Workshop, La Trobe University, Melbourne, July 9 1994
The Workshop was organised by Patrick McConvell (Anthropology,
Northern Territory University) and Margaret Florey (previously
of the Centre for South-East Asian Studies, NT University, now
of Linguistics, La Trobe University), and took place during
the Australian Linguistic Institute being held at La Trobe.
There were 14 invited speakers at the workshop, from
Australia, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, the Cook Islands,
Indonesia, USA and Sweden: travel costs for six of these were
met wholly or partially by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for
Anthropological Research, while Australian Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Island speakers were assisted by the Australian
Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.
Copies of short versions of most of the papers were printed in
two booklets circulated prior to the workshop.80 people
participated in the workshop and their opinion was
overwhemingly that it was a highly successful event.
The aim of the workshop was to bring together speakers of
indigenous languages, academics working on endangered
languages of the region and on language shift and maintenance,
and people working on language maintenance intervention
programs, to exchange information on the wide variety of
language situations found in the region, and to address common
themes which are useful in explaining language shift and
intervening to reverse it, where communities want this.
The keynote address was delivered by Don Kulick of Linkoping
University, Sweden, author of Language Shift and Cultural
Reproduction which describes language shift to Tok Pisin in
Gapun, PNG. His emphasis was on the complexity of cultural
phenomena involved in language shift. Many of his themes
struck a chord with those familiar with situations elsewhere
in the region, such as acceleration of the rate of shift
because adults, because of cultural predispositions, tend to
speak the children's language back to them once the children
start to speak a new language all the time.
The workshop from that point on tended to move more towards
discussion of practical intervention issues, but participants
continually referred back to the theoretical points raised by
Kulick, echoing the intention of the organisers to bring
theory and practice closer together. The paper by Graham McKay
(Edith Cowan University) and Patrick McConvell (NTU) tried to
bridge that gap by describing a study being carried out for
the Australian Languages and Literacy Council comparing four
Australian indigenous language maintenance and revitalisation
programs, and assessing the relevance of Fishman's theory of
"reversing language shift" to these situations. One of the
themes here was the potential importance of "higher level"
functions such as education and media for increasing the
prestige of the old language by means of "feedback" - an
aspect mentioned, but not stressed, by Fishman, and an area
for which there is unfortunately almost no good research
available.
Ken Hale (MIT) outlined the catastrophic world situation of
endangered languages, and Bernd Heine (Cologne) pointed out
the role of CIPL and UNESCO in compiling a "Red Book" of
endangered languages and setting up a clearing house for
Pacific region language information in Japan.
The rest of the workshop was dominated by presentations by
speakers of indigenous languages of the region. Lorraine Injie
of the Pundulmurra College Aboriginal Language Worker's course
and Sue Smyth of the Wangka Maya, both of Port Hedland in the
Pilbara region of Western Australia talked about their own
language backgrounds and what they are doing to maintain
languages and train Aboriginal language workers - a key area
referred to by many speakers. This provided an interesting
contrast in one region, because children are no longer
speaking Lorraine Injie's language Panyjima, whereas Sue
Smyth's language Yinjiparnti is relatively strong, but could
come under severe threat very easily. These speakers
emphasised the strong connection between language and country
in Aboriginal Australia and the corresponding emphasis on
trips back to traditional country, and even setting up
communities in traditional country, in language maintenance
programs.
Marina Babia outlined the situation of the Torres Strait,
where shift to Torres Strait Creole ("Broken English" as it is
locally known) has claimed both the eastern language (Meriam
Mir) and western language (Kalaw Lagaw Ya/Kalaw Kawaw Ya) on
many islands and is continuing at present, leaving only the
far western islands - her home - with the old language
strongly maintained, even in a complex multilingual situation
involving KKY, Meriam, Broken, English and Kiwai, a language
from neighbouring Papua. Marina Babia has been teaching her
language (Kalaw Kawaw Ya) to speakers and mainly non-speakers
at Thursday Island High School for some years and she is now
seeing the beginnings of use of KKY by non-speakers at the
school.
Helen Syme of the Cook Islands Education Department described
the situation in which language shift to English is occurring
rapidly in the capital island Rarotonga, whereas other islands
are maintaining Rarotongan (Cook Islands Maori) and other
dialects (which another participant said should be classified
as other languages). After a period where use of C.I. Maori
was punished in schools, bilingual education beginning with
C.I. Maori and transferring to English was established some
years ago, but rapid rethinking of the program is now
necessary with children entering the school speaking only
English and sometimes with negative attitudes to C.I. Maori.
The afternoon session began with two presentations from Papua
New Guinea, from Otto Nekitel and Nick Faraclas, both of the
Department of Languages and Literature, University of PNG.
Otto Nekitel presented a comprehensive survey of the roughly
850 indigenous languages of PNG showing 5 are recently
extinct, at least 50 others are moribund, and a large number
of others may be severely threatened. Some discussion was
engendered by the statement found in the literature that
languages with less than 10,000 speakers would have to be
considered endangered in the modern world, in the light of the
fact that many Pacific region languages have never had that
many speakers. However while it is true that small languages
can survive, other evidence pointed to by Nekitel indicates
that many speakers of PNG languages like his own (Abu') are
shifting to Tok Pisin (an English based Pacific Pidgin/Creole)
as they adopt a "modern" lifestyle. Nekitel drew attention to
the fact that languages and their situation had not been
systematically researched in PNG and hoped that the proposed
Institute of PNG languages would work on this task.
Nick Faraclas' paper looked at the opposite side of the coin:
intervention and successful language maintenance. He described
the establishment of many locally run projects in PNG focussed
not so much on language maintenance as on "critical literacy"
which enabled people not just to read and write in their own
languages but to "read" and take control of their own lives.
He was critical of "top-down" approaches to literacy and
language maintenance.
Jerry Taki of Erromango in Vanuatu, who works on recording
local languages with the Vanuatu Cultural Centre, gave a paper
on the work of their team, with the assistance of Jeff Siegel,
of Linguistics, University of New England. The situation
described was mainly one of language death caused by
introduced epidemic disease which wiped out or nearly wiped
out whole language groups in the early twentieth century. As
the population recovers from that, the language team are
recording what is left of those languages from old speakers.
Vanuatu like PNG has a large number of languages (perhaps
600). People are shifting from smaller to larger languages in
some cases; while no shift to the lingua franca Bislama (the
local variety of Pacific Pidgin English) is going on on
Erromango, it may be on other islands.
Finally two reports were given from Eastern Indonesia. Henk
Rumbewas of Northern Territory University described the
situation of his language Biak in Irian Jaya. Once a
widespread and powerful language of the north coast, the
Indonesian government has tried to suppress it and replace it
with the national language Bahasa Indonesia. This combined
with a massive influx of Javanese and Balinese transmigrants
accompanying development projects on Biak land has caused a
situation in which Rumbewas feels it is likely that the Biak
language will soon disappear. Threes Kumanireng surveyed the
situation further west in Nusa Tenggara (Flores -her home -
Sumba and Timor - where she works, at Nusa Cendana University-
and other islands), where the prospects for local languages
are somewhat better, although still affected by strong
emphasis on use of Bahasa Indonesia in education, media and
government. Recent moves towards allowing use of local
languages in education may allay the shift from minority
languages which is going on, if properly supported and funded.
Two discussants Nick Thieberger, of the Australian Institute
of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies and Charlene
Sato of the University of Hawai'i drew out some points from
the day's papers. Both stressed how embedded language shift
and maintenance issues are in social issues like indigenous
land rights and resistance to cultural homogenisation.
Charlene Sato referred to the recent rapid development of
Punana Leo ("language nests") to revitalise the Hawai'ian
language through a coalition of native Hawai'ians alienated
from the mainstream education system and academic linguists,
and the relationship between Basque language maintenance and
workers' cooperaives.
In general discussion, questions were raised about the
relationship between the endangered languages movement among
linguists and the movement for language maintenance, and the
appropriateness, for instance, of a clearing house in Japan as
a focus for UNESCO funding of activity in the Pacific. Some
discussion centred around why some languages of wider
sociality become so dominant as to cause shift. While some
speakers tried to clarify the concept of "prestige" as applied
to languages, others, like Otto Nekitel, felt it may be an
inappropriate and confusing concept in countries like PNG. One
of the common themes emerging from several places was the
relationship between languages and the land which people see
as home.
All agreed that a priority was for linguists to produce
relevant and accessible information which can be used in local
programs, and to make the message that use of one language
does not necessarily preclude the use of another better heard
in key areas such as teacher education. An important point was
to allow indigenous people of the Pacific nations themselves
to decide the agenda for language work and for academics to
engage in collaborative research with local people. In this
process mutual aid between Pacific groups was essential so
that ideas from various places could be successfully adapted
to other situations.
In a brief final session and two other meetings following the
workshop, an attempt was made to take some steps toward such a
mutual aid network in language maintenance. The PALM (Pacific-
Australia Language Maintenance) Network was established. In
the first instance the email list NAT-LANG (Languages of
Aboriginal Peoples) is to be used as a forum (NAT-
LANG@tamvm1.tamu.edu) Later projects might include extension
of the email network by fax distribution, a separate email
list, a hard-copy newsletter, and publication of a book from
the workshop.