Abstract
Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu are three independent Melanesian Pidgin-speaking polities to the north-east of Australia. The largest, Papua New Guinea, with an area of 461, 690 sq km (178, 258 sq miles), occupies the eastern half of the Island of New Guinea, and includes about 600 smaller islands of the Bismarck Archipelago, and Bougainville. It is roughly twice the size of the United Kingdom and more than 10 per cent larger than California. It has a population of 4, 705, 126. (See Appendix A, Figure 15.) The Solomon Islands to the east of Papua New Guinea and to the south-east of Bougainville are 28, 450 sq km (10, 985 sq miles) in area with a population of 455, 429. The landmass of the group is similar in size to Maryland, Vermont or Belgium. (See Appendix A, Figure 16.) Vanuatu, an archipelago of 13 large islands and 70 smaller ones, lies to the south of the Solomons with an area of 14, 760 sq km (5, 699 sq miles) and a population of 189, 036. It is about 20 per cent smaller than Kuwait, but larger than Connecticut. (See Appendix A, Figure 17.)
Melanesia traditionally includes Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu (covered in this chapter) as well as Irian Jaya (see Note 2; Chapter 6), New Caledonia (see Chapter 1 on French possessions) and sometimes Fiji.
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Notes
Irian Jaya, or Propinsi Papua as the Indonesians call it, was initially retained by the Netherlands when Indonesia became independent in 1950. It was ceded to Indonesia in 1963 through the United Nations and agreed to remain part of Indonesia in 1969 by an ‘Act of Free Choice’. The one million plus inhabitants speak perhaps 250 different languages, many of which are small—setting aside the 16 largest languages with 10, 000 or more speakers, the remaining languages have an average of 2, 000 speakers and half have fewer than 1, 000 speakers. Transmigration from other parts of Indonesia, particularly Java, has introduced Javanese and Bahasa Indonesia. The intermarriage of migrants, with their high status languages, into small language groups, and the general high status of Indonesian as the language of economic and political power has lead to significant language shift in Propinsi Papua (see Walker 1993). Thus, while Propinsi Papua is ethnically part of Melanesia, and members of the Free Papua movement have been fighting / negotiating with Indonesia for independence, it has no recent common history with the rest of Melanesia nor has Melanesian Pidgin developed there.
Pidgin Yamas is pretty well moribund now. It was part of the pre-contact linguistic ecology, but there is little place left for it today with the spread of Tok Pisin.
Tok Pisin is accorded some constitutional recognition, we are informed, in that naturalised citizens must demonstrate an ability to communicate in Tok Pisin, Hiri Motu or a local vernacular.
According to the 1989 census statistics cited by Crowley (2000b: 117 – 118), 91.9 per cent of the population aged six years and over could speak Bislama while only 4.8 per cent said they could speak Bislama, English and French.
Technically this need not be the case. A descriptive grammar and dictionary could list all the forms in use. However, such material would be very extensive and difficult to gather, produce and use; even when materials are labelled descriptive, the authority conveyed through publication may mean they take on prescriptive characteristics.
The Kadazandusun language (Sabah’s largest indigenous language) provides an example of the former—indigenous choice, and the problems faced by oral cultures when they are supplemented by a written one. In Sabah there are 13 Dusunic languages consisting of coastal (Kadazan) and central (Dusun) language chains. Not only is there language variation, but even what to call the language was problematic (hence, Kadazandusun). Without agreement on nomenclature and standardisation, dictionary and teaching materials would have been fragmented and difficult to introduce into schools under Malaysia’s POLs policy (Asman Haji Omar 1992a). The community felt the language was deteriorating and wanted it taught in schools. The compromises arrived at created a standard written language with a new trilingual dictionary (Kadazandusun, Malay English) and in 2000 there were 19, 731 primary students studying the language in 440 primary schools (Lasimbang and Kinajil 2000). As this is a new program it is too early to tell whether this standardisation will undermine the dialect variation or contribute to long term language maintenance, but many people in the community feel that school-based literacy is necessary. Mülhäusler (2000: 348 ff.) presents an example of the latter—a missionary-based choice. In 1892 the Lutheran missionaries identified five principal dialects of Kâte, a language in Papua New Guinea, and there were 4 other languages in the area with a 65 per cent lexicostatistical word list overlap. This diversity was problematic for mission goals and the Wemo dialect of Kâte was adopted as the mission standard. The result of this is that 1) the other four dialects of Kâte have effectively been supplanted, 2) the four lexically related languages have become more structurally or lexically similar to Kâte, 3) the missionary version of Kâte reflects the ideolect of one of the missionaries and is based on a simplified ‘foreigner talk’ version of the language, and 4) the Wemo version of Kâte has gained status vis a vis other languages upsetting the egalitarian attitudes generally expressed about languages. While it is clear that this choice by Lutheran missionaries has introduced language shift and changed the language ecology, what we can not say is what the situation would be like if this intervention had not occurred, although we can be certain that there would have been language change. Finally after 110 years we still don’t know whether these changes mean that some version of Kâte is more or less likely to survive another century. Crowley (2000b, 2001: 240) presents a contrasting outcome and argues that Mülhäusler has “over-dramatised the negative aspects of the impact of missionary policy on Pacific languages.” He cites the case of Erromango in Vanuatu where early missionary translations of the Bible into Erromangan in 1864 are difficult for current speakers of the language to read due to lexical and grammatical ‘errors’. These problems may have occurred because a) the language has changed, b) the translation was poor, c) the translator felt a need to introduce new features into the language or d) some combination of these factors. A hymnal and catechisms—produced in 1867 and containing this unusual usage—continue to be used today in a community that is very religious (i.e., this language is used in Church once or twice a week). Despite the common use of these rare features in print form— secular materials only appeared in 1997—these features “do not appear in the normal spoken language at all ...” (Crowley 1991:247). Thus in Erromangan (and a number of other languages), a dyglossic Situation appears to exist. The introduction of a domain specific standardised variant form appears to have had little or no cross-over effect on popular speech or casual writing despite its long history and prestige usage. Thus, while standardisation typically leads to a reduction in linguistic diversity in various parts of the world, an example such as this indicates it can also add to complexity.
Kale (1990) points out that while the English-medium educational system was in many respects dysfunctional, there were no easy alternatives. The elites were committed to English, and English was a neutral language. Tok Pisin was a New Guinea language, although it had spread and was used extensively around the capital Port Moresby. It also had the stigma of a pidgin attached to it. Hiri Motu was a Papua regional lingua franca and the vernacular languages were too small and too many, and often associated with particular religious groups. The easiest political decision was to do nothing. For a description of the contexts and causes of illiteracy through the enforcement of the English only policy in the educational system, see Ahai and Faraclas (1993).
Siegel (1997c) has been involved over a ten year period in an evaluation of a community-based prep Tok Pisin program run by the Pacific Island Ministries in the Ambunti District of the Sepik Province. A statistical analysis of 3 three small cohorts of students, comparing those who had ‘prep’ versus those with ‘no prep’ on English, Maths and General school-based achievement tests taken over several years found that the mean scores of prep students were significantly higher and that non-prep students did not catch up with prep students over time. The study suggests that learning a pidgin language (Tok Pisin) does not interfere with the subsequent learning of the standard form of the lexifier language (English). Whether the achievement differences found are due to the additional two years of pre-schooling, or whether the results would be even better if the programs were in English, remain unanswered questions. However, the resources for implementing English based programs are not available so the latter question remains purely theoretical. The results are in line with common recommendation that initial schooling be in a familiar language. Evaluations of TPPS programs has generally been positive in terms of their impact on primary schooling (see Siegel 1997a:210–211 for a summary).
According to Siegel (1997a: 209) these include “the Saskawa Peace Foundation, CODE (Canadian Organization for Development through Education), UNESCO, UNDP, UNICEF, the World Bank, The Asia Development Bank, the EEC and the governments of Australia, Canada, Japan and New Zealand. Some of the funds go directly to the various NGOs that are directly involved, while others go through the central government for specific training programmes, materials and equipment.” Other funds come from school fees, local churches, and local and regional governments.
These constraints are worth listing here because they are common problems that Baldauf and Kaplan have observed first hand in their work in various parts of the Pacific Basin. While some have been resolved with time, money and development (e.g., in the rural primary school where Baldauf taught in Sabah in the 1960s, 12 of the 14 teachers were ‘pupil teachers’—Primary 6 graduates recruited into teaching with no training); others are continuing and recognisable as problems in countries like Australia when teacher proficiency in second languages being taught in schools is a problem Departments of Education are grappling with or where recruiting teachers to work in rural areas is a problem.
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Kaplan, R.B., Baldauf, R.B. (2003). Language Planning in Melanesia. In: Language and Language-in-Education Planning in the Pacific Basin. Language Policy, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0145-7_11
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