Of Birds (Pidgins) and Conquest

The Silisili Survey, on which we depart in three days, is different from any of the surveys I’ve done before. Prior surveys have taken me to areas and languages never before surveyed. The Silisili area, by contrast, has been surveyed at least twice.

Why go again? Shouldn’t once be enough? With 800+ languages to get to, do we really have time to repeat some of them? The problem is LANGUAGE SHIFT.

In a country where you can leave your village, walk five miles, and meet people speaking an entirely unrelated language, language shift is bound to occur. Another catalyst is foreign forces. A century ago missions came into the country and picked a language to work in, making it the official church language. One language went from about 600 to something like 70,000 speakers this way!

Perhaps most influential in today’s PNG in Tok Pisin, the trade language. Tok Pisin was created on plantations over a century ago, when foreign bosses and PNG’an workers created a pidgin language to communicate (check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin for a definition). It has now become the primary trade language of PNG, and is, in fact, one of the reasons we surveyors can do our work. Think about it: 100 years ago, we wouldn’t have been able to communicate with the people we go to survey. Now, most people in the villages we visit know Tok Pisin.

Back to language shift. Shift towards Tok Pisin happens for a number of reasons. 1) In many areas it is the language of business and education. Want your children to go to school and get good jobs? You’re probably going to encourage them to speak Tok Pisin rather than your own vernacular, even at home. Live on the ocean and want to trade fish for garden food with inland peoples? You’ll use Tok Pisin to bargain. Need to get a job with the nearby timber or mining company? Tok Pisin is a requirement.

2) Another reason for shift is low prestige. A language or people group can become looked down on for quite a few reasons, but if it has such a reputation, you’re probably going to avoid speaking it, right? On a previous survey we found a situation where language X had tried to force the women of language Y to marry their own men. When there was resistance, they took stronger measures and killed a bunch of language Y’s people. They still live side by side today, but only one speaker of language Y remains, and even for him, much of language X’s vocabulary has crept into his own. Linguistic conquest. Of course it’s about more than language, it’s about tribal identity. But language is inextricably woven into that identity in most cases.

3) It’s worth mentioning that language shift isn’t always premeditated or intentional. If you grew up somewhere where your parents speak a vernacular but your schoolmates, friends, and siblings speak Tok Pisin, you’re probably going to speak mostly Tok Pisin, right? This often happens in the States with children of immigrants, who grow up speaking English and learn very little of the language of their parents.

Why do we need to know about language shift? As surveyors, one of our primary responsibilities is assessing language vitality. Is the language alive, used for a variety of purposes, and likely to continue to be used in future generations? Ok, that’s a good reason to send in translators. If it’s not likely to be used in future generations, it is much less likely a translation team will be sent. When you consider it often takes 10 to 15 years to complete just the New portion of the Book, you can see why it’s important to us that it’s going to be used!

Can significant language shift have happened in the 21 years since the last survey? Yes, definitely. It’s our job to find out whether it has.