Language Contact in New Guinea (original) (raw)
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Language Contact and Language Change in the Sepik Region of New Guinea: The Case of Yalaku
2020
Yalaku is one of the smallest members of the Ndu language family of the Sepik region of New Guinea. Spoken in a hilly area off the Sepik river, Yalaku has been in intensive contact with the unrelated Kwoma for several generations. Comparison between Yalaku and closely related Manambu shows the presence of a number of grammatical patterns borrowed from Kwoma, alongside a number of loanwords. Tok Pisin, the lingua franca of Papua New Guinea, is known to every speaker of Yalaku, with the two languages in a diglossic relationship. Lexical loans from Tok Pisin are avoided; however, Tok Pisin impact is being felt in the pronunciation patterns by younger speakers, calques, and the presence of two borrowed grammatical forms—the possessive verb and the negator. Cultural and linguistic factors suggest an explanation for this seemingly curious development.
Worlds apart: language survival and language use in two Middle Sepik communities
This contribution focuses on the language situation in two different communities of the Middle Sepik area, speaking closely related languages of the Ndu family – the Manambu and the Yalaku. The two groups maintain traditional features typical of 'river-dwellers' who live on the banks of the Sepir River (the Manambu) and those who live of the River, or 'jungle-dwellers' (the Yalaku), including subsistence and exchange patterns. Due to a history of interactions with the Kwoma-speaking people, the Yalaku language has incorporated numerous borrowings and grammatical calques from Kwoma (not genetically related to the Ndu family to which both Manambu and Yalaku belong). In contrast, there is hardly any Manambu-Kwoma multilingualism. A major difference between the two groups lies in the high number of loans from Tok Pisin in Manambu and the scarcity of them in Yalaku. The paper addresses the changes in the life styles of the two groups, contrasting their responses to social and cultural changes as reflected in linguistic change and in attitudes to language.
The rise and fall of English in a trilingual village in Papua New Guinea
Two major debates in contemporary linguistics are the fate of thousands of small languages, doomed to disappear by the end of this century, on the one hand, and the spread of English to become the only truly global language, on the other. While both trends – the extinction of small languages and the spread of English – are undeniable facts, far less has been said about the area in between. An implicit conclusion from the two trends mentioned would be that more and more languages will die and ultimately be replaced by English. However, the processes happening in the ‘middle field’ are much more complex. I will describe the sociolinguistic situation of a Papua New Guinean village which is currently trilingual. The traditional language of the area is the Papuan language Iatmul; on the national level, the dominant language in education, business, and administration, is English; and the regional, and increasingly national, lingua franca is Tok Pisin. Currently, Tok Pisin is the language best known among the villagers, as all generations are fluent in it. Next in competence comes Iatmul, which is the native language of most adults, but has been relegated to second-language status for the children, who could be labelled semi-speakers. Finally, English, which is well known by many in the middle generation, who were educated in schools still characterized by the legacy of an English-speaking colonial administration. English is less well known among the elder and the younger generation. I will then compare the trilingual situation of today with the situation of previous generations, which were ultimately monolingual in Iatmul, reconstruct how subsequent generations became bi- or trilingual, and finally present an outlook into the future, where monolingualism in Tok Pisin is likely to prevail. Thus, while the Iatmul situation confirms scenario I, the disappearance of small languages, it does not confirm scenario II, the spread of English. Surveys among the Iatmul confirm that English has the highest prestige, but is the least used, while Tok Pisin is the language with the lowest prestige, but at the same time the most widely known, and the one to ultimately oust both Iatmul and English. I will discuss the sociocultural background and environment in which language shift is taking place, to explain the discrepancy between professed prestige and actual use. My paper is based on intense long-term immersion fieldwork of 14 months, between 2005 and 2008.
Predicting the Ethnolinguistic Vitality of an Endangered Philippine Language: The Case of Three Batak Communities in Palawan Teresita D. Tajolosa Palawan State University published in Asia-Pacific Linguistics, 2015 released under Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0) teestajolosa@gmail.com The aim of the study was to examine the ethnolinguistic vitality of three Batak communities in Palawan and predict whether language maintenance or shift will prevail, drawing on by Tajfel and Turner’s (1986) Social Identity Theory , Giles, Bourhis, and Taylor’s (1977) theory of ethnolinguistic vitality, Bourhis’ (1979) ethnolinguistic vitality model, and Allard and Landry’s (1987) macroscopic model of bilingualism. Batak, Kalakuasan and Mangapin demonstrated positive language attitude and very high ethnic identity, reported high Batak language ability which correlated with actual language proficiency, reported more domains of language use and exhibited medium to strong beliefs in ethnolinguistic vitality. Structural analysis of data from the objective language test revealed replacements of Batak lexicon by Tagbanua and Cuyonon counterparts. However, examination of sentence translation data for grammatical morphemes revealed a relatively intact set of Batak grammatical morphemes. Findings in the present study have established the following variables– (1) age, (2) actual language proficiency, (3) language attitude, (4) ethnic identity and interpersonal network of linguistic contacts as predictors of language contact, shows clearly that despite individuals’ own set of which shows clearly that despite individuals’ own set of language habits, it is the behavior of the majority that distinguishes a certain language group. Overall, the speakers in all three areas have generally demonstrated in varying degrees, additive bilingualism/multilingualism in that the learning of Tagalog, Tagbanua and Cuyonon did not entail the loss of the Batak language. While Tagalog is indisputably dominant in the domains of school, church, politics, media and public interactions, and while Tagbanua and Cuyonon have shown influence in Batak language, none of these three languages is embraced as a Batak identity marker, hence the Batak language continually occupies the domains of home, neighborhood and work in all three areas. Keywords: sociological factors, ethnolinguistic vitality, ethnic identity, language attitude, language loss