strong influence of French provided an additional reason for the disappearance of Pidgin English.
3. PIDGIN ENGLISH IN THE RECRUITING A R E A S
3.1. Introduction The recruiting of labor for the various plantations followed a relatively fixed pattern, taking place in: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Loyalty Islands in the early 1860s Banks and Gilbert islands in the late 1860s Santa Cruz and New Hebrides in the early 1870s Solomon Islands f r o m 1872 t o 1883 New Ireland and New Britain f r o m 1879.
Whereas English-based jargons and pidgins have declined in importance in former trading and contact areas, important highly-developed forms of Pidgin English are found in those former recruiting areas that are characterized by the greatest linguistic diversity, in particular New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and the New Hebrides (cf. Wurm 1971). In these three areas the various pidgins brought back by returning laborers have assumed the status of intertribal lingue franche. Since these pidgins first became established in the three areas, their original functions have been expanded from those of masterservant languages to an extent where they are now languages in which the full range of human experience can be expressed. This development has progressed most in Papua New Guinea b u t , with the uprise of national independence movements in the Solomon Islands and the New Hebrides, the social status of Solomon Islands Pidgin and Bichelamar has also been raised considerably. The question as to the historical links between the various plantation pidgins on the one hand and between the pidgins in the recruiting areas on
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the other has been the topic of lengthy debate. What is certain is that the whole history of the development of pidgins in the southwestern Pacific is characterized by a long progression of mutual influences, contact, and regional mobility of populations. It is unlikely that either monogenesis, the development of the various pidgins f r o m a single source, or independent development alone will suffice as explanation of the origin of the southwestern Pacific pidgins. Instead, one must conceive of a complex network of relationships between the various Pacific English jargons and pidgins. It now seems certain that not only the Queensland plantations (as argued, for example, by Laycock 1970:ix-x) but also New Caledonia and Samoa have had considerable influence on their development. Reinecke's suggestion that 'New Caledonia ... was one of the chief centres in the formation of Beach-la-Mar' still has to be substantiated. The influence of Samoan Plantation Pidgin on New Guinea Pidgin has been demonstrated by Miihlhausler (1975a, 1976b). It is hoped that, as the recruiting and repatriation patterns in the Pacific become clearer (cf. the various articles in the Journal of Pacific History 11(1-2)), moredefinite statements can be made about the relative importance of the various plantation pidgins for those pidgins that subsequently arose in the recruiting areas. A problem which may be solved by referring to the impact of different plantation pidgins is that of the strong regional variation in New Hebridean Bichelamar and Solomon Islands Pidgin. Again, at least some regional variation may be due to the predominance of one or the other substratum language, as has been shown for Bichelamar by Camden (1975). Some more specific remarks on the three present-day survivors of the original Beach-la-Mar will now be made.
3.2. New Guinea Pidgin (NGP, also known as Tok Pisin and Neomelanesian) Together with Cameroons Pidgin English and perhaps Bichelamar, NGP represents the class of expanded pidgins, i.e. pidgin languages that have grown into fully fledged languages without having any significant numbers of native speakers (cf. also Todd 1974:3). It is this aspect of the language which offers the most rewarding prospects for sociolinguistic research. The expansion of NGP can be regarded as proceeding through a number of stages, each being characterized by certain social and linguistic developments. Miihlhausler (1976a) provides a detailed account of how the functional (social) expansion of this language is reflected in its increasing grammatical complexity. Expansion of a social kind is primarily expansion of the functions of a pidgin. The five main stages that can be distinguished are: 1. the jargon stage 2. the stabilization stage
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3. the expansion stage 4. the creolization stage 5. the post-pidgin or post-creole stage At the first stage, the principal function of the crude jargons in the various parts of the Pacific was to establish short-term communication across a limited range of topics such as bartering and giving simple instructions. Contemporary observers complain about the inarticulateness of this 'broken English'. Little is known about the jargons in the New Guinea area. They were fairly soon replaced by a stabilized pidgin whose norms were partly brought to the Bismarck Archipelago f r o m Samoa. NGP became a plantation language on the first plantation of the Gazelle Peninsula in the 1880s. Subsequently its use was extended to cover communication between master and servants (houseboys) and it was also used by the police force, administration and courts in German times. The fact that the Germans took the language seriously, considering it to be more than just broken English, and the absence of English as a model for over 30 years, constituted further stabilizing factors. German colonial presence also provided the situational stimuli for large-scale intertribal communication: the imposition of a pax Germanica, the creation of a colonial economy involving interregional mobility of the work force, and the founding of government posts increased the number of contexts in which speakers from different parts of New Guinea had to intercommunicate. Thus, during German times, the main function of NGP shifted from that of a m a s t e r servant to that of an intertribal lingua franca. The effects of the German colonial presence are reflected most clearly in the lexicon of NGP, though its effects on other parts of the grammar can also be pointed out (cf. Muhlhausler 1975b: 100-101). On the one hand, harsh commands and social inequality are reflected in the German expressions that f o u n d their way into NGP, such as: NGP
Gloss
sisan (stillgestanden) haltmunt (halt den Mund)
standstill! shut up!
raus{raus)
get out!
On the other h a n d , words of local origin are witness to the fact that conversations were no longer restricted to the basic necessities of life (cf. Cassidy 1971:216ff for a hypothetical basic pidgin lexicon) but had become extended to topics such as local mythology, nature and entertainment. The expansion of NGP after World War I is manifested in a number of developments, t h e most significant being the adoption of NGP as a mission medium by the Catholic missions in the 1920s, the use of NGP as the language of administration, occasionally even in written form, and its use in some new
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professions which sprang up as the economy diversified (e.g. mining, small industries). World War II witnessed the use of NGP in the armed forces and for propaganda purposes: millions of NGP leaflets were dropped over New Guinea by both the Japanese and Allied Forces and the language was first used in broadcasts. The functional expansion of NGP accelerated after World War II. In the late forties and early fifties it began to be used by local government councils, by a number of newspapers (cf. Baker 1953:196-198) and in some schools. Rapid increase in urbanization from the 1960s onwards increased the importance of the language as the sole medium of communication for large numbers of speakers. At the same time, urban life stimulated new imaginative dimensions in the development of the language: Evidence of the operation of ethnogenesis within Papua New Guinea cities can be found in the growing number of original Pidgin expressions covering the shared experience of their black inhabitants. These range from descriptive terms referring to town occupations, the shortage of money, to sport, beer drinking, brawling, sexual adventure, card playing, the police, the whites, and so on, together with more complex terms which recognise the effects of city life on the individual. (Brash 1975:323)
Important points in NGP's expansion phase (which is by no means over yet) have been the adoption of the language in the House of Assembly (cf. Hull 1968) and a more lenient attitude towards the use of the language in schools. A concise account of the social role of the language in the late 1960s was given by Wolfers (1971). The development of NGP subsequent to its structural expansion proceeds along two alternative lines, depending mainly on the social environment in which it is used. On the one hand, the functional expansion of NGP has resulted in the gradual replacement of local vernaculars in some areas, i.e. NGP has taken over more and more functions from the vernaculars (communication across an increasing range of topics, social control, self-identification) so that it now serves as the first language for some communities and can thus be said to have become creolized. Typically, a new generation of speakers grows up that only passively knows the former local vernacular and that uses NGP to the exclusion of all other languages. Few case studies of this phenomenon have been made to date, though a study of the death of local vernaculars could be of great importance to sociolinguistic theory (cf. Dressier 1972; Trudgill 1978). In the situation just described the internal (linguistic) expansion typically comes from internal resources of the language, with local vernaculars providing only some lexical materials. Under certain external pressures, particularly the resettlement of populations in areas where different languages are spoken (such as with the Hoskins Oil Palm Project), accelerated creolization can occur. Some case studies are provided by Miihlhausler (1976a:202-213). The
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significance of these studies is that it can be demonstrated that different kinds of creolization may have different consequences for the linguistic structure of a pidgin and that a notion of creolization that does not consider social environment is likely t o lead to dangerous overgeneralizations. While creolization relies on internal resources, contact with another language, more precisely the superimposed European language English is the principal force in the development of the post-pidgin or post-creole varieties of NGP. The development of these varieties is the direct result of the breakdown of the colonial caste-society, in which the social distance between rulers and ruled was paralleled by linguistic distance. A more general discussion of this principle is given by both DeCamp (1971) and Valdman (1973). With reference to NGP, Bickerton has described the process which eventually leads to the establishment of a linguistic continuum intermediate between 'basilectal' pidgin and the 'acrolect', i.e. standard NewGuinean English. The society-mobile speaker will attempt to acquire the speech manners of the group to which he aspires, in this case those who speak English. Because of his educational background his imitation will be heavily flavored with NGP. This variety of English, '... will become the target of speakers a little lower down the social ladder, who will speak a variety of English yet more admixed with Tok Pisin. By this time, the accumulation of features which are neither truly English nor truly Tok Pisin will be so considerable as to form a sizable part of the input to the language acquisition device of any child growing up in an urban area; and since the input mix of English, Tok Pisin, and hybrid varieties will vary proportionally for every such child, it will not be long before we have an urban spectrum containing all linguistically possible varieties intermediate between Tok Pisin and English. (Bickerton 1975:25)
That this has already happened to some degree is demonstrated in the paper on NGP sociolects in this volume. The development is likely to continue as long as English remains the prestige language of the Papua New Guinean elite and as long as no steps are undertaken to standardize NGP in a form which is clearly distinct from English. The development of linguistic continua may be fascinating for the linguist but for the members of a post-pidgin speech community considerable social and linguistical problems are likely to develop. For Papua New Guinea, the main danger is the widening of the linguistic and social gap between basilectal rural speakers and mesolectal and acrolectal urban speakers, a gap that defeats NGP's original purpose as a lingua franca enabling communication across all tribal, linguistic and social barriers in Papua New Guinea. Apart from encroaching upon communication, the development of a post-pidgin continuum in Papua New Guinea also holds the danger of losing national together with linguistic identity. The dangers of cultural and linguistic imperialism have been made abundantly clear by Dutton (1976:9).
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and D. T. Tryon
As has been mentioned above, the process o f NGP's functional and linguistic expansion is not yet complete and thus sociolinguists have ample opportunities for observing ongoing changes. What is more important, because o f the very short history of the language, altogether little more than 100 years, all stages o f its life cycle can be observed in situ by moving along the parameters of geographical remoteness and time (age o f NGP speakers): This means nothing else but that, with the continuous spread of Pidgin, its linguistic history is repeated so that, for instance, the contact situation in a very remote area today resembles that of a developed area fifty years ago. (Miihlhausler 1975c:72) It has not been possible to deal with the social and historical setting o f NGP in any depth. This has been done by Miihlhausler (1976a) and Wurm et al. ( 1 9 7 7 ) . We have refrained from making strong claims about the salient and universal properties of the sociolinguistic status o f NGP as too little comparative data is available at present. However, it will be shown below that considerable progress has been made in the study of the two remaining nativized pidgins of the southwest Pacific, i.e. Solomon Islands Pidgin and Bichelamar.
REFERENCES Baker, S., J. (1941), New Zealand Slang. Christchurch, Whitcombe and Tombs. - (1953), Australia Speaks: A Supplement to "The Australian Language'. Sydney and London, Shakespeare Head Press. Bickerton, D. (1975), "Can English and Pidgin be kept apart?', in Tok Pisin i go we?, ed. by K. A. McElhanon, 21-27. Brash, E. (1975), Tok Pisin!', Mean/in Quarterly 34(3):320-327. Camden, W. G. (1975), 'Parallels in structure of lexicon and syntax between New Hebrides Bislama and the South Santo language spoken at Tangoa'. Paper presented at the International Conference on Pidgins and Creoles, Honolulu, January 1975. Cassidy, F. G. (1971), 'Tracing the pidgin element in Jamaican Creole', in Pidginization and Creolization of Languages, ed. by Dell Hymes, 203-22. London, Cambridge University Press. Churchill, W. (1911), Beach-la-mar: the Jargon or Trade Speech of the Western Pacific. Washington, D.C., Carnegie Institution. Clark, R. (1977), In Search of Beach-lM-Mar. Working Papers in Anthropology, Archaeology, Linguistics, Maori Studies 48. University of Auckland. DeCamp, D. (1971), Towards a generative analysis of a post-creole speech continuum', in Pidginization and Creolization of Languages, ed. by Dell Hymes, 349-370. London, Cambridge University Press. David, Mrs. E. (1899), Funafuti or Three Months on a Coral Island. London, John Murray. Dressier, W. (1972), 'On the phonology of language death', in Papers from the Eighth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 448-457.
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Dutton, T. E. (1970), 'Informal English in the Torres Straits', in English Transported, ed. by W. S. Ramson, 131-160. Canberra, Australian National University Press. - (1976), Language and National Development - Long Wanem Rot? Inaugural Lecture. Port Moresby, University of Papua New Guinea. Hall, R. A., Jr. (1945), 'English loan words in Micronesian languages', Lingua 2 1 : 2 1 4 219. - (1962), 'The life cycle of pidgin languages', Lingua 11:151-156. Hollyman, K. J. (1976), 'Les Pidgins européens de la région calédonienne', Te Reo 19: 25-65. Hull, B. D. (1968), T h e use of Pidgin in the House of Assembly', Journal of the Papua New Guinea Society 2 ( l ) : 2 2 - 2 5 . Hymes, D., editor (1971), Pidginization and Creolization of Languages. London, Cambridge University Press. Laycock, D. C. (1969), 'Melanesia has a quarter of the world's languages', Pacific Islands Monthly (September) 71-76. - (1970), Materials in New Guinea Pidgin. Pacific Linguistics D-5. London, J. (1909), 'Beche de Mer English', Contemporary Review 96:359-364. McElhanon, K. A., editor (1975), Tok Pisin i go we? Proceedings of a conference held at the University of Papua New Guinea, Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, 18-21 September, 1973. Kivung Special Publication Number One. Mühlhäusler, P. (1975a), 'Samoan Plantation Pidgin English and the origin of New Guinea Pidgin'. Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the Linguistic Society of Australia, Sydney. -
(1975b), 'The influence of the German administration on New Guinea Pidgin', Journal of Pacific History 10(4) :94-l 11. - (1975c), 'Sociolects in New Guinea Pidgin', in Tok Pisin i go we? ed. by K. A. McElhanon, 59-75. - (1976a), 'Growth and structure of the lexicon of New Guinea Pidgin'. Ph.D. thesis, Australian National University. To be published as Pacific Linguistics C-52. - (1976b), 'Samoan Plantation Pidgin English and the origin of New Guinea Pidgin: an introduction', Journal of Pacific History 11(2) : 122-125. Ramson, W. S., editor (1970), English Transported. Canberra Australian National University Press. Reinecke, J. E. (1937), 'Marginal languages: a sociological survey of the Creole languages and trade jargons'. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Yale University. Rigsby, B. and Crowley, T. (1976), 'Cape York Creole'. Unpublished ms., University of Queensland. Schuchardt, H. (1881), 'Kreolische Studien V: über das Melaneso-englische', Sitzungsberichte der k.k. Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Wien, Philosophisch-historische Klasse 105:131-161. - (1889), 'Beiträge zur Kenntniss des englischen Kreolisch. II: Melaneso-englisches', Englische Studien 13:158-162. Sharpe, M. C. and Sandefur, J. (1976), T h e Creole language of the Katherine and Roper River areas. Northern Territory', in Australia Talks, ed. by M. Clyne, 6 3 - 7 7 . Pacific Linguistics D-23. Siegel, Jeff (1975), 'Fiji Hindustani'. Unpublished ms., University of the South Pacific. Todd, L. (1974), Pidgins and Creoles. Language and Society Series. London, Routledge and Kegan Paul. Trudgill, P. J. (1978), 'Creolization in reverse : reduction and simplification in the Albanian dialects of Greece', in Transactions of the Philological Society 1976-1977, 32-50.
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Valdman, A. ( 1 9 7 3 ) , 'Some aspects of decreolization in Creole French', in Diachronic, Areal, and Typological Linguistics, ed. by T. A. Sebeok, 5 0 7 - 5 3 6 . Current Trends in Linguistics 11. The Hague, Mouton. Wolfers, E. P. ( 1 9 7 1 ) , 'A report on Neo-Melanesian', in Pidginization and Creolization of Languages, ed. by Dell Hymes, 4 1 3 - 4 1 9 . London, Cambridge University Press. Wurm, S. A. ( 1 9 7 1 ) , 'Pidgins, Creoles and lingue franche', in Linguistics in Oceania, ed. by T. A. Sebeok, 9 9 9 - 1 0 2 1 . The Hague, Mouton. Wurm, S. A., Mühlhäusler, P., and Laycock, D. C. ( 1 9 7 7 ) , 'Language planning and engineering in Papua New Guinea', in New Guinea Area Languages and Language Study, vol. 3, ed. b y S . A. Wurm, 1 1 5 1 - 1 1 7 7 . Wurm, S. A., editor ( 1 9 7 7 ) , New Guinea Area Languages and Language Study, vol. 3: Language, Culture, Society, and the Modern World. Pacific Linguistics C-40.
B. SOLOMON ISLANDS PIDGIN by J. A. Bennett The history of Solomon Islands Pidgin 1 exemplifies at different periods all the three main types of pidgin mentioned by Miihlhausler: a) jargons used in short-term communication between Europeans and islanders, b) pidgins that sprang up in various plantation areas and c) pidgins transported from the plantations to the main recruiting area (nativized pidgins). The first jargons in the Solomons developed in the contact situation between whalers and Solomon Islanders. The visits of explorers and passing merchantmen were brief and had little linguistic impact. By 1800 as the Atlantic whaling grounds were fished out, whaling ships moved into Pacific waters. The first recorded whaler reached the Solomons in 1803. By the 1820s American, British and colonial whalers called regularly at Simbo, Mono (Treasury), Santa Ana, Santa Catalina, as well as the Polynesian islands of Sikaiana and Tikopia. In the 1840s as whalers visited the large island of San Cristobal, Makira Harbour became a popular resort with its abundance of vegetables, wood, water and willing women. At these ports where trade was carried on by the iron-hungry islanders, men often joined the ship as crew, sailing around Solomons waters and sometimes across the Pacific (Bennett forthcoming). Under such circumstances jargons developed. It was said of the Sikaianans in the 1840s: 'They can nearly all speak more or less broken English which they have picked up through their intercourse with whale ships, who often visited to get supplies of coconuts and pigs' (Cheyne 1852:53, 1855:67). Along with this jargon and other 'mongrel dialects' (Churchill 1911:8), the whalers seem to have also been responsible for introducing the Hawaiian word, kanaka [man] into Melanesia. Crew lists of whaling ships calling at Hawaii have many a 'Jack' and 'John' Kanaka. Little survives in Solomon Pidgin to suggest more early Polynesian influences introduced by whalers, as other pan-Melanesian pidgin words such as susu [milk or breast], tambu [forbidden, sacred], are also found in many Melanesian languages themselves.
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At San Cristobal in the 1860s an old native man was described as speaking 'coarse Hawaiian gibberish', along with others who spoke English (Brenchley 1873:273). Whether this was a Hawaiian jargon learned from whalers or just broken English is not clear. The few who spoke good English there and elsewhere in the sixties were former students in New Zealand who had gone away for some formal education with Bishop Selwyn of the Melanesian Mission. Whalers traded their iron and steel goods for fresh food as well as portable and durable island products such as tortoiseshell which fetched good prices in Western capitals, including Sydney. One or two Sydney-based traders started to call at the Solomons in the 1850s in search of this tortoiseshell. These and the odd Auckland trader visited the islands alongside the whalers, adding further to the raison d'être for the continuance of trading jargons. At Makira Harbour, a popular resort for the trader as well as the whaler, the people in 1860 were using jargon phrases such as 'the carpenter no right kill', 'carpenter no bad man', 'much bad kill carpenter'. 2 In the early 1870s recruiters came to the Solomons from Queensland and Fiji t c sign on men for the colonial canefields. Malaita and Guadalcanal, particularly its south coast, were the major suppliers of labor. These areas had little to attract the trader, so the only way the men could obtain the valued iron tools and other Western goods was by indenture for overseas labor. In most of the western Solomons little recruiting was done because of the hazards of the vigorous headhunters of the New Georgia Islands. As well, the people there could get the trade goods they wanted by the relatively easy method of bartering tortoiseshell and copra when there was the seasonal lull in the head-hunting raids (Corris 1973:29-31). Those who went to Queensland and Fiji had to communicate with each other as well as with Europeans and Fijians. In Queensland a kind of pidgin grew up among the 'Kanakas'. The specific influence and contribution by existing Aboriginal and perhaps Chinese jargons have yet to be described, but this pidgin sprang directly from the plantation experience. In Fiji the situation is less clear, but the Solomon recruits seem to have been exposed to both Fijian and English and some could make themselves understood in both languages after they returned to the Solomons. 3 Their fluency in conversational Fijian was noted in the 1880s and 1890s by Fijian-speaking recruiters and the first Resident Commissioner, C. M. Woodford. Woodford had hopes that it would become the Protectorate's lingua franca. 4 Fijian, or a possibly pidginized Fijian, did not long survive outside the immediate social milieu of the colonial plantation. It was only the occasional recruiter or the rare official like Woodford who spoke Fijian, so it was infrequently used. Between circa 1870 and 1910 about 9,400 Solomon Islanders went to Fiji. Of these about 5,000 laborers chose to return. In Queensland between 1872 and 1904 about 17,400 came to work. At least 75% or 13,250 chose or were forced to go back home
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(Corris 1973:41; Price and Baker 1976:115). All other factors being equal, the impact that the ex-Fijian laborers had on the language pool of the Solomons was under half that of the ex-Queensland recruits, so Fijian ran a poor and fading second to English-based pidgin at the end of the century. This development of pidgin in overseas plantations illustrates Miihlhausler's second category of pidgin. As he says such divisions are an 'abstract ideal' and that holds for the Solomons. By the 1880s and 1890s returnees brought back to the islands a form of pidgin learned in the canefields. Doubtless in some cases this became mixed with, and was superimposed upon existing jargons, the products of early whaler and trade contact. Because of this and the varying influences in the colonial situations, a fully stable pidgin was not observed in the existing documents of the late nineteenth century. Recruiting for Queensland closed in 1904 and for Fiji in 1910. At this time European-owned copra plantations were being established in the Solomons, with the assistance of the government's 'pacification' policies. Companies like Lever Brothers and Burns Philp embarked on large-scale planting. Many hundreds of laborers were needed for such expansion. Returnees with colonial experience often sought employment on plantations or as boats' crew within the Solomons and so were in a position to pass their pidgin on to other islanders. Once again the populous island of Malaita supplied labor along with Guadalcanal and,to alesser extent, San Cristobal. During the years 1914-1942 Malaitans made up 50%-70%, and Guadalcanal men 20% of the plantation work force. 5 The Malaitans went everywhere where plantations were located, from the Shortlands to San Cristobal. To some extent this was true too of the Guadalcanal men, although they favored either the Su'u and Baunani plantations on Malaita or Levers' estates in the Russells. San Cristobal people, particularly the Arosi were a little less mobile, although some worked at least one contract (2-3 years) on Santa Isabel or the New Georgia Islands. Plantations were the nurseries of a stable nativized Pidgin, Miihlhausler's third type. The unstable pidgin(s) of the labor trade era would have persisted in areas where trading and other contact went on between Melanesians and Europeans, but without the plantations Pidgin would not have stabilized and expanded. Returnees from Queensland and Fiji, unless they signed on for work within the Solomons, did not use Pidgin again except perhaps to talk with the trader or the infrequent government officer. This was particularly so in southern Guadalcanal and Malaita. After marriage men rarely left home for work. Their children learned no Pidgin from them, but learned it later as adults when they went to plantations from circa 1900 to 1942. On the plantation the new recruit had to learn Pidgin to communicate with all but his own language group and to understand the directions of the white manager and the local bos-boi. Pidgin gradually spread to areas where few men contracted for plantation
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work. In the western Solomons villagers near expatriate-owned plantations traded their fresh food and betel nut for the laborers' tobacco, soap, and matches and at these markets learned some Pidgin. As men from the west often worked as crews on trading,mission, and recruiting vessels, they quickly learned Pidgin. Even on plantations where most of the laborers were from the local area, Pidgin was k n o w n , if not always spoken; for example, many Arosi men went to nearby plantations such as Maro'u Bay and Boroni. The majority had previously as single men been to the western Solomons for a few years. When they came h o m e , they married and preferred to work locally for a few months at a time. Usually, for reasons of discipline and efficiency, the bosbois were from other islands, particularly Malaita, and therefore spoke Pidgin with the laborers. 6 Pidgin-speaking grew as part of the plantation's culture, b u t it extended beyond that limited context. By 1914 five Christian missions were involved in the evangelization of the Solomons. In the New Georgia Islands, Choiseul and parts of the Shortlands, two of t h e m , the Methodists and the Seventh Day Adventists generally used a vernacular as a church language. The S.D.A. in their central school also taught English. In the central and eastern Solomons, the Melanesian Mission continued using the Mota language until mounting pressure for vernaculars and English lead to its abandonment in 1931 (Hilliard 1966: passim). The Roman Catholics adopted the southwest Guadalcanal language, Gari, as a church language in Guadalcanal and Malaita, printing the first vernacular newspaper, Na Turupatu, in this language in 1911. Besides Gari, Pidgin was used, particularly on Malaita where most of the non-Catholics spoke it as a second language (Laracy 1976:71,95). The f i f t h mission group, the South Seas Evangelical Mission employed Pidgin almost exclusively b o t h in its central school at Onepusu, Malaita, and in village evangelical work where the missionary, brown or white, was from a different language group. It was through the activities of S.S.E.M. evangelists that some villagers, including women, learned some Pidgin without leaving their village. Through the plantations employing 3,000-6,000 men per year and the positive reinforcement in the east by the missions, Pidgin had spread so far by the early 1930s that it was the lingua franca in all the major recruiting areas - Malaita, Guadalcanal and San Cristobal (Chapman and Pirie 1 9 7 4 : 2 3 4 235). The law requiring recruiting ships to carry interpreters was repealed since the recruiter and the recruit or his friends spoke the same language. 7 This is also indicative of a stabilized pidgin with a predictable grammar and lexical items. Such stabilization is evident in recorded Pidgin from the 1930s which can quite easily be understood by modern speakers. Those Solomon Islanders who had the opportunity to compare their Pidgin with that of New Guinea perceived the differences. One man who was part of the crew on a vessel going to New Britain for refit in the thirties summed it up by saying that
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New Guineans altogether maski [they all say maski]. As Miihlhausler shows, the history of New Guinea Pidgin is quite different from that of the Solomons and had a definite German input. Although some hundreds of Solomon Islanders went to Samoa and a few to New Britain in the labor trade days, there is no indication of New Guinea Pidgin borrowings nor any evidence of the survival of an old form of pidgin which Miihlhausler believes to have existed in Samoa. If such a pidgin was ever brought home to the Solomons at the turn of the century, subsequent evolution and overlays have obliterated all traces of it. Any German-based borrowings would not have been reinforced as the Germans had no tangible presence in the territories of Santa Isabel, Choiseul and the northern Shortlands as late as 1900 when the British assumed actual control of these islands. 8 Solomon Islands Pidgin's English base (from Queensland and to some extent Fiji) was constantly reinforced before World War II because almost the whole white population of the Solomons were English speakers. The language today reflects this, particularly the strong Australian influence. There are some words larikan-man [larrikin], spel [a rest, spell], bugarup [buggered-up, useless], niu chum [new chum] and also perhaps rous [to rouse on, to castigate] , karange [cranky], lilibet [a little bit] which come from Australian English or slang. Today, a few of these words are being discarded by younger speakers who have more appropriate expressions to describe the changed social and economic setting', larikan-man is being superseded by liu, and niu chum, a term applied to a new plantation recruit, is declining in use as Solomon Islanders now have wider work opportunities. World War II dramatically changed the destinies of Solomon Islanders. The war spelt the beginning of the end for colonialism and exposed Solomon Islanders to a new range of ideas. Hundreds of men from the old recruiting centers of Malaita, Guadalcanal and San Cristobal joined the Solomon Islands Labour Corps to facilitate logistical support of military action on and out of northern Guadalcanal. These men lived side by side with the troops. New words and experiences were incorporated temporarily into Pidgin, but all except one seem to have been discarded after the troops left. The S.I.L.C. men spent a lot of their time moving the seemingly endless supplies from one stack to another stack. Thus, so one version goes, the word staka came to mean 'a lot of, plenty' and is used in that sense today. Secular Pidgin songs were composed and sung at this time, the best known being Raisi [Rice] and Japani, ha! ha! [Japan ha! ha!] — a song telling of Solomon Islanders assisting the Americans in driving off the Japanese. Since the war there had been increasing participation by Solomon Islanders in all levels of government, church and commerce as a prelude to Independence which occurred in July 1978. In the formal side of such administration the language used is generally English. But Pidgin is spoken by about 50% of the
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population and is the common language of communication between islanders from different language groups. 10 Its spread is being aided by radio broadcasts in Pidgin throughout the islands. It is also furthered by the common urban employment experience of many young people who, with a very rudimentary grasp of English after only two or three standards of primary education, quickly learn Pidgin. Their input on return to their villages plus the radio provide village youth with an age-group argot. This is often a source of annoyance to their more conservative elders, some of whom resent the increasing borrowings from Pidgin that pass into the vernacular. 11 The radio, urbanization, and a modicum of formal education have made Pidgin accessible for the first time to large numbers of women. In the pre-war plantation era Pidgin was, with few exceptions, a man's language, a verbal status symbol of experience of the wider world. Most village women over forty are not fluent in Pidgin while many of their teen-age daughters and younger sisters are. With an increasing number of women speakers the potential for creolization exists. This would normally happen to children when both partners in a 'mixedmarriage' reside outside their respective home districts, which would mean, in fact, residence in one of the town centers, Honiara, Aoke, Gizo, Kira Kira or the old capital Tulagi. Permanent or even extended residence in towns is still relatively uncommon for Solomon Islanders, even for the 2% of the population living in the urban situation. They return regularly to their villages, often leaving a child or two there for a few years, as company and comfort to their own parents. This practice will probably continue for a long time because Solomon Islanders value these family and village relationships and also wish to keep their land rights active. However, as the 1976 census shows, creolization is occurring, albeit slowly; 1,302 people give Pidgin as their only language. If the Papua New Guinea situation is any indications gradual increase in creolization may be expected in the future. Urbanization, although it occurs only on a small scale, is having a definite influence on the evolution of Pidgin. Pidgin has had to expand functionally with the growth of Solomon Islanders' participation in the wider world and their own government. This is reflected in the increasing use of connectives, subordinate clauses, and a variety of prepositions borrowed from English such as fo [for] and bekaus [because]. Additional English words have been pidginized, for example, kolektem [collect], ediukesin [education], hedikwata [headquarters]. There is also more use than in pre-war years of the tense indicators shud [should] and mus [must]. Along with these English borrowings there are other developments which reflect a genuine Solomons influence. Structurally, there is an increasing use of the particle ia which refers back and gives emphasis, for example disfela man ia ... [This man ...]. Idiomatic expressions are also appearing, usually reflecting the urban experience, for example, Mi lusim pasport belong mi [I can't go back now, can't return home
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because I've been away too long]. There are also borrowings from the languages of the dominant urban migrants, the Malaitans, for example, liu (noun) [a person moving around w i t h o u t a s e t purpose,anidler, a possible troublemaker, a drop-out], osoos (verb) [to flatter, to beg, to 'bludge']. Another change which seems to have Malaitan origins though it is certainly an Austronesian pattern is the growing tendency to repeat the first syllable of a word used as a verb, for example, gigivam [to give]. This used to be done sometimes to give emphasis or to show that the action continued for a long time, but now seems to be included outside these specific contexts. Some of these changes are resented by Pidgin speakers in the villages. These presage the beginnings of the urbanites' post-pidgin stage that Mühlháusler mentions, while the rural Pidgin lags behind. The educated urban elite dominate the few publications that exist in Pidgin as well as the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Service. Many of this elite were educated overseas and have been heavily influenced by Western concepts and sophisticated English. Frequently they use a kind of trendy Pidgin with heavy borrowings from rather recondite English (or occasionally New Guinea Pidgin) which villagers find hard to understand. In 1974 resentment of this situation by radio listeners ran so high that there was a call for the reintroduction of Pidgin examinations for Solomon Islander public servants. 12 Although the problem persists it is nowhere near the scale of that in Papua New Guinea as described by Mühlháusler because both the towns and the elites in the Solomons are so much smaller and the links with village society still strong. Presently Pidgin is growing in status, but some of the elite wish to see English as the common, second language. They are opposed to Pidgin on the grounds that it is the colonial masta-servant language. Some may also have absorbed the old British colonial's official aversion to it. However, the numbers are against these few since Pidgin is the most widely spoken language, native or introduced, in all the islands. It is used frequently in parliamentary debates, island council meetings, and interisland church conferences. There is no doubt Pidgin is here to stay and that it will continue to expand in the number of speakers. The most immediate problem, common to other pidgin-speaking Melanesian countries, is the question of standard orthography. The sound patterns of each vernacular are naturally transferred to Pidgin. Although Solomon Islanders can readily converse with one another despite the varying pronunciation, they are not always in agreement as to the written representation of Pidgin. This is, in Francis Bugotu's words, 'almost a political issue' and may well remain so for some time. 1 3 Guidelines have been developed by the Pidgin Committee and the Solomon Islands Christian Association and are the basis for the orthography used in the recently published Pidgin New Testament. This is one of the few major publications so far in Pidgin and is sure to be read widely by the predominantly Christian population. Once a standard
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form of spelling is adopted, Pidgin has the potential, through the written word, to expand ever further as the main medium of communication in the Solomon Islands, as it has been, in varying forms, for almost a hundred years.
NOTES 1. All of the following is discussed more comprehensively by the writer, in 'The Development of Pidgin in the Solomons' (Unpublished Seminar Paper), Australian National University, Canberra, 1977. 2. Bradford to British Consul, Tahiti, 1861. British Consulate Papers. Vol. 5 in letters 1857-1866, Set 24, Item 8, Mitchell Library, Sydney. 3. Stated by the writer in T h e Development of Pidgin in the Solomons' (see Note 1). 4. Woodford to Thurston, 7 September 1896, Western Pacific High Commission, No. 415 of 1896, Western Pacific Archives, Suva, Fiji. 5. Reports of the Labour Department 1914-1940, High Commission, Western Pacific Archives, Suva, Fiji. 6. Writer's fieldwork notes, Solomon Islands, 1976. 7. Report of the Labour Commission, 23 January 1930, Western Pacific High Commission, No. 837 of 1930, Western Pacific Archives, Suva, Fiji. 8. Woodford to O'Brien, 29 August 1900, Western Pacific High Commission, Western Pacific Archives, Suva, Fiji. 91/00. 9. Not to be confused with New Guinea Pidgin's raus (rausim) [to be ousted, to throw o u t ] from the German raus. 10. Estimate based on data kindly provided by Joan Herlihy, Department of Human Geography, Australian National University, from samples taken on Santa Isabel and San Cristobal in 1976. 11. I am very grateful to Ian Frazer for his valuable information on Pidgin's use in the monocultural setting of the village. The remarks relating to elders' resentment reflect my own experience and not necessarily Frazer's. 12. Kakamora Reporter, March-April 1974, No. 4 2 , p. 4. 13. Kakamora Reporter, November 1972, No. 31, p. 16.
REFERENCES Bennett, J. A. (forthcoming), 'A history of trade and copra plantations in the Solomon Islands, c. 1800-1942'. Ph.D. thesis in preparation, Chapter 1, Australian National University, Canberra. Brenchley, J. L. (1873). Jottings During the Cruise of the H.M.S. Curagoa among the South Sea Islands in 1865. London, Longmans, Green. Chapman, M., Pirie, P., et al. (1974), Tasi Mauri: A Report on Population and Resources of the Guadalcanal Weather Coast. Honolulu, East-West Population Institute and University of Hawaii. Cheyne, A. (1852), A Description of Islands in the Western Pacific Ocean. London, Potter. - (1855), Sailing Directions from New South Wales, to China and Japan. London, Potter.
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Churchill, W. (1911), Beach-la-mar: The Jargon or Trade Speech of the Western Pacific. Washington, D.C., Carnegie Institution. Corns, P. R. (1973), Passage, Port and Plantations History of Solomon Islands Labour Migration 1870-1914. Melbourne, Melbourne University Press. Hilliard, D. L. (1966), 'Protestant missions in the Solomon Islands 1849-1942'. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Australian National University, Canberra. Laracy, Hugh (1976), Marists and Melanesians: A History of Catholic Missions in the Solomon Islands. Canberra, Australian National University Press. Price, C. A. with Baker, E. (1976), 'Origins of Pacific island labourers in Queensland, 1863-1904: a research not z', Journal of Pacific History 11(2) : 106-121.
C. BICHELAMAR (NEW HEBRIDES) by D. T. Tryon Although Muhlhausler, above in A.3.2., is confident that much progress has been made in the study of Bichelamar, and although this lingua franca has indeed received some attention from scholars in recent years, for example from Guy (1974), Camden (1975, 1977), and Clark (1977), it is much less well known and studied than New Guinea Pidgin. Prior to these studies, documentation on Bichelamar had been tantalizingly sketchy, notes and observations on it being found in Schuchardt (1883, 1889), Churchill (1911), Pionnier (1913), Jacomb (1914) and more recently Schmidt (1957). Among these the only detailed account is that of Pionnier, based on the pidgin spoken around Lamap, South Malekula in the 1890s. The five main stages in the development of a pidgin, distinguished by Muhlhausler above, in A.3.2., are certainly recognizable in the New Hebridean context, but with the important difference that the expansion of Bichelamar is not so much a socially conditioned phenomenon as it is in New Guinea Pidgin; rather, it appears that a series of regional pidgins have evolved in the New Hebrides, independent of the 'expansion stage', which is noted, mainly, in the highly urbanized areas of Luganville (Espiritu Santo) and Port Vila (Efate). A brief note on the history and geography of the New Hebrides will go some way towards explaining this state of affairs. The New Hebrides, an Anglo-French condominium, consists of approximately ninety islands, the communication between which leaves much to be desired, even at this late point in the twentieth century. There are 105 separate languages, all Austronesian, spoken in the New Hebrides archipelago (Tryon 1976), the subgrouping of which largely follows the main land masses. In terms of affiliation, even at this stage the 'man-island' concept dominates New Hebridean thinking, and regionalects of Bichelamar are evident, largely following the natural geographical separations imposed by expanses of often 'unpacific' ocean. The regional character of Bichelamar, even in urban centers, was underlined recently by Efatese (southern New Hebrides) reaction to an
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elementary manual of the language (Guy 1974), where the southerners rejected the material as 'Bislama blong Santo', the regionalect of the northern part of the group. The post-European contact history of the New Hebrides begins in the 1830s, when early whalers and sandalwood traders began operations in the area. They used a kind of English-based 'jargon' as a contact language with the New Hebrideans. In point of fact, this early date of contact suggests that the New Hebrides was probably the area of earliest pidgin development in Melanesia (Clark 1977:24). While reports vary as to the exact nature and content of the jargon used at this early period, the earliest text recorded from the New Hebrides dates from not later than 1859 (McFarlane 1873:106), while the first reference to 'sandalwood English' known to date occurs in 1865 (Paton 1894:6), in a letter f r o m the wife of the celebrated missionary John G. Paton. The London Missionary Society made a first abortive attempt at evangelizing the New Hebrides in 1839, ending with the murder of the Rev. John Williams on Erromanga. While Turner and Nesbit remained on Tanna in 1842-1843, because of hostility from the New Hebrideans, no further European missionaries were stationed in the New Hebrides until 1848, when Geddie arrived on Aneityum. The effect of the missions on the development of Bichelamar was not great at that period, as the policy was to use the vernacular for evangelical purposes. By the 1850s the sandalwooders and traders were active in many areas of the New Hebrides, and by the 1860s the recruiting of labor for the plantations in Queensland, Samoa and Fiji, with its attendant abuses and atrocities, had become a fact of life in the islands. For the remainder of the century the picture of mission endeavor and recruiter brutality prevailed. For the whole of the nineteenth century, then, New Hebrides Bichelamar could not be said to have passed jargon stage, if one may place any reliance on the documentary evidence of those times which has survived. In 1906 the New Hebrides Condominium was proclaimed, mainly as a result of often bitter dispute between French- and English-speaking traders, colonists and missionaries, as this seemed the only possible solution to the interminable wrangles which raged, particularly over land issues. As a result of the proclamation of the condominium, both sides were entitled to impose their own language and administrative systems in their areas of influence. However, in those early days education was entirely in the hands of the missions, so that areas were allegedly English- or French-speaking according to the religious persuasion of the chiefs of each particular region, for by this stage there were French-speaking Marist missionaries on the one side, and the English-speaking Presbyterian and Anglican missions on the other. By this time also, around the first decade of this century, considerable numbers of
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New Hebrideans had found their way home from the plantations overseas, not always to their original islands of course. During this period, a certain 'stabilization' of Bichelamar was taking place, but regionally, not nationally, as there was little contact between islands. That stabilization occurred between 1890 and 1910 in certain areas is attested by the diaries of Father Pionnier, a French missionary based at Lamap, Malekula, for much of the period. For, while most missions, b o t h Protestant and Roman Catholic, opted for the local vernacular as the vehicle of evangelization, a number of others, including that at Lamap, opted for Bichelamar as the tool to fulfill this function. Pionnier's notes show the stabilization of the regionalect of Bichelamar in use at Lamap, his testimony being all the more valuable as his diaries reveal that he did not know English and thus could not be suspected of introducing Anglicisms into the Bichelamar he reports. The diaries show that two superlatives, translated in Bichelamar by very and tumas, were competing at the time of his residence at Lamap, tumas eventually predominating. Other regional features, still preserved, are to be found in Father Colomb's arrangement of the Pionnier material (Pionnier 1913). Detailed research remains to be carried out into New Hebrides Bichelamar. It would appear, however, that by the end of the first decade or so of the twentieth century a number of regionalects of Bichelamar had evolved, each reflecting a particular contact history, similar to the case at Lamap. Camden (personal communication) has assured the writer that a southwest Santo regionalect of Bichelamar was a reality until recent times. The same situation has been noted in other areas of the New Hebrides. Since the 1960s and the advent of air transport and more reliable shipping, however, the regionalects have become less marked, being noticeable mainly in the speech of older speakers, although regionalism in lexicon and syntax is still apparent among even younger people who have not traveled beyond their home area. Returning to the original point, stabilization may be said to have been achieved in New Hebrides Bichelamar by about the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. The physical disposition of the islands, the dual administration and the lack of regular interisland contact, to say nothing of the suspicion with which New Hebrideans from different islands viewed one another, contributed to the isolation needed to preserve the regionalects which had sprung up. This situation continued uninterrupted until perhaps World War II, when New Hebrideans from different localities were thrown together for the first time since the days of the blackbirders nearly a century previously. The effects of the Second World War on the development of Bichelamar are difficult to estimate — the main contacts were with U.S. marines and airmen — as no obvious traces remain t o d a y . Since the war, as indeed before, Bichelamar has served as the lingua franca of administrators and planters when communicating with New Hebrideans,
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but more especially between New Hebrideans of different languages. One might add that it has served and still serves as a lingua franca between French and English monolingual planters and traders. In the pre-1960 period, however, Bichelamar was used only as a second choice to local vernaculars for evangelical purposes, scarcely at all written, and generally frowned upon by all European parties, be they civil servants or missionaries. The net result was that the regionalects described above continued to thrive and even expand within specific-geographical areas, while the nationwide contact required for real 'expansion' did not materialize because of the lack of contact on a wide scale, together with the fact that the New Hebrides has for some time been divided into four fairly autonomous administrative districts. In the late 1960s, however, urbanization came to the New Hebrides, largely occasioned by boom conditions and employment opportunities which prevailed at that time. During these years the Melanesian populations of Port Vila (Efate) and Luganville (Espiritu Santo) more than trebled, with people from all over the archipelago being thrown together in social and employment situations heretofore unknown. Marriages were contracted between couples of diverse linguistic groups, the language of the couple being Bichelamar. At the same time, broadcasting was born in the New Hebrides. This would normally be considered a powerful standardizing influence on Bichelamar, since there were and continue to be numerous broadcasts in that language. Until recently such has not proved to be the case, since first the standard of translation into Bichelamar from the metropolitan languages fell below acceptable standards, seriously impairing intelligibility, and second the power output of Radio Vila was insufficient to reach potential listeners outside the main island (Efate). In the last two or three years these deficiencies have to a large extent been remedied, with numerous Bichelamar programs now being broadcast which are not translated from or into the two metropolitan languages, English or French. The late 1960s and early 1970s also saw the appearance of newspapers for the first time in the New Hebrides, with increasing numbers of pages being devoted to Bichelamar news. (Currently New Hebrides News and Nabanga, published fortnightly by the British and French residencies respectively.) At the same time, relatively large numbers of New Hebrideans sought and found employment outside the New Hebrides, principally in New Caledonia. Added to this, and perhaps the most important single factor in the expansion of Bichelamar was the publication of a Bichelamar translation of the Four Gospels, Gud Nyus Bilong Jisas Krais, in 1971. Because of its wide distribution, this publication did much not just to expand Bichelamar, but to cross and in some cases overcome the regionalect situation which obtained throughout the group until a few years ago. Initial reaction to the translation was, of course, predictable — 'This is not the pidgin of my region' claimed many
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readers. However, general acceptance and accommodation to a standard form was not long in coming, and in fact because of this situation a translation of the whole New Testament into Bichelamar is now in train. In 1968-1969 New Hebridean politics emerged, at first in the form of land claims against individual planters and then against companies and the two administrations. Since that time, political development has moved quite rapidly, New Hebridean internal autonomy being attained on January 11, 1978 under Chief Minister, George Kalsakau, with Independence only two or three years away. Naturally this political evolution has been accompanied by much debate, and the language in which most of the debate has been waged has been Bichelamar. Indeed Bichelamar is one of the official languages of the current Representative Assembly. This fact, together with the acceptance of Bichelamar as a language fit for evangelism, has finally given this lingua franca status as a worthy vehicle in its own right in the eyes of New Hebrideans. All of the different forces mentioned above, together with regular contact and travel throughout the New Hebrides by increasing numbers of people, have led to the expansion of Bichelamar to its current point of development. Pidgin has certainly 'expanded', at least among the educated elite, but has retained and still retains its regional characteristics in nonurban areas. The creation or evolution of a standardized national Bichelamar, while in theory achieved, still has some distance to go, for regionalism dies hard, especially in the New Hebrides. Creolization has been reached in the case of a number of children of linguistically mixed marriages in the main centers of Port Vila and Luganville, especially the latter, but with pride in local vernaculars running high, the increase in 'creole' speakers will probably not be marked in the immediate future. Miihlhausler distinguishes a 'post-pidgin' or 'post-creole' stage in New Guinea Pidgin in A.3.2. With French and English competing as prestige metropolitan languages, the phenomenon described by Miihlhausler for NGP does not seem to apply to any great extent in the New Hebridean context. Anglicized or Francisized Bichelamar is not often heard from the lips of educated New Hebrideans speaking among themselves, although accommodation to European-type Bichelamar has been noted in mixed-group discussions and conversations. What has been observed on numerous occasions, however, is the wholesale introduction of complex English or French terms or phrases such as 'security council meeting', 'five year plan', or 'overdraft', without so much as an attempt at translation into Bichelamar. The language engineering phase of Bichelamar, then, may be said to be in its infancy. In sum, Bichelamar has obviously evolved considerably from the jargon it was in the 1830s and 1840s. Its study has barely begun, but what has been achieved suggests strongly that the detailed study of regionalects in the New
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11
Hebrides will become increasingly important for an understanding of this particular speech variety and for that of English-based Pacific pidgins in general.
REFERENCES Camden, W. G. (1975), 'Parallels in structure of lexicon and syntax between New Hebrides Bislama and the South Santo language spoken at Tangoa'. Paper presented at the International Conference on Pidgins and Creoles, Honolulu, January 1975. - (1977), A Descriptive Dictionary Bislama to English. Vila, Maropa Book Shop. Camden, W. G., editor (1971), GudNyusBilongJisas Krais. Bible Society - New Zealand. Churchill, W. (1911), Beach-la-mar: The Jargon or Trade Speech of the Western Pacific. Washington, D.C., Carnegie Institution. Clark, R. (1977), In search of Beach-La-Mar: Historical Relations among Pacific Pidgins and Creoles. Working Papers in Anthropology, Archaeology, Linguistics, Maori Studies 48. University of Auckland. Guy, J. B. M. (1974), Handbook of Bichelamar: Manuel de Bichelamar. Pacific Linguistics C-34. Jacomb, E. (1914), France and England in the New Hebrides. Melbourne, George Robertson. McFarlane, S. (1873), The Story of the Lifu Mission. London, James Nisbet. Paton, M. W. (1894), Letters and Sketches from the New Hebrides. London, Hodder and Stoughton. Pionnier, Rev. (1913), Pigeon English ou Bichelamar. Parlé universellement dans le Pacifique, recueilli par un Missionnaire Mariste et mis en ordre par le P.A.C.s.m. Paris. Librairie Klincksieck. Schmidt, H. (1957), 'Le Bichelamar', Etudes Mélanésiennes, Nouvelle Serie 1 0 - 1 1 : 1 1 9 136. Schuchardt, H. (1883), 'Kreolische Studien V: über das Melaneso-englische', Sitzungsberich te der k.k. Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Wien, Philosophisch-historische Klasse 105:131-161. - (1889), 'Beiträge zur Kenntnis des englischen Kreolisch. II: Melaneso-englisches', Englische Studien 13:158-162. Tryon, D . T . ( 1 9 7 6 ) , New Hebrides Languages: An Internal Classification. Pacific Linguistics C-50.
D. CONCLUSIONS by P. Mùhlhâusler As the 'some' in the title suggests, this account of southwest Pacific varieties of Pidgin English is not exhaustive. The question of Papuan Pidgin English is dealt with elsewhere in this volume, whilst the very important problem of the various Australian pidgins and Creoles (in particular Cape York, Roper River) has been omitted, as it is impossible to do justice to the very complex pidgincreole situation in Australia in a short survey such as this. Again, Torres Straits Pidgin-Creole English has not been mentioned. These pidgins, because of
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P. Miihlhausler, J. A. Bennett, and D. T. Tryon
their complex social history, are difficult t o accommodate within the framework of this article, i.e. one which distinguishes trade jargons, plantation pidgins and nativized pidgins and a potential five stages in the life cycle of these pidgins. Progress in the study of the Pacific pidgins is closely linked with progress in the understanding of the contact history of this area. The picture is one of great complexity. Sophisticated sociolinguistic models are required to provide answers to the numerous questions that can be asked about these languages.
Ethnography of Speaking
D O N LAYCOCK
Multilingualism: Linguistic Boundaries and Unsolved Problems in Papua New Guinea
0. INTRODUCTION In an earlier paper on multilingualism in the N e w Guinea area (Laycock 1966: 4 4 ) I wrote: It is only in recent years however that extensive bilingualism has been the case; to understand why, it is necessary to look at the linguistic background. In New Guinea and the surrounding islands there are upwards of five hundred, possibly as many as a thousand, different languages, showing every possible relationship to each other from near-dialect to 'probably unrelated'. In this situation one would expect a fair amount of bilingualism, but in fact in pre-European times native knowledge of other languages was apparently not as extensive as was, for example, the knowledge of other languages on the part of Australian aboriginals. There are a number of reasons for this: (1) there was often extreme dissimilarity between neighbouring languages; (2) the major language groups in New Guinea are relatively large, larger than in Australia, so that it was possible to travel a fair distance without encountering very different tongues; (3) many factors operate against contact between different linguistic groups. In the Sepik area the main social unit was the village, and even trading with other villages of the same linguistic community was fraught with suspicion. Trading was carried on across linguistic groups often in the form of 'silent trading', where, for example, hills natives would lay down their yams and sweet potato against the fish from the river, until an agreement was reached — but the more normal social interaction with other linguistic groups was warfare, where a knowledge of the other language was not necessary. Nevertheless, many natives did pick up at least smatterings of neighbouring languages, sometimes of several different languages, and there existed in native communities, as with us, a small proportion of people with an interest in foreign cultures and languages. In complex linguistic areas like the Sepik it was customary for young boys to be exchanged between villages at the age of about ten, so that they could grow up bilingual and mediate in disputes. But the knowledge of foreign languages was individual and restricted, so that comparatively little interlinguistic borrowing seems to have taken place. Issue is taken with this statement by Sankoff ( 1 9 7 7 ) , in the most comprehensive account of multilingualism in the New Guinea area to date. She argues for extensive multilingualism in pre-European times, on the basis of such contemporary ethnographic evidence as is available.
82
Don Lay cock
In fact there is no essential disagreement. My 1966 remarks must be seen in context. Firstly, at that time had just come the realization of the enormous linguistic complexity of the New Guinea area, a complexity which one might have expected to have produced almost universal multilingualism — but which did not. Secondly, the New Guinea situation was being contrasted with the then better-known Australian aboriginal one, and the initial impression — which still seems valid today — was that the number of different languages spoken by Australian aboriginals was, on the average, higher (per head of population) than the number of different languages spoken by their counterparts in Papua New Guinea. But the extensive linguistic chaining in Australia, together with the prevalence of small nomadic groups and extensive intergroup marriage, has probably contributed to making Australian aboriginals the leading contenders for being the most multilingual people in the world. If the New Guinea area has less multilingualism than Australia, the amount can still be great — perhaps as great, or greater, than anywhere else in the world. This paper examines some of the aspects of that multilingualism.
1. HOW MUCH MULTILINGUALISM?
Regrettably, we do not have very solid data on the linguistic competence, either in quantity (number of languages spoken) or quality (how well the languages are spoken) for multilinguals in the New Guinea area, and observations must therefore be based on far-reaching inferences drawn from such data as we do possess. A distinction must also be drawn between the precontact period and the post-European period, with enhanced mobility of peoples within the area and concomitant spread of lingue franche. Some estimate of the extent of multilingualism in recent years can be obtained from the language data in recent censuses — with due allowances for inaccuracies in the sampling. Sankoff (1977) analyzes the language data from the 1966 Population Census of Papua New Guinea, but the figures for the 1971 census were not available when her paper was written, so some discussion of them here is appropriate. Particularly significant are the changes apparent in the five years between the two censuses. Table 1 gives the basic population figures for speakers of the main nonindigenous languages — Tok Pisin, Police Motu, 1 and English — in respect of the indigenous population; percentage figures have been added, which (in all the tables) are to be read as 'percentage of males', 'percentage of females', and 'percentage of total'. 2 Table 2 gives similar data on the total numbers of speakers of each language, while Table 3 attempts to derive some figures relating to multilingual competence. From these tables it is apparent that the fastest growing language, overall,
•5 S
o c
cu Sj
Ä n. 5
a
XI
CS H
S
20,348 2.68
17,146 2.26
PM and English
1,458,055
1,369
698,396
820,289
769,306
1,589,595
1
Total indigenous population % increase
1
+70,910 +10.15
+60,630 +7.98
+9.02
+131,540
1
759,659
none of the above
not stated
-60,630 -8.44 -19,761 -9.10 745,112 46.87
470,792 61.20
274,320 33.44
805,742 55.31
490,553 70.30
315,189 41.53
Tien t—
%
+19,508 +1.07 +5,371 +0.64 +14,137 +1.49
47,027 2.96
9,114 1.18
37,913 4.62
27,519 1.89
23,776 3.13
3,743 0.54
m so
%
+5,250 +0.26
+1,434 +0.17 +3,816 +0.37
15,965 1.00
2,793 0.36
10,715 0.74
1,359 0.19
13,712 1.60
+5,979 +0.22
+4,705 +0.48 +1,274 -0.01
32,661 2.05
26,682 1.83
9,536 1.37
14,241 1.85
+94,161 +5.34
+32,267 +3.78
+61,894 +6.87
194,384 12.22
63,331 8.23
131,053 15.98
1
100,223 6.88 o