Pacific LanguagesPacificLanguagesAN INTRODUCTIONJohn Lynch© 1998 University of Hawai‘i PressAll rights reservedPrinted in the United States of America98 99 00 01 02 03 5 4 3 2 1Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataLynch, JohnPacific languages: an introduction / [John Lynch].p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 0–8248–1898–9 (alk. paper)1. Pacific Area—Languages. I. Title.P381.P3L96 1998499—dc21 97–24552CIPUniversity of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet theguidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library ResourcesDesigned by Josie HerrThis book is licensed under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), whichpermits readers to freely download and share the work in print or electronic for-mat for non-commercial purposes, so long as credit is given to the author.Derivative works and commercial uses require permission from the publisher.For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.The Creative Commons license described above does not apply to any materialthat is separately copyrighted. Please refer to the credit lines and source nota-tions in the book to determine the copyright holders for images and other third-party material.The open-access ISBNs are 9780824842581 (PDF) and 9780824881832(EPUB).The open-access editions of this publication were made possible by The Univer-sity of the South Pacific (USP) OER Course Conversion Grant. This competitivefunding program is open to all USP faculty and staff wishing to integrate openmaterials into mainstream teaching and learning.ToAndonia,Brendan,andStevenContentsIllustrations xPreface xiiiAcknowledgments xviiTerms Used xixChapter 1 Linguistics: Some Basic Concepts 11.1. The Structure of Language 11.2. Common Grammatical Categories and Functions 51.3. Reconstructing Linguistic History 9Part 1: Geography and History 21Chapter 2 The Languages of the Pacific 232.1. How Many Languages? 232.2. Linguistic Demography 272.3. Language Names 402.4. A Brief History of Pacific Language Research 41Chapter 3 The History of the Austronesian Languages 453.1. The Austronesian Family 453.2. The Oceanic Languages 46VII3.3. The Settlement of Oceania 513.4. Reconstructing Culture 58Chapter 4 The History of the Papuan and Australian Languages 604.1. Interrelationships of Papuan Languages 614.2. Interrelationships of Australian Languages 684.3. Possible External Links 694.4. Implications for Prehistory 69Part 2: Structure 73Chapter 5 Sound Systems 755.1. Oceanic Languages 755.2. Papuan Languages 875.3. Australian Languages 915.4. Orthographies 945.5. Summary 99Chapter 6 Oceanic Languages: Grammatical Overview 1006.1. Pronouns 1006.2. Nouns and Noun Phrases 1056.3. Possessive Constructions 1226.4. Verbs and the Verb Complex 1306.5. Sentences 1486.6. Similarities and Differences 165Chapter 7 Papuan Languages: Grammatical Overview 1667.1. Pronouns 1667.2. Nouns and Noun Phrases 1697.3. Possessive Constructions 1717.4. Verbs and the Verb Complex 1727.5. Sentences 177Chapter 8 Australian Languages: Grammatical Overview 1858.1. Pronouns 1858.2. Nouns and Noun Phrases 1878.3. Possessive Constructions 1948.4. Verbs and the Verb Complex 1958.5. Sentences 198VIII ContentsPart 3: The Social and Cultural Context 203Chapter 9 Languages in Contact 2059.1. The Social Context of Language Contact 2059.2. The Linguistic Effects of Contact 2089.3. Three Case Studies 2139.4. Historical Implications 218Chapter 10 Pidgins, Creoles, and Koines 22010.1. Pidginization, Creolization, and Koineization 22010.2. Melanesian Pidgin 22110.3. The Pidgins of the Motu Traders 23210.4. Fiji Hindi 235Chapter 11 Language, Society, and Culture in the Pacific Context 23711.1. The Vocabulary of Pacific Languages 23711.2. Counting Systems 24411.4. Languages in Use 25611.5. Language Use in Pacific Nations 26111.6. Shift, Survival, Death, Revival 268Conclusion Ideas about Pacific Languages 272Suggestions for Further Reading 279Appendices 2831. Data Sources 2852. Phonetic Symbols 2913. Sample Phoneme Systems 2954. Glossary of Technical Terms 299Notes 313References 321Index 345Contents IXIllustrationsTables1. Pacific languages by region and country2. Polynesian Outliers3. Languages of Melanesia4. Papuan language families5. Anejom̃ pronouns6. Baniata independent pronounsFigures1. Genetic relationship2. Subgroups of a family3. Subgroups of Proto East-Central Papuan4. Establishing migration patterns5. Time limits on comparative linguistics6. An Austronesian family tree7. The Polynesian subgroup8. Partial classification of Anejom̃ terms for marine life9. A moiety system10. Njamal kinship terms11. Anejom̃ kinship termsXMaps1. Reconstructing migration patterns2. The Pacific3. Languages of Polynesia4. Languages of Micronesia5. Languages of Fiji and Rotuma6. New Caledonia7. Vanuatu8. Solomon Islands9. Papua New Guinea10. Irian Jaya11. Australia12. Austronesian languages13. Oceanic subgroups in Melanesia14. Austronesian migrations15. Papuan language families16. Possible wider groupings of Papuan familiesIllustrations XIPrefaceThis book was born out of frustration. I have lost count of the number oftimes people have asked me to recommend to them a “good general bookon the languages of the Pacific.” There are any number of good specialist ortechnical books on the Austronesian languages as a whole, or on the Papuanlanguages, or on Australian languages, or on certain subgroups or individuallanguages—but virtually all of these are aimed at readers who have studieda considerable amount of linguistics.There are, however, many nonlinguists who want or need to know some-thing about the languages of this region. Language is an important topic ofconversation, an important political and social phenomenon, in many if notall Pacific countries and territories. Pacific peoples want to know more abouttheir languages—what other languages they are related to, where they camefrom, how they compare with, say, English and French, what the other lan-guages in the region are like. People working in Pacific countries need somegeneral information on the languages of the country or the region to assistthem in their work and in their appreciation of the cultures and societiesof the Pacific. Teachers, sociologists, community workers, government offi-cers, high school and university students—all are affected by language, andmost would like to know more.Hence this book. It has been a long time in the making, but I hope thatit will serve a useful purpose. I have tried to steer a middle course betweenbeing too simplistic and being too technical. Obviously, to provide detailedcoverage in any book of the sound systems and grammars of fourteen hun-dred languages, their interrelationships and connections with languagesoutside the region, their history and current status, and the relationshipsbetween language, culture, and social organization is quite impossible.XIIIWhat I have tried to do is to give the general reader a feel for what theselanguages are like (with a minimum of references) and at the same timeoffer linguists something to get their teeth into (with references to sourcesthey can follow up).The book has three major sections. Part 1 describes the geographicaldistribution of Pacific languages and attempts to summarize what is knownof their history. Part 2 is an overview of the phonological and grammaticalstructure of these languages. This discussion is far from exhaustive. Manyareas (e.g., complex sentences) and many thorny problems (e.g., the Polyne-sian “passive”) are omitted or glossed over. But there is enough informationto give a general picture of what Pacific languages are like, in what waysthey are similar, and how they differ both from each other and from met-ropolitan languages like English or French. Part 3 looks at the relationshipbetween Pacific societies and cultures and their languages from a number ofdifferent points of view. In the Pacific as elsewhere, language is very much asocial and cultural phenomenon.The careful reader will notice a bias toward Oceanic languages in part2. This results partly from my own professional background and partly fromthe fact that, while there are good general surveys of Papuan and Australianlanguages (Foley 1986 and Dixon 1980), there is nothing comparable forOceanic languages.The orthography I use in citing language data is generally the standardorthography of the language. For languages lacking such an orthography,I have used a standard set of phonetic symbols (see appendix 2). This hasoften meant modifying the orthography of the original sources. Similarly, Ihave consistently used the same name for the same language, even whensome sources use different names.Phrase and sentence examples are presented as shown below.FijianE ā rai-ci irau na yalewa na cauravou.he PAST see- (TRANS) them:two the woman the youth‘The young man saw the two women.’• The first line, in italics, is the phrase or sentence in that language,with hyphens marking morpheme breaks within a word; underlin-ing is used to focus on the particular aspect of grammar beingdiscussed (in this example, the transitive suffix -ci).• The second line is a word-by-word and morpheme-by-morphemetranslation. Where a single morpheme expresses more than oneitem of meaning, these are separated by a colon (thus irau ‘theXIV Prefacetwo of them’ is glossed as ‘them:two’). Grammatical categories aregiven in capitals; a few of these are abbreviated (thus TRANS = tran-sitive), and a list of all such abbreviations appears below. I havetried not to be too technical with these grammatical terms, andhave used, for example, “the” or “with” rather than abbreviationslike ART (for article) and COM (for comitative), even if these aresometimes too general. Readers interested in more technical as-pects of the grammars of any languages cited should consult thesources (appendix 1).• The last line, in single quotation marks, is the free English translation.I have tried to be consistent in my use of grammatical terms throughoutthe book, even where this means using a different term from that in the orig-inal source. So, for example, I consistently use “continuous,” even thoughsome writers may have used terms like “progressive” or “durative,” and Iuse “completive” where others use “perfective.” I have used small capitalswhen a technical term is introduced for the first time in the text. There is aglossary of such terms in appendix 4.I have generally not directly quoted sources of language data in the text,since this would unnecessarily clutter the text with references. However, alist of data sources for all languages from which data are cited can be foundin appendix 1, and the languages’ locations are indicated on maps 3 through7. I have also provided suggestions for further reading at the end of thebook.Preface XVAcknowledgmentsThis book originally appeared in 1993 as an in-house text for the Universityof the South Pacific course “Structure of Pacific Languages.” I am grateful tostudents for their feedback about this earlier version, and to Donn Bayard,Barbara Hau‘ofa, Andrew Horn, Ross McKerras, Macha Paris, Mere Pulea,Jeff Siegel, Matthew Spriggs, Jan Tent, Randy Thaman, Howard Van Trease,Vilimaina Vakaciwa, and the Department of Geography of the University ofthe South Pacific, who either commented on parts of the earlier version orprovided useful information.I take particular pleasure in expressing my gratitude to Niko Besnier,Terry Crowley, Ken Rehg, Malcolm Ross, and Nick Thieberger, withoutwhose assistance this book would not be what it is. I reserve, of course, allblame for errors and misinterpretations.I am also deeply indebted to a number of Pacific people who haveopened the doors of their languages to me. I am especially grateful to JohnDavani, Tom Hiua, John Naupa, Julie Piau, Tu‘a Taumoepeau-Tupou, PhilipTepahae, and Apenisa Tusulu, to the people of Uje and Anelcauhat (Ane-ityum) and west Tanna in Vanuatu, and to my tambus in Kond and Anigl inPapua New Guinea.My sons Brendan and Steven have lived with this book over the past fewyears, and the backs of discarded drafts have been of great use in helping todevelop their artistic talents. My wife Andonia has been a source of constantencouragement, and I am eternally grateful for her love and support. I ded-icate this book to them.XVIITerms UsedThe following abbreviations are used in the text:* (a) marks a phrase or sentence as ungrammatical; (b) marks aphoneme or word as having been reconstructed for someproto-languageø zero1 first person2 second person3 third personC:S construct suffixDIFF:SUBJ different subjectEXC exclusiveINC inclusiveNOM nominalizerO objectPL pluralPOSS possessiveS subjectSG singularSAME:SUBJ same subjectTRANS transitiveV verbXIXCHAPTER1Linguistics:Some Basic Concepts1.1. The Structure of LanguageLinguistics is the systematic study of language, and descriptive lin-guistics is the branch of linguistics that deals with the analysis and descrip-tion of languages. Each language is a system with various units and rulesfor the combination of these units into larger units. These rules are not al-ways formulated in grammar books, but they are there nevertheless—in thebrains of speakers of the language.One simple way of seeing the operation of these rules is through the mis-takes children make when they are learning a language. When a four-year-old says *The mans goed away, the sentence is clearly incorrect English. Itdoes, however, follow a pattern. First, the child has deduced that, to make anoun plural in English, you add s to it. She has already produced large num-bers of plural nouns, like dogs, cats, cups, bananas, and so on, following thisrule. Second, she has also deduced that, to put a verb into the past tense,you add ed to it. Again, she has already produced many English verbs in thepast tense this way—laughed, cried, kicked, washed, etc.In producing the sentence *The mans goed away, the child is not imitat-ing what adults say, since no adult speaker of English would say that sen-tence. Instead, she is applying two of the many rules she has formulated onthe basis of observing how English is spoken.1. NOUN + s = PLURAL2. VERB + ed = PAST TENSEThe only problem is that the noun man happens to be an exception to rule(1), and the verb go an exception to rule (2). Looking at this ungrammatical1utterance gives us insight into how the child’s brain is functioning in termsof rules that combine units into larger units.What are these units I have been talking about? If you asked a non-linguist that question, the answer would probably be sounds, words, andsentences. Unfortunately, the situation is more complex than that.1.1.1. The Sounds of LanguageAt the “lowest” level of language we have sounds, which linguists enclose insquare brackets [ ] to distinguish them from letters. Individual sounds, like[t], [e], and [n] are meaningless in themselves. Only combinations of soundsprovide meaningful utterances: [t] + [e] + [n] = ten, [n] + [e] + [t] = net.No language uses all the speech sounds human beings can make, andthe sound systems of different languages are organized in different ways.The study of sounds is known as phonetics, and the study of the way inwhich sounds are organized into a system in a language is called phonology(or sometimes phonemics). (A chart of all phonetic symbols used in thisbook appears in appendix 2.)Let us take as an example the sounds [p] (represented by the letters por pp) and [f] (represented by f or ff). These are quite different sounds, butis the difference between them important? In some languages, for exampleEnglish, it is, as the pairs of words below show.pull fullpig figsupper suffercup cuffThe only difference in sound between the words in each pair is the differencebetween the sounds [p] and [f], but each word has a very different meaning.In English, the sounds [p] and [f] belong to different phonemes; that is, theyare different significant units of sound in the language. And linguists writephonemes in slant lines / / to distinguish them from both sounds and letters.Thus English has the phonemes /p/ and /f/.Compare the same two sounds in the Tok Pisin language of Papua NewGuinea:paia faia both mean ‘fire’pasim fasim both mean ‘tie’mipela mifela both mean ‘we’lap laf both mean ‘laugh’2 CHAPTER 1In this language, the difference between [p] and [f] is not significant. You canuse either sound without changing the meaning of a word. In Tok Pisin, [p]and [f] belong to the same phoneme, usually written /p/. The same sounds indifferent languages may therefore have quite different functions in the sys-tems in which they occur, and quite different relationships with each other.Note that we are dealing with sounds and phonemes here, not with theletters that are used to write them. In the English words we looked at above,the phoneme /f/ is represented by the letter f in full as well as by the combi-nation ff in suffer. The same phoneme /f/ is also represented by ph in phone,by gh in enough, and so on. Our principal concern is with the sound systemsof Pacific languages, though we will also look at their orthographies, orwriting systems.1.1.2. The Composition of WordsPhonemes combine to form larger units. Consider the following English ex-amples:actactedreactreactedEach of these consists of a number of phonemes, and each is also a word, since ithas meaning by itself and, in the written language, appears with a space beforeandafter.Thesecondandthirdwords,however,canalsobedivided into twomean-ingful parts, act ‘carry out’ + ed ‘past tense’ and re ‘back’ + act. The fourth wordconsistsof threemeaningfulparts: re+act+ed.These smallest meaningful units are called morphemes. Some single mor-phemes are words (act, dog, house, desire, for example). Other words (acted, re-act, reacted, dogs, housewife, desirable, for example), consist of multiple mor-phemes. The study of morphemes and of the way morphemes combine to formwords, isknownasmorphology, a termalsousedtorefer to thepatternsbywhichmorphemescombine to formwords inaparticular language.The examples given above show one other feature of morphemes. Whileact can stand on its own as a word (as a free morpheme), re and ed cannot.Morphemes like re and ed are known as affixes, and they must be attachedto another morpheme. There are a number of different kinds of affixes, themost common being prefixes, which, like re, come before the root in a word,and suffixes, which, like ed, come after the root. The convention in linguis-tics is to write prefixes with a following hyphen (re-) and suffixes with apreceding hyphen (-ed), the hyphen indicating where the join takes place.Linguistics: Some Basic Concepts 3Another kind of affix occurs in some Pacific languages, namely, the infix,which is placed within the root. In Roviana (Solomon Islands), for example,verbs are converted to nouns by inserting the infix -in- (note the hyphensboth before and after the infix) before the first vowel of the root:habu ‘to fish’ hinabu ‘a catch of fish’kera ‘to sing’ kinera ‘a song’moho ‘to be sick’ minoho ‘sickness, disease’toa ‘to be alive’ tinoa ‘life’zama ‘to talk’ zinama ‘language’When morphemes combine to form words, the sounds at the boundariesof these morphemes often change. For example, I said above that the four-year-old had learned to form plurals by adding the suffix -s, but this is notstrictly true. The regular plural morpheme has two spellings and three orfour pronunciations in English. The pronunciation of the letter s in pluralslike cats, cups, socks is indeed the phoneme /s/, but the letter s of pluralslike dogs, bugs, homes is pronounced as the phoneme /z/, not as /s/; and thesame letter in plurals like inches, buses, dishes is pronounced /IZ/ or /əz/, de-pending on the dialect. I also said that the child had learned to form the pasttense by adding -ed to verbs. Again, this is not strictly true. The pronunci-ation of -ed is /ɪd/or/əd/ in words like banded and slotted, /d/ in killed andconned, and /t/ in laughed and kissed.In these examples, the sound at the end of the noun or verb determinesthe pronunciation of the plural or past-tense suffix. The study of soundchanges that take place when morphemes combine to form words is knownas morphophonemics.1.1.3. Above the Word LevelWords combine to form phrases. A phrase is a group of words that func-tions as a unit in a sentence. Look at the following English sentence (where/ marks the boundary between phrases):The young boys / were killing / the cats / on the beach.Each of these phrases is a unit. When each is moved to some other positionin the sentence, it must be moved as a whole entity. For example, the passiveequivalent of the sentence above isThe cats / were being killed / by the young boys / on the beach.and not something like* The young the cats were being killed by boys on the beach.4 CHAPTER 1(The asterisk marks the sentence as ungrammatical.) That is, it is not justthe noun boys that moves in this change from active to passive, but thewhole noun phrase the young boys.There are different types of phrases. In this book, I refer to noun phrases,which are phrases that function like nouns and can be replaced by a single nounor a pronoun—the young boys and the cats in our sentence above are both nounphrases (and could be replaced, for example, by they and them). I also refer toprepositional phrases, which are noun phrases introduced by a preposition:on the beach and by the young boys in the examples above are prepositionalphrases, introduced by the prepositions on and by. I use the term verb com-plex to refer to phrases that function like verbs: were killing and were beingkilled in the sentences above are both verb complexes.1Phrases combine to form clauses. A clause is a group of phrases containinga subject (the topic being talked about) and a predicate (what is being saidabout the topic). A sentence is a group of one or more clauses that can standalone. If we return to our example of the cat-killing boys, none of the following isa sentence, since each requires other phrases to make it complete.2*The young boys*Were killing the cats*The young boys on the beachEnglish and many other languages usually require each predicate to con-tain a verb complex, so that a sentence must have at least one verb. Manylanguages of the Pacific, however, do not require this, since in these languagesthere is no verb equivalent to English be (with its various forms is, are, etc.). So,for example, English demands the verb be in equational sentences like That manis a doctor, but many Pacific languages have no verb in equivalent sentences. Inthe Lenakel language of Vanuatu, for example, the same sentence would be Wusaan tokta, literally ‘man that doctor,’ with no verb.1.2. Common Grammatical Categories and Functions1.2.1. Subject and ObjectThe terms subject and object traditionally refer to the performer and re-ceiver of the action of the verb, respectively. In the sentence The boy ispetting the pig, the performer of the action, the boy, is called the subject,and the receiver, the pig, is the object. In many languages the verb changeswith a change of subject. In the sentence The boys are petting the pig, theplurality of the subject, the boys, causes the verb to change from singular (ispetting) to plural (are petting).Linguistics: Some Basic Concepts 5This fact is important, because the subject is not always the performerof the action. Look at these sentences:The boy likes the pig.The boy was bitten by the pig.In these sentences, the boy is still the subject, because we can see the samekinds of changes in the verb when the boy becomes plural:The boys like the pig.The boys were bitten by the pig.In the second case, however, the boy is not performing the action. The pig isperforming the action on the boy.In other languages, the subject and the object behave in ways differentfrom the way in which English subjects and objects behave, and we cannotgive a universal definition of these concepts. But the subject often performsthe action, and the object usually receives it.1.2.2. Transitivity and VoiceA sentence that contains no object is intransitive, while one that does con-tain an object is transitive. Examples:Intransitive: Mele is eating.The dogs are sleeping.Transitive: Mele is eating a banana.The dogs chased the children away.An active sentence—a sentence in the active voice—is one in which thesubject performs the action or where the object has the action performed onit. A passive sentence is one in which the action is performed on the subject.For example:Active: Mele ate the banana.The men cut down the tree.Passive: The banana was eaten by Mele.The tree was cut down.1.2.3. Adjectives and VerbsMany Pacific languages do not distinguish between adjectives and verbs in thesame way English does. The distinction in English is related to the existence ofthe verb be. In English, an adjective—like good, for example—can either pre-6 CHAPTER 1cede the noun it describes or follow the verb be (or similar verbs like seem orappear), as in A good chief looks after his people and Our chief is/seems good.In many Pacific languages, however, adjectives belong to a class ofstative verbs, verbs that indicate a state rather than an action. In Fijian, forexample, a verb is marked as stative by one of a number of markers (e.g., e‘third person singular subject’). In the first sentence below, the verb is kana‘eat,’ and the word levu ‘big’ follows the noun it modifies, vuaka ‘pig’:E kana na vuaka leva oqō.‘This big pig is eating.’ it eats the pig big thisIn the next sentence, the word levu ‘big’ behaves like a verb, that is, just askana ‘eat’ does in the sentence above.E levu na vuaka oqō.‘This pig is big.’ it big the pig thisA stative sentence is an intransitive sentence expressing a state rather thanan action. Thus while Mele is eating expresses an action, Mele is fat or Meleis a teacher express a state.1.2.4. Person, Number, and GenderIn English, we are used to distinguishing first, second, and third personpronouns as well as subject, object, and possessive forms. Both nouns andpronouns occur in singular and plural, and in some cases they have mascu-line, feminine, or neuter gender. The English subject, object, and possessivepronouns illustrate this:Singular PluralFirst person I, me, my we, us, ourSecond person you, your you, yourThird personMasculine he, him, his they, them, theirFeminine she, her they, them, theirNeuter it, its they, them, theirPacific languages differ in a number of ways from the English model.1. Most Pacific languages do not show gender in pronouns. Raroton-gan (Cook Islands) ia, or Fijian o koya, or Anejom̃ (Vanuatu) aen allmean ‘he,’ ‘she,’ and ‘it.’2. A large number of Pacific languages distinguish two types of first per-son pronouns. Inclusive first person pronouns refer to the speakerand the addressee(s). Exclusive first person pronouns refer to thespeaker and some other person(s), but not the addressee(s). In Bis-Linguistics: Some Basic Concepts 7lama, the national language of Vanuatu, for example, yumi is the firstperson inclusive pronoun (‘I + you’), while mifala is the first personexclusive pronoun (‘I + he/she/it/them [not you]’).3. Many Pacific languages distinguish more than two numbers, the mostcommon (apart from singular and plural) being the dual number,which refers to two and only two; the trial number, referring to threeand only three; and the paucal number, used for a few (three to six orso), or to a small group that is part of a much larger one.The function of the plural changes depending on how many num-bers a language recognizes. In a language with a singular, a dual, atrial or a paucal, and a plural, the role of the plural is much smallerthan it is in a language with only a singular and a plural. In Fijian, forexample, we have o koya ‘he/she/it’ (singular), o irau ‘they two’ (dual),o ira-tou ‘they (a few)’ (paucal), and o ira ‘they (many)’ (plural).4. Many Pacific languages have separate object and possessive formsof the pronoun, as English does. But in addition, and unlike English,many also distinguish between an independent pronoun and a sub-ject pronoun. The independent pronoun can be used as an answerto a question, and may be used as a subject, but when it is it isusually emphatic. In Lenakel, for example, in is the third personsingular independent pronoun, and r- is the corresponding subjectpronoun. The sentences In r-am-apul and R-am-apul both mean ‘He/she is asleep.’ But while the second one is a neutral statement, thefirst emphasizes that it is he or she, not someone else, who is asleep.1.2.5. Possessives and ClassifiersIn languages like English, there is usually only one kind of possessive con-struction. No matter what the possessed noun refers to, or what the posses-sor’s relationship is to that noun, the same construction is used: my hand,my father, my house, my dog are all possessed in the same way, by means ofthe possessive, my.Now look at translations of those four phrases in Motu (spoken aroundPort Moresby in Papua New Guinea), in which the suffix -gu translates ‘my.’The nouns are ima, tama, ruma, and sisia:ima-gu ‘my hand’tama-gu ‘my father’e-gu ruma ‘my house’e-gu sisia ‘my dog’Here we can see that there are two different constructions: The words for‘hand’ and ‘father’ attach -gu directly to the noun. I call this type a direct8 CHAPTER 1possessive construction. The words for ‘house’ and ‘dog’ do not attach -gudirectly to the noun, but attach it instead to the morpheme e-, and this word(e-gu) precedes the noun. This I call an indirect possessive construction.In one way or another, most Pacific languages distinguish two types ofpossessive constructions to which different linguists have given differentlabels, and which have different semantics. These two types could be classi-fied as follows:• Close, or subordinate, or inalienable possession is often manifestedby direct constructions. This involves the possession of something overwhich the possessor has no control, and which cannot (normally) be ac-quired or disposed of. It may be an integral part of the possessor (like ahand), or a relative (we cannot control who our father is).• Remote, or dominant, or alienable possession is frequently mani-fested by indirect constructions. This involves the possession ofsomething over which the possessor has control. It can be acquiredand disposed of, given away or sold, like a house or a dog.Some languages are more complex than this, using a system of classifiers,often in both possession and counting, to show what type of thing the noun is,just as in English we normally do not say ten cattle or four breads, but ten headof cattle or four loaves of bread, using head and loaf as kinds of classifiers. Lookat the following examples from Ponapean (spoken in Pohnpei, Micronesia):kene-i-mahiedible:thing-my breadfruit‘my breadfruit’nime-i uhpwdrinking:thing-my coconut‘my drinking coconut’sehu pah-sopsugarcane four-stalk‘four stalks of sugarcane’Ponapean has more than twenty possessive classifiers (like kene- and nime-above), and approximately thirty numeral classifiers (like -sop above).1.3. Reconstructing Linguistic History1.3.1. Genetic RelationshipAll languages change. The process of change is gradual, but it is also con-stant. There are various kinds of evidence for this. For example, earlierwritten records show a version of the language different from the modernLinguistics: Some Basic Concepts 9version, though both are often still recognizable as the “same” language.The two examples given below, of the beginning of the Lord’s Prayer in theEnglish of about 1400 and in modern English, illustrate this principle.Oure fadir that art in heuenes halowid be thi name, thi kyngdom come to,be thi wille don in erthe es in heuene.Our Father, who is in heaven, may your name be kept holy. May your king-dom come into being. May your will be followed on earth, just as it is inheaven.Even if a language does not have written records going back a longtime, the fact that people of different generations speak the same languageslightly differently shows that languages change. We can even observechanges taking place in a language when we notice competing forms, likethe two different pronunciations of a word like either in English (one with aninitial vowel sound like that of niece and the other with a vowel like that ofnice), or the past tense of the verb dive—dived and dove—in many dialects ofAmerican English. Perhaps the most obvious example of language change,however, is the continual introduction of new words into all languages (and,less obvious but also quite frequent, the gradual loss of words that, for onereason or another, have become obsolete).Imagine now that we have a single speech community speaking a lan-guage we will call X. This community splits into four separate groups, A,B, C, and D. Because language change is inevitable and continuous, after afew hundred years these four communities would speak different dialects ofthe same language.3 But after a thousand years or more, these four dialectswould have changed so much that they had become separate languages, asshown in figure 1. The languages would share many similarities in vocabu-lary and grammar, since language change is relatively slow. But a speakerof language A would have considerable difficulty in holding a conversationwith a speaker of B, C, or D.Languages A, B, C, and D in figure 1 are all genetically related toeach other, because they all descend from language X, which is their com-mon ancestor. Languages A, B, C, and D are often referred to as daughterlanguages of X, and all four languages belong to the same language fam-ily. Figure 1, which represents their relationship, is their family tree.Where there are historical records of the ancestor language and of thewhole period of change, it is easy to establish the relationship between thedaughter languages and to see how diversification took place. But in thePacific, as in many other parts of the world, such records do not go back any-where near far enough for us to have concrete proof of diversification andrelationship. How, then, do linguists establish such languages’ relationship?Related languages share a number of similarities in vocabulary, pronun-10 CHAPTER 1Figure 1. Genetic Relationshipciation, and grammar. Linguists look for similarities between various lan-guages, and if the similarities are numerous enough, they assume that thelanguages involved are related despite the absence of documentary proofand derive from a hypothesized common ancestor, which is referred to as aprotolanguage.But not all similarities between languages can be attributed to genetic re-lationship. There are two other possible explanations. One is that the similar-ities are purely accidental. In Motu, Fijian, and many other Pacific languages,the word for ‘eye’ is mata, while in Modern Greek the word for ‘eye’ is mati.This, however, is a purely accidental resemblance, as there are no other con-nections between Greek and Motu or Fijian. If two or more languages shareonly a few similarities, these are probably coincidental. It is virtually impossi-ble, however, that languages could accidentally have hundreds of similarities.The second explanation for similarities between languages is copyingor borrowing—that a language has adopted a word (or some other linguisticfeature) from some other language. For example, in many Pacific languagesthe word for ‘radio’ is something like retio or ledio. This word has beencopied from English, but this does not mean that these languages are relatedeither to English or to each other.Copying is a very common phenomenon in all languages (see chapter 9).When new items of technology, new social practices, or new ideas are intro-duced into a society from outside, often the words for them, modified to fitlocal pronunciation, will be brought in at the same time. English is full ofwords copied from other languages: Algebra, boomerang, coup, demonstra-tor, ghetto, junta, taboo, thug, and yen are just a few examples.Copying is more likely to take place in certain areas of the lexicon thanin others. For example, words like snow, coconut, ice cream, church, team,and television could be easily introduced into a language, since they representthings or concepts that are by no means found in all cultures or environments.Linguistics: Some Basic Concepts 11But words like hand, leg, one, two, black, white, eat, sleep are much less likelyto be taken from another language, since all languages probably have theirown words for these concepts, irrespective of the culture of their speakers orthe physical environment in which they live. There would be no need for a lan-guage to supplement its vocabulary by borrowing them. For similar reasons,certain aspects of grammar (the morphological structure of words, for exam-ple) are less likely to be borrowed than others (like word order).If similarities between two languages are only in areas where we mightexpect to see copying, they do not constitute evidence of genetic relation-ship. If, however, the similarities are in areas of vocabulary and grammarwhere borrowing is much less likely to take place, we can reasonably con-clude that these are not due to chance or borrowing, but to genetic in-heritance. The words and structures were present in some form in an an-cestor language and have been retained, usually in a modified form, in thedaughter languages. This then leads to the conclusion that the languagessharing these similarities are related, belong to the same language family,and derive from the same protolanguage.1.3.2. Reconstructing a ProtolanguageIn addition to being able to show, with reasonable confidence, that a setof languages are related and derive from the same common ancestor,historical-comparative linguists can reconstruct what many of the sounds,words, and grammatical structures in the protolanguage were probably like.An important principle in reconstruction, especially in dealing with simi-larities in vocabulary, is that of the regularity of sound correspondences.Look at the following examples from the Aroma, Hula, and Sinagoro lan-guages spoken on the coast east of Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea:Aroma Hula Sinagoro‘father’ ama ama tama‘milk’ laa laa lata‘sew’ uli uli tuli‘grandparent’ upu upu tubu‘sago’ lapia lapia labia‘pigeon’ pune pune pune‘skin’ opi kopi kopi‘bird’ manu manu manu‘mosquito’ nemo nemo nemoThere are a number of correspondences between identical phonemes.Aroma m corresponds to Hula m and Sinagoro m. This correspondence is12 CHAPTER 1abbreviated as m:m:m. We can also see all the vowels (a:a:a, i:i:i, and soon). But there are also some correspondences between different phonemes:First, although we have the set p:p:p (as in pune : pune : pune ‘pigeon’), wealso have another set p.p:b (as in lapia : lapia : labia ‘sago’). Then, we alsohave the set θ:θ:t (where θ represents the absence of a sound), as in uli: uli:tuli ‘sew.’ The important thing about both types of correspondence sets isthat they are regular. They are not random, but occur again and again inmany words. Even in the short list above, you can see a number of examplesof each.In the case of correspondence sets of the type m:m:m, the original lan-guage almost certainly had m, and the daughter languages have not alteredit. The protolanguage, then, had a phoneme *m, where the asterisk denotesa reconstructed form.In the case of correspondence sets of the type p:p:p and p:p:b, however,one or more daughter languages has changed. The logical assumption hereis that the set p:p:p reflects an original *p, while the set p:p:b represents anoriginal *b, which Aroma and Hula have changed to p. The merger of pho-netically similar phonemes is a very common phenomenon, and this is whatseems to have happened: The distinction between the two phonemes p and bhas been lost in these two languages (in the same way as the distinction be-tween the voiced w in witch and the voiceless w in which is being lost in mostvarieties of English). Similarly, the set θ:θ:t probably represents an earlier*t, which has been lost in Aroma and Hula; again, loss of a phoneme is farmore common and natural than the addition of a phoneme.Using this principle of regularity of correspondence, and also makinguse of what linguists know generally about language change, it is possibleto reconstruct elements of a protolanguage—to make an educated guessabout what the phonemes, words, and grammar of the ancestor languagemight have been. Given that Aroma nemo, Hula nemo, and Sinagoro nemoall mean ‘mosquito,’ for example, and that the correspondences n.n.n, e:e:e,m:m:m, and o:o:o are regular, linguists would reconstruct the word *nemo‘mosquito’ in the language ancestral to these three languages. The full set ofprotoforms for the words given above would be:*tama ‘father’*lata ‘milk’*tuli ‘sew’*tubu ‘grandparent’*labia ‘sago’*pune ‘pigeon’Linguistics: Some Basic Concepts 13*kopi ‘skin’*manu ‘bird’*nemo ‘mosquito’1.3.3. Families and SubgroupsThe original split of a community may be followed by later splits. Similarly,the original split of a protolanguage may be followed by subsequent splitsin intermediate ancestral languages, sometimes called interstage lan-guages. Look at the family tree in figure 2, which represents the followinghistorical sequence of events.First, the original ancestral language, X, initially split into three daugh-ter languages, P, Q, and R. Some time later, (1) language P suffered sufficientdivisions to result in the modern languages A and B; (2) language Q splitinto Z and the modern language C; (3) language Z itself underwent a furthersplit, into the modern languages D and E; and (4) language R split, givingrise to the modern languages F, G, and H.All of these languages are related, since they all derive from a commonancestor, X. There are, differing however, degrees of relationship in this fam-ily tree. For example, languages A and B are more closely related to eachother than either is to any other modern member of the family because theyshare a period of common development that the other languages do not—theperiod when language P was separated from the others. Similarly, languagesF, G, and H are more closely related to each other than to any other modernmember of the family. Languages C, D, and E can also be grouped together,Figure 2. Subgroups of a Family14 CHAPTER 1but within the group, D and E are more closely related to each other than ei-ther is to language C.Linguists generally use the term subgroup to refer to two or more lan-guages within a family that are more closely related to each other than tothe rest of the family. In figure 2, A and B form one subgroup and F, G, and Hanother. C, D, and E make up a third subgroup within which exists a further,lower-level, subgroup (sometimes called a subsubgroup), D and E.When the history of a language family is known through written records,the subgrouping of languages within that family can also usually be estab-lished by examining those records. But how do we determine subgroups ofa language family in an area like the Pacific, where written records of lan-guages either do not exist at all or date only from recent times?One technique for doing this is known as lexicostatistics. This involvesthe comparison of the basic vocabulary of the languages we are interestedin (using a standard one-hundred-or two-hundred-word list), and expressingthe degree of relationship between any two languages in the sample as apercentage, which represents the cognates (similar vocabulary items pre-sumed to derive from the same original word in the protolanguage) sharedby each pair of languages. A higher percentage corresponds to a closer rela-tionship, and members of subgroups should show the highest percentages.Lexicostatistics has the advantage of allowing quick formulation and quan-tification of the internal relationships of a language family, but it also has manyproblems.Someof theseare theoretical ormethodological andneednotconcernus here. One obvious problem, however, is that a list of even two hundred wordsrepresents only an extremely small part of a whole language, and the figures ob-tained from comparing such lists may not accurately represent the relationshipbetween two languages. Today, most linguists do not rely heavily on lexicostatis-tics as a method for subgrouping languages, although they might use it to get apreliminary indication of the possible subgrouping.The chief method linguists use to establish subgroups is examination ofshared innovations. If you go back to the Aroma, Hula, and Sinagoro exam-ples in the last section, you will see that two changes, or innovations, havetaken place: (1) original *t has been lost in both Aroma and Hula (but not inSinagoro); and (2) the distinction between original *b and *p has been re-tained in Sinagoro, but it has been lost in both Aroma and Hula, where thesetwo phonemes merge as the single phoneme p.Aroma and Hula share two innovations that Sinagoro does not, whichwould suggest that the two languages are more closely related to each otherthan either is to Sinagoro. The family tree in figure 3 shows how these threedescendants of Proto East-Central Papuan are related.Rather than suggesting that Aroma and Hula both quite independentlyLinguistics: Some Basic Concepts 15Figure 3. Subgroups of Proto East-Central Papuanmade the changes *t > θ, *b > p inferred from a comparison of cognates, itseems logical to assume that the changes happened only once, in the inter-stage language, Proto Aroma-Hula. In this way Aroma and Hula came toshare two innovations missing in Sinagoro, which suggests that they belongtogether in a subgroup.There are various kinds of innovations which, if shared by two or morelanguages exclusive of others in the family, can be solid evidence for assign-ing those languages to the same subgroup. Phonological innovations (likethe example above) and innovations in morphology are fairly strong evi-dence; innovations in vocabulary and syntax (sentence structure) are lessstrong, since changes take place in vocabulary much more easily and rapidlythan in phonology or morphology. Quantity is also a factor. Generally speak-ing, if languages share more innovations (of the stronger kind) the hypothe-sis that they form a subgroup is more secure.1.3.4. Reconstructing Linguistic and Cultural HistoryWhat use can linguists and others can make of the conclusions reachedabout the relationships between languages, the subgroups of a languagefamily, and the reconstructed protolanguage?The branch of linguistics I have been discussing is known as com-parative linguistics or historical-comparative linguistics. It involvescomparing languages in order to find out something about their history.This branch of linguistics is one of the disciplines contributing to the studyof prehistory, the time preceding the existence of written records. (Othersuch disciplines include archaeology, social anthropology, the study of oralliterature and oral traditions, and so on.) So, what can comparative linguis-tics tell us about prehistory?16 CHAPTER 1First, the fact that languages are related implies that they have a com-mon origin. This often (though not always) implies that the people whospeak those languages have a common origin as well, telling us somethingabout the origins of and historical connections between the peoples of aregion.Second, information about subgroupings can give us an idea of thechronology of language divisions (and presumably also divisions in a com-munity), as well as providing indications about the directions in which peo-ple migrated. As an example of this, let us consider just the following Pacificlanguages: Fijian, Tongan, Pukapuka (spoken in the Cook Islands), Tahitian,and Rapanui (Easter Island). A simple family tree for just these five lan-guages would look like the one in figure 4.The most recent split in this family (which includes hundreds of otherlanguages) is that between Tahitian and Rapanui, with the next most recentthat between Pukapuka and the ancestor of Tahitian and Rapanui. Some-what earlier Tongan and “Proto Pukapuka-Tahitian-Rapanui” divided, andthe first split was between Fijian and all the other languages. As you can seeby looking at map 1, the splits proceeded from west to east.On the basis of this subgrouping, most linguists would assume (1) thatthe original homeland of this group of people was probably somewherearound the Fiji-Tonga area; and (2) that the general direction of migrationof these peoples was probably from west to east, as shown in map 1. Notethat I have used the terms “assume,” “probably,” and “somewhere.” Theseconclusions are merely the best educated guesses we can make from thedata. We would still want to find supporting evidence from other disci-plines—archaeological dates, oral traditions, or the like—before adoptingthese conclusions firmly.Third, comparative linguistics can tell us something about the cultureof the people who spoke the protolanguage, and about the changes thathave taken place in that culture. If a set of words can be reconstructed forFigure 4. Establishing Migration PatternsLinguistics: Some Basic Concepts 17Map 1. Reconstructing Migration Patternsa protolanguage, the items or concepts they refer to were probably alsopresent in the protoculture. For example, if we could reconstruct for a pro-tolanguage words for taro, yam, coconut, and breadfruit, then we couldpresume that these items were in the original culture of the people whospoke that language. And if the daughter languages have quite unrelatedwords for peanut, rice, coffee, and sweet potato, then we could assume thatthese items were not in the original culture, but represent later innovations.The identification of copied words can also tell us quite a bit about anotheraspect of linguistic and social history—cultural contact between groups ofpeople speaking (related or unrelated) languages.1.3.5. Time DepthsFinally, a word of warning. The principles and techniques of comparative lin-guistics allow linguists to trace relationships between languages going backperhaps eight or ten thousand years, and to make associated conclusionsregarding migrations, cultures, and so on. If, however, the initial breakupof a language family took place longer ago than about ten thousand years,linguists often cannot find sufficient evidence to prove that the languages in-volved are related. The changes that have taken place in each language overthe millennia are usually so great that very few similarities can be distin-guished or reconstructed.The hypothetical family tree in figure 5 helps illustrate this point. Thesimilarities currently existing between the modern languages P through Ywould probably lead comparative linguists to divide them into four unre-lated families:18 CHAPTER 1Figure 5. Time Limits on Comparative Linguistics1. the C family, with members P and Q;2. the D family, with members R, S, and T;3. the E family, with members U and V; and4. the F family, with members W, X, and Y.The true historical picture is presented in the diagram, which showshow all these languages are related, deriving from a common ancestor X.Because of the length of time involved, however, the changes have been sogreat that most similarities between, say, languages P and Y have been lost,which is why linguists would treat these languages as belonging to four dis-tinct families.The study of prehistory relies heavily on comparative linguistics formany different kinds of information. But it is important also to realizethat—at least with the techniques currently at our disposal—comparativelinguistics has limitations.Linguistics: Some Basic Concepts 19PART ONEGeography and HistoryCHAPTER2The Languagesof the PacificWhen different people speak of the Pacific region, they often mean differentthings. In some senses, people from such Pacific Rim countries as Japan andKorea, Canada and the United States, and Colombia and Peru are as mucha part of the region as are those from Papua New Guinea, Fiji, the MarshallIslands, Tonga, and so on. In this book, however, I use the term “the Pacific”to refer to the island countries and territories of the Pacific Basin, includingAustralia and New Zealand.This Pacific has traditionally been divided into four regions: Melanesia,Micronesia, Polynesia, and Australia (see map 2). Australia is clearly sepa-rate from the remainder of the Pacific culturally, ethnically, and linguisti-cally. The other three regions are just as clearly not separate from oneanother according to all of these criteria. There is considerable ethnic, cul-tural, and linguistic diversity within each of these regions, and the bound-aries usually drawn between them do not necessarily coincide with clearphysical, cultural, or linguistic differences. These regions, and the bound-aries drawn between them, are largely artifacts of the western propensity,even weakness, for classification, as the continuing and quite futile debateover whether Fijians are Polynesians or Melanesians illustrates.Having said this, however, I will nevertheless continue to use the terms“Melanesia,” “Micronesia,” and “Polynesia” to refer to different geographi-cal areas within the Pacific basin, without prejudice to the relationships ofthe languages or the cultures of people of each region.2.1. How Many Languages?This book deals mainly with the indigenous languages of the Pacific region.There are many other languages that can be called “Pacific languages,” for23Map2.ThePacific24 CHAPTER 2example, languages that have developed fairly recently, such as HawaiianCreole, Fiji Hindi, Hiri Motu (Papua New Guinea), Melanesian Pidgin(known as Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea, Pijin in Solomon Islands, and Bis-lama in Vanuatu), Broken and Kriol (Australia), and others. There are alsothe languages of the metropolitan powers, particularly English and French,which are widely used throughout the region, but also Bahasa Indonesia inIrian Jaya and Spanish in Easter Island. And there are small but substantialnumbers of speakers of various Chinese languages, of Vietnamese, and ofother “intrusive” languages in Pacific towns. (These languages receive someattention in part 3.)When it comes to what we might call “true” Pacific languages, we findthat this region is probably the most linguistically complex in the world.There are, or were, almost fourteen hundred distinct languages spoken inthe Pacific, or about one quarter of the world’s languages. And these four-teen hundred languages are spoken by not much more than 0.1 percent ofthe world’s population!1 Further, so far as we can tell, these languages donot all belong to a single language family. There are a number of languagefamilies in the Pacific.Let us look first at the nature of the differences between languagesin this region. Many people describe the languages of the Pacific as “di-alects,” partly because most are spoken by small populations and areunimportant in terms of world politics, and partly because many are un-written. But linguists use the terms “language” and “dialect” with quitespecific meanings.Speakers of the same language living in geographically separateareas often speak differently, though these differences are usually notgreat enough to prevent communication between them. For example,many Americans say sidewalk, diaper, and flashlight where English peo-ple would use footpath, nappy, and torch. And while most English peoplepronounce words like half, past, and mast with the same vowel as thefirst vowel in father, most Americans pronounce them with the samevowel as in hat. But despite these obvious differences in vocabulary, inpronunciation, and in grammar as well, the Americans and the Englishcan still communicate quite easily. We would therefore say that they arespeaking different dialects of the same language. But Americans or Eng-lish people must learn French to understand a French person, as Englishand French are different languages.Mutual intelligibility—whether speakers from one group can or cannotcarry on a normal conversation with speakers of another—is just one way oflooking at the distinction between language and dialect. In many parts of thePacific, it is difficult to test for mutual intelligibility, because people not onlyThe Languages of the Pacific 25speak the language of their own community, but also acquire an understand-ing, either active or passive, of the languages of neighboring communitiesfrom a very early age. People from two communities can quite often carry ona conversation in two different languages, so testing for mutual intelligibil-ity is fraught with all sorts of problems. In cases like these, linguists have touse their own judgment about how many languages are involved.Perhaps more important than the issue of mutual intelligibility is the is-sue of social identity. People believe that their language is the same as—or isdifferent from—another group’s language for a variety of social rather thanlinguistic reasons. Here are two examples of this:1. On the basis of mutual intelligibility, Hindi and Urdu would beclassified as dialects of the same language. Hindi is the nationallanguage of India. It is written in the Devanagari script and isclosely associated in people’s minds with Hinduism. Urdu is thenational language of Pakistan. It is written in Arabic script andis closely associated with Islam. For these nonlinguistic reasons,most speakers would say that Hindi and Urdu are two different lan-guages.2. Many people refer to Fijian as if it were one language. It is associ-ated with a group of people who are ethnically and culturally fairlyhomogeneous, and there is just one written version, which all lit-erate Fijians read and write. But people in the eastern part of Fijicannot understand people from the western area when they speak(unless they have learned the western Fijian language).There is a further problem with differentiating and counting languagesthat relates to the phenomenon known as a dialect chain. A dialect chainis found in a series of communities in which each community has a differentdialect. Close neighbors can quite easily understand each other, but peoplehave greater difficulty in understanding or communicating with people fromcommunities farther along the chain. Imagine that the following villages arespread along the coast of a large island:A B C D E F G H I JPeople from, say, village C can easily communicate with their close neigh-bors (A and B to the west, D and E to the east); they have some difficultycommunicating with people from F and G; and they cannot communicatewell at all with people from H, I, and J. On the other hand, people fromvillage E can communicate easily with those from C, D, F, and G, havesome difficulty with those from B, H, and I, but find people from A and Junintelligible. People from A would be unable to communicate with those26 CHAPTER 2from J, so it would seem from looking just at the two ends of the chainthat two different languages are involved. But there is nowhere in themiddle of the chain where we can draw a language boundary, since every-one can communicate with their immediate neighbors. So are we dealingwith one language or two?In one sense, this is really a problem only when one tries to count thenumber of languages, to tidy up the situation with a neat classification.Some linguists would say that the villages I have described share one lan-guage, made up of a complex dialect chain. Others would say it is two, with,however, no distinct boundary between the western language and the east-ern one. Situations like this are found in Fiji, in the Caroline Islands ofMicronesia, and in a number of areas in Papua New Guinea. This is one rea-son that different authorities give different numbers of languages for certainareas of the Pacific.Despite these complications, when I say that there are about fourteenhundred languages spoken in the Pacific, I do mean languages, not dialects.Some, of course, are quite similar to each other, as French is to Spanish andItalian, or even as Hindi is to Urdu. But there are also differences of thesame order of magnitude as those between English and Chinese. And manyof these languages are spoken in a number of dialects as well.There are two other reasons why we cannot be exact about the numberof languages in the Pacific. Some languages are moribund—that is, at lastreport they were spoken by just a small number of old people—and there-fore are almost extinct. Many Australian languages fall into this category,but there are some in Melanesia as well. The other reason is that, at leastin certain parts of the Pacific, we have insufficient information. The interiorof Irian Java is an especially good example, though not the only one. In suchcases we are forced to make educated guesses.Table 1 gives the number of languages spoken in each of the main re-gions of the Pacific and in each of the countries and territories within eachregion. For the reasons discussed above, the figures given are approximate.2.2. Linguistic Demography2.2.1. Polynesia and MicronesiaWith a few exceptions, we can say that in Polynesia there is generally onelanguage per island or per island group. Ignoring minor problems (“Are theytwo languages or two dialects?”), there are twenty-one languages spoken inwhat is referred to as the Polynesian Triangle (including the extinct Moriorilanguage).2 Map 3 shows the location of all these languages.The Languages of the Pacific 27Table 1. Pacific Languages by Region and CountryMelanesia 1151+Irian Jaya 205+Papua New Guinea 750+Solomon Islands 63Vanuatu 105New Caledonia 28Micronesia 16Belau 1Northern Marianas and Guam 2aMarshall Islands 1Kiribati 1Nauru 1Federated States of Micronesia 11Fiji and Polynesia 22Fiji, including Rotuma 3Tonga 2Niue 1The Samoas 1Tuvalu 1Tokelau 1Wallis and Futuna 2Cook Islands 3Hawai’i 1French Polynesia 5Easter Island 1New Zealand 1Australia 200bTotal 1389+aOne of these is a dialect of Carolinian, other dialects of which are spoken inthe Federated States of Micronesia.bMany of these have become extinct or are moribund.Speakers of many of these languages now live outside their home coun-tries. There are significant communities of speakers of, for example, EastUvea (Wallisian) in New Caledonia and Vanuatu, and of Tongan and Samoanin both New Zealand and the United States. About as many Rarotongan28 CHAPTER 2The Languages of the Pacific 29speakers, and many more speakers of Niuean, live in New Zealand as in theCook Islands and Niue, respectively.Some Polynesian languages have large numbers of speakers. Samoanprobably has about 250,000 speakers, Tongan, Tahitian, and New ZealandMāori each approximately 100,000. Rarotongan, with more than 30,000speakers, and Wallisian, with 10,000, are also large in Pacific terms. In con-trast, some of the languages of French Polynesia other than Tahitian arespoken by fewer than a thousand people.Micronesia is similar to Polynesia in having—as a rule—only one languageper island or island group, although there are difficulties in deciding exactlyhow many languages there are. Bender and Wang (1985, 54–56) have a goodbrief discussion of this problem. While many of the speech traditions of Microne-sia are clearly identifiable as discrete languages, the Trukic group of speechcommunities, extending from Chuuk (Truk) Lagoon to Tobi, presents a majorproblem. Different linguists have divided this complex continuum into three,seven, and eleven distinct languages, which makes the exercise of counting lan-guages difficult and probably futile. I have taken Bender and Wang’s figure ofthree languages for this continuum, and this gives the somewhat arbitrary figureof sixteen languages spoken in Micronesia. Map 4 shows the location of theselanguages, but also indicates the named varieties of the three Trukic languagesthat some linguists treat as distinct.Many speakers of Micronesian languages also live outside their home coun-tries, particularly in Guam and the United States. Fiji, Nauru, and Solomon Is-lands possess sizable Kiribati-speaking communities. Kiribati and Chamorro,each with more than 50,000 speakers, have the greatest number of speakers inMicronesia. Lagoon Trukese, Ponapean, and Marshallese all have about 20,000speakers, and most of the other languages (depending on how they are defined)number in the thousands. A number of languages or dialects, how-ever,—including Sonsorolese, Satawalese, Namonuito, Ngatikese, Kapingama-rangi, and Nukuoro—have fewer than a thousand speakers.2.2.2. MelanesiaFor the purposes of this discussion, Melanesia is taken as including the in-dependent states of Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Fiji, theIndonesian province of Irian Jaya, and the French overseas territory of NewCaledonia. Melanesia differs from Polynesia and Micronesia; here it is therule rather than the exception for there to be many languages per island. Inthis general survey of the linguistic situation in Melanesia, maps 5 through10 locate all the languages of Melanesia mentioned in this book.30 CHAPTER 2The Languages of the Pacific 31Fiji and RotumaRotuma is home to a distinct language spoken by around 10,000 people,but linguists disagree about how many languages are spoken in the rest ofFiji. Certainly there are many different varieties of “Fijian” spoken by the300,000 or so ethnic Fijians in Viti Levu, Vanua Levu, and the offshore is-lands. The situation is further complicated by the fact that the dialect of theMap 5. Languages of Fiji and Rotuma32 CHAPTER 2island of Bau, southeast of Viti Levu, has been adopted as the standard forthe written language, for education, and for certain public occasions, so thatmany Fijians who speak another dialect also know that one. “Fijian” consistsof a chain of perhaps thirty or forty dialects. Most linguists would probablydivide this chain into two languages, Western Fijian (spoken in the westernhalf of Viti Levu), and Eastern Fijian (spoken in the rest of the country, ex-cluding Rotuma).New Caledonia and the Loyalty IslandsThere are twenty-eight languages in the French territory of New Caledonia,all spoken by small populations. The two languages with the largest numberof speakers are Drehu, with about 7,000 speakers, and Paicî, with just under5,000; but five of the territory’s twenty-eight languages have fewer than twohundred speakers. (Map 6 shows only those languages that I mention in thisbook.)Map 6. New Caledonia (showing languages referred to in the text)The Languages of the Pacific 33VanuatuThe Republic of Vanuatu is home to between one hundred and 110 lan-guages (Tryon 1976). As in New Caledonia, all of these are spoken by verysmall populations. Recent estimates (Tryon and Charpentier 1989) showthat Northeast Ambae on Ambae Island, with 4,300 speakers, Lenakel andWhitesands on Tanna, each with 4,000, and Apma on Pentecost, with 3,800have the largest number of speakers.3 Forty-one languages, or almost halfthe languages of the country have two hundred speakers or fewer; five ofthese forty-one have fewer than fifty speakers. (Map 7 shows only those lan-guages mentioned in the text.)Solomon IslandsThe most recent linguistic survey of Solomon Islands (Tryon and Hackman1983) lists sixty-three languages as being spoken in that country. Those withthe largest populations are the North Malaita dialect chain, with 13,500, andKwara’ae, with 12,500, both on Malaita. No other language has more than10,000 speakers. Twelve languages have fewer than two hundred speakers;six of these twelve have fewer than fifty. (Map 8 includes only those lan-guages discussed in the text.)Papua New GuineaPapua New Guinea is probably the most linguistically diverse nation inthe modern world. A population of around four million people speak wellover seven hundred distinct languages. Wurm and Hattori’s (1981) lin-guistic atlas of the region estimates that there are 750 languages spokenin Papua New Guinea. This may be a slightly conservative figure. Otherestimates usually count more than these. Some differences lie in the dis-tinctions made between dialect and language. Map 9 shows only a fewof these languages.According to Wurm and Hattori’s figures, in the 1970s, nine of the lan-guages of Papua New Guinea were spoken by more than 40,000 people. Allof these except Tolai are spoken in the Highlands. These languages are:Enga 165,000 Huli 60,000Kuman (Simbu) 140,000 Kewa 48,000Hagen 100,000 Mendi 45,000Kamano 85,000 Wahgi 45,000Tolai 65,000At the same time, a staggering 114 languages in Papua New Guinea arelisted as being spoken by populations of fewer than two hundred people.34 CHAPTER 2Map 7. Vanuatu (showing languages referred to in the text)The Languages of the Pacific 3536 CHAPTER 2The Languages of the Pacific 37Irian JayaThe situation in Irian Jaya is less clear than anywhere else in the Melanesianregion, since much less research has been done on these languages thanon those of any other part of the Pacific. Wurm and Hattori (1981) believethat slightly more than two hundred languages are spoken in this Indonesianprovince, only four of them by 40,000 people or more. These four are:Western Dani 100,000Grand Valley Dani 75,000Ekagi 65,000Biak-Numfor 40,000In contrast, Wurm and Hattori list forty languages—20 percent of thosein the province—as being spoken by two hundred or fewer people. (Map10 names only the languages mentioned in this book.)Map 10. Irian Jaya (showing languages referred to in the text)38 CHAPTER 22.2.3. AustraliaDixon (1980) says that, at the time of first European settlement, there wereprobably about two hundred different languages spoken in Australia. We willnever know the exact figure, since many languages had disappeared beforeany linguistic work had been carried out on them. Of these two hundred, theWestern Desert language had the largest number of speakers, around 6,000.It was spoken over an area of about 1.3 million square kilometers.4The survival of Australian languages (and of the people who speak them)has been severely threatened in the last two centuries. Whole tribes andtheir languages died out in many areas, while other tribes assimilated tovarying degrees to the invading culture, losing their languages in theprocess. Of the current language situation in Australia, Dixon says:Of the 200 languages spoken in Australia before the Europeaninvasion 50 are now extinct, the last speakers having died someyears ago; in most cases there are still some people who wouldclaim tribal membership but they know only a dozen or so isolatedwords of what was once a full and flourishing language. Then thereMap 11. Australia (showing languages referred to in the text)The Languages of the Pacific 39are probably around 100 languages that are on the path towardsextinction. Some are remembered by only a handful of old peo-ple, and will cease to be spoken or remembered within a very fewyears; others may be being learnt by children in a few families butthe total number of speakers is so small—a few dozen or less—thatthese languages seem bound gradually to drop out of use over thenext few generations. Finally, perhaps 50 languages are in a rel-atively healthy state—spoken as first language by a few hundred(or, in one or two cases, by a few thousand) people and preservingtheir full range of use in everyday affairs and in ceremony and rit-ual. (Dixon 1980, 18)While the languages of the rest of the Pacific region are generally quiteviable, the Australian languages, which once spread right across the conti-nent, are in rapid decline. The number of speakers of each diminishes withthe shift toward English and the decimation of the population.2.3. Language NamesLanguage names in the Pacific can be problematic. Some languages areknown by one, and only one, name. It may be the people’s own name for thelanguage (Nakanamanga in Vanuatu), the name of the people themselves(Motu in Papua New Guinea), an English version of a local name (Tongan),or a compound expression referring to some feature of the language (Pitjan-tjatjara, the name of a dialect of the Western Desert language of Australia,which means “having the word pitjantja ‘come’”).In some areas, however, people do not have a name for their own lan-guage, but refer to it as “the language,” “our language,” or “correct/goodlanguage.” The Tolai language of New Britain, for example, has been re-ferred to in the literature as Tuna, from a tinata tuna ‘the real language.’Languages of this kind are often named in the literature after the locality inwhich they are spoken. For example, linguists call the languages spoken onthe islands of Paama and Mota in Vanuatu Paamese and Mota.People sometimes invent names for languages lacking a specificappellation. Discussing the names of some languages of the Torricelli Phy-lum in the Sepik area of Papua New Guinea, Laycock (1975b, 774) says, “Thelanguages are named, when not after a village or area, by the translationinto that language of no or there u none; this practice has been widespreadin the Lumi area for some time, and may antedate European contact, and theprinciple has been extended in naming languages outside the Lumi area.”This practice explains why a number of languages in this area have very sim-ilar names (Olo, Alu, Galu, Aru, Aruop, and so on).40 CHAPTER 2Even when people do have their own name for a language, some othername is often given, usually a geographical one. On the island of Tannain Vanuatu, for example, the “real” names of the languages spoken in theLenakel and Whitesands areas are, respectively, Netvaar and Nɨrak. Butthese languages are almost universally known as Lenakel and Whitesandsnot only to outsiders but also to their speakers.In many cases the same language goes by a number of different names,a name in the local language and a geographical name, or a series of namesfor different dialects or different localities in the language area, for example.The language spoken (in two dialects) on the islands of Rennell and Bellonain Solomon Islands is known variously as Rennell-Bellona, Rennellese, Bel-lonese, Moiki, Munggava, and Munggiki. The Nakanamanga language ofcentral Vanuatu is perhaps better known to linguists as Nguna or Ngunese,which is the dialect that has received the most attention.5Again, there are cases where names may refer only to different dialects.West Guadalcanal (Solomon Islands), for example, has a number of nameddialects, some of which appear in the linguistic literature as if they were sep-arate languages (Gari or Ghari. Kerebuto, Nggae, Sughu, and Vaturanga).Early mission grammars or dictionaries often named the language afterthe location of the mission, while the name in current use is different(Lamalanga [name assigned by missionaries] for Raga, spoken in PentecostIsland in Vanuatu). Hyphenated language names (e.g., Mono-Alu in SolomonIslands) can indicate that there are (at least) two named dialects but no over-all local name for the language. Spelling variations also occur. The name ofthe Baniata language of Rendova in Solomon Islands has also been spelledBañata and Mbaniata, while another Solomons language, spoken in NewGeorgia, has been variously spelled Bareke, Bariki, Mbareke, and Mbariki.In this book I try to use the most generally accepted name for any lan-guage with consistency, even if (1) the language has other names, and (2)these other names are used in my sources.2.4. A Brief History of Pacific Language ResearchThe first information on Pacific languages came from European navigators,who published lists of words and occasional sentences in various languages(and sometimes commented on the similarities between some of them). Mis-sionaries followed, translating religious materials into various Pacific lan-guages, but also producing grammars, dictionaries, and the like. Some colo-nial government officials also made contributions.Professional linguists were rather late on the scene. In general, their in-terests have been threefold.The Languages of the Pacific 411. Comparative-historical: attempting to establish relationships be-tween languages within the Pacific, and between Pacific languagesand languages outside the region, thus contributing to the study ofPacific prehistory.2. Descriptive: analysis of the grammars of Pacific languages,compilation of dictionaries, and so on.3. Theoretical: testing or formulating general claims about the natureof language and of language change on the basis of data from Pa-cific languages.2.4.1. Fiji and PolynesiaOur knowledge of the Fijian and Polynesian languages is more completethan our knowledge of most other Pacific languages for a number of reasons.There is usually only one language per country (or island). The languagesare not especially difficult phonologically and are quite closely related, sothat a knowledge of one makes a good stepping-stone to learning another.And in general, the Polynesian languages and Fijian have been studied forfar longer than have those of the rest of the region.Missionary endeavors and the work of some colonial officials provideda firm foundation for the description of many of these languages, with agood number of grammatical studies and dictionaries being written in thenineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first grammar and the firstdictionary of Fijian, for example, were published in 1850 (Hazlewood 1850a,1850b), and there were also early studies of the languages of Tonga, Samoa,and various parts of eastern Polynesia, including New Zealand. In many ofthe countries of Polynesia, governments have also taken a keen interest inthe preservation of traditional culture and language, encouraging the useof Polynesian languages in schools and churches, on radio and television, inbooks and newspapers, and elsewhere in the public domain. So there aregood grammars and/or dictionaries for most of the languages of Fiji andPolynesia, and there are numerous publications in and on these languagesof both an academic and a general nature.2.4.2. MicronesiaGiven Micronesia’s checkered colonial history, it is not surprising that littlewas known about most of its languages until after the Second World War.Some of the early information on Micronesian languages was written in Ger-man or Japanese.Bender (1984, viii–x) gives a brief summary of the history of Microne-42 CHAPTER 2sian linguistics since 1945. Initial studies focused on applied linguistics toassist the American government in education and other areas. But thesestudies often had a more academic side as well. The decision in 1966 to sendPeace Corps volunteers to Micronesia meant that language courses had tobe written, providing a fresh impetus for linguistic research. These languagelessons often developed into full-scale grammars and dictionaries, mainlyunder the auspices of the University of Hawai’i, which continues to be themajor center for the study of Micronesian languages.As a result of the last fifty years’ research good grammars or dictio-naries exist for most Micronesian languages. Orthographies have been de-veloped for virtually all the languages, and many are or have been used asclassroom languages in Micronesian educational systems.2.4.3. MelanesiaIn Melanesia, some languages have been well known to linguists for a longtime, but a very large number remain almost completely unstudied. Apartfrom a few wordlists published by early explorers, it was once again the mis-sionaries who undertook the first serious study of any of the Melanesianlanguages. For many of these languages missionary grammars and dictio-naries (in French, German, or Dutch as well as English) remain the onlypublications of a linguistic nature. By the turn of the twentieth century, therewere publications on a handful of these languages, including the compara-tive studies of von der Gabelentz (1861–1873). Codrington (1885), and Ray(1926), which presented grammatical sketches of a number of languages.But even into the 1920s, very little indeed had been published about the lan-guages of Melanesia.During the twentieth century, missionary linguistic work has continuedin anglophone Melanesia. Scholars from various universities have also pub-lished grammatical and lexical studies of a number of Melanesian languages,while the Summer Institute of Linguistics has engaged in a massive amountof research into languages of the New Guinea area especially. Until recently,the pioneering work of Leenhardt (1946) remained the major source of infor-mation for the languages of francophone Melanesia, though recent work by anumber of French and other linguists has dramatically increased our knowl-edge of the languages of New Caledonia and the Loyalty Islands.2.4.4. AustraliaApart from a few missionaries and colonial officials, very few of the earlywhite settlers paid much attention to Australian languages. Given their atti-The Languages of the Pacific 43tudes toward Aboriginal people and Aboriginal society, which ranged fromclassifying them as primitive, attempting to assimilate them, and treatingthem with “benign neglect” to downright extermination and genocide, onewould not have expected much linguistic work to be done on these lan-guages in the first century of contact.In the earlier part of the twentieth century, some linguistic study accom-panied anthropological studies. In his survey of the languages of AustraliaDixon notes that, in the fifty years between 1910 and 1960, there was onlyone linguist, Arthur Capell, active in the field. In more recent years, linguistsfrom a number of universities in Australia and elsewhere, as well as thoseworking with the Summer Institute of Linguistics, have produced a consid-erable body of descriptive and comparative work. Much of this falls into thecategory of salvage linguistics, recording a language before it becomes ex-tinct. Many salvage attempts are just sketches, containing gaps in lexiconand grammar that can never be filled.44 CHAPTER 2CHAPTER3The History of theAustronesian LanguagesComparative-historical linguists have divided the fourteen hundred or solanguages of the Pacific into three broad groups. About 450 are classified asbelonging to the Austronesian family, a very large family of languages withanother six or seven hundred members spoken outside the Pacific Basin.Seven hundred or so languages spoken on the island of New Guinea, or onislands not far from it, belong to a number of apparently unrelated families.All are grouped under the cover term Papuan. The two hundred Australianlanguages belong to a third broad genetic grouping. We know much moreabout both the present and the past of the Austronesian languages of the Pa-cific than we do about the Papuan or Australian languages. For this reason Idiscuss the history of the Austronesian languages first.3.1. The Austronesian FamilyThe Austronesian language family is one of the two largest language fami-lies in the world in number of member languages. (The other is the Benue-Congo family in Africa.) The family as a whole has somewhere between athousand and twelve hundred languages, spoken by almost three hundredmillion people.1 Map 12 shows the distribution of Austronesian languages.Outside the Pacific Basin, Austronesian languages are spoken in Taiwan, inMalaysia and a few small pockets on the Asian mainland, in Madagascar, andin almost all of island Southeast Asia. All the languages of the Philippinesand almost all the languages of Indonesia (excluding most of Irian Jaya) areAustronesian.About 450 Austronesian languages are spoken within the Pacific region.These include all the languages of Polynesia, Micronesia, Fiji, New Caledo-nia, and Vanuatu, as well as almost all the languages of Solomon Islands.Only about one quarter of the languages of the New Guinea area belong45Map 12. Austronesian Languagesto this family, however. Speakers of these languages generally occupy NewGuinea’s offshore islands and some coastal areas, but very few inhabit in-land areas.While linguists are still not in full agreement as to the major subgroupsof Austronesian, figure 6 shows one widely accepted view of the higher-or-der branches of this family. Nearly all of the Austronesian languages dis-cussed in this book belong to the Oceanic subgroup. The family tree sug-gests an Asian origin for speakers of Austronesian, and the archaeologicalevidence tends to corroborate this.3.2. The Oceanic LanguagesTwo languages spoken in Micronesia, Palauan and Chamorro, belong to oneof the Western Malayo-Polynesian subgroups of Austronesian, and the Aus-tronesian languages of the western part of Irian Jaya belong to the SouthHalmahera–West New Guinea subgroup. All of the other Austronesian lan-guages in the Pacific belong to the Oceanic subgroup. This subgroup wasoriginally established by the German linguist Dempwolff (1934–1938). Hereferred to it as Urmelanesisch ‘Proto Melanesian.’ All Oceanic languagesshare a number of phonological, grammatical, and lexical innovations thatare absent from the other Austronesian languages.3.2.1. Internal Relationships of the Oceanic LanguagesScholars have been debating the internal relationships of Oceanic for sometime. They agree that the initial branching of Oceanic was in the western46 CHAPTER 3part of the Pacific, but the poor state of our knowledge of Melanesian lan-guages has made it difficult to determine just what that initial branchinglooked like. Fijian and the Polynesian languages have been thoroughly stud-ied for more than a century, and their interrelationships are fairly clear.They form, however, only one small subsubgroup of Oceanic, and studyingthem has not helped a great deal in determining the overall structure of theOceanic subgroup.Figure 6. An Austonesian Family TreeThe History of the Austronesian Languages 47Only in fairly recent years has a coherent picture of the Oceanic sub-group begun to emerge. Currently the groups within this subgroup include:1. Yapese, spoken on the island of Yap in Micronesia (Ross 1995). Thismay prove to form part of the Admiralty Islands group.2. The Admiralty Islands group, namely, the languages of Manus andneighboring islands to the north of the New Guinea mainland.3. The Saint Matthias Islands group, two languages spoken on smallislands immediately to the north of New Ireland in Papua NewGuinea. This also may prove to be part of the Admiralty Islands group.4. The Western Oceanic group, a very large grouping consisting of:a. The North New Guinea subgroup, comprising all the Oceaniclanguages of western and southern New Britain plus those spo-ken along the northern coast of Papua New Guinea from justsouth of the Markham Valley westward to the Irian Jaya border.b. The Papuan Tip subgroup, all the Oceanic languages of thePapuan mainland and the neighboring islands.c. The Meso-Melanesian subgroup, made up of the Oceanic lan-guages of northern and eastern New Britain, New Ireland,Bougainville (and their offshore islands), and the Oceanic lan-guages of the western half of the Solomon Islands (excluding ahandful of Polynesian Outlier languages—see 3.2.2 below).d. The Sarmi-Jayapura subgroup, made up of the Oceanic lan-guages of the northeast coast of Irian Jaya (Ross 1996). (Theseare included here because they may turn out to be part of theNorth New Guinea subgroup.)5. The Southeast Solomons group includes the Oceanic languagesof Guadalcanal, Malaita, and Makira, plus Bughotu on Isabel. Thisgroup may possibly also include the languages of Utupua andVanikoro in the Temotu Province of Solomon Islands, though it ismore likely that these form one or even two separate subgroups.6. The Southern Oceanic group (Lynch 1997), consisting of:a. The North-Central Vanuatu subgroup, in which are the non-Polynesian languages of north and central Vanuatu from theTorres Islands in the north to Efate in the central south.b. The Southern Melanesian subgroup, with the non-Polynesianlanguages of Southern Vanuatu (Erromango, Tanna, and Ane-ityum), New Caledonia, and the Loyalty Islands.7. The Micronesian group, all non-Polynesian Oceanic languages ingeographical Micronesia, excluding Yapese; note that the status ofNauruan within this group is still problematic.48 CHAPTER 3The History of the Austronesian Languages 498. The Central Pacific group, consisting of Rotuman, the languagesof Fiji, and all Polynesian languages, including the Polynesian Out-liers discussed below.2Attempts have been made to try to link two or more of these groupingstogether into a higher-order group, but they have so far been unsuccessful.Groups 5–8 above have recently been linked into a putative Central-EasternOceanic subgroup (Lynch, Ross, and Crowley 1998) whose validity is still be-ing investigated. Because of this, trying to present a family tree of Oceanicwould serve no real purpose at this stage of our research.3.2.2. Oceanic Subgroups and Geographical RegionsGiven the subgrouping of Oceanic just outlined, it should be obvious that theboundaries dividing the three traditional geographical-cultural regions of thePacific—Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia—do not correspond to the lin-guistic facts. About twenty languages are spoken in the geographical areaknown as Polynesia. Outside Polynesia are fourteen other languages that arevery clearly genetically “Polynesian.” These are referred to as PolynesianOutliers, and most scholars assume that they are the result of migrations intoMelanesia and Micronesia from western Polynesia after its settlement by theancestors of the modern Polynesians. Table 2 gives a list, with locations, of thefourteen Polynesian Outliers. (See also maps 4, 6–9). Figure 7 shows the in-terrelationships of the Polynesian languages and their immediate relatives inthe Central Pacific group. The primary split in Polynesian occurred betweenthe Tongic subgroup (consisting of just Tongan and Niuean) and the NuclearPolynesian subgroup (consisting of all other Polynesian languages includingthe Outliers). The closest Outliers’ relatives within Polynesian appear to beSamoan, Tokelauan, Tuvaluan, East Uvea, East Futuna, Niuafo‘ou‚ and Puka-puka. Although all the languages of Polynesia are Polynesian in the geneticsense, not all Polynesian languages are spoken in Polynesia.In Micronesia the situation is somewhat different. The “Micronesian” sub-group consists of most, but not all, of the languages of geographical Microne-sia. Not only are two Polynesian Outliers, Nukuoro and Kapingamarangi, spo-ken in Micronesia, but Yapese appears to be a single member of a subgroupseparate from all other Oceanic languages. To complicate matters further, thenature of the relationship of Nauruan to the other Micronesian languages isunclear, and Palauan and Chamorro are not even Oceanic languages at all, buthave as their closest relatives languages in Indonesia and the Philippines.Nowhere, however, is the mismatch between so-called cultural areasand linguistic classification more glaring than in Melanesia. Hundreds of50 CHAPTER 3Table 2. Polynesian OutliersCountry or territory Location LanguageFederated States of Mi-cronesiaNukuoro Island NukuoroKapingamarangi Island KapingamarangiPapua New Guinea Nukuria Island NukuriaMortlock Island TakuuTasman Island NukumanuSolomon Islands Ontong Java LuangiuaStewart Island SikaianaRennell Island, BellonaIslandRennelleseDuff Island PileniTikopia Island, AnutaIslandTikopia-AnutaVanuatu Emae Island EmaePort Vila harbor Ifira-MeleFutuna Island, AniwaIslandWest FutunaNew Caledonia Ouvéa, Loyalty Islands Fagauvea (WestUvea)Papuan languages are spoken in Melanesia, as are a number of Oceanic lan-guages, including a dozen or so Polynesian Outliers (see table 3).But more important is the fact that, although we can speak of a Polyne-sian subgroup, and even of a Micronesian subgroup, that have some corre-lation with geography, there is no such thing as a Melanesian subgroup ofOceanic. Of the eight major subgroups of Oceanic, six are located wholly orpartly in Melanesia.3.3. The Settlement of OceaniaLinguists construct hypotheses about the interrelationships of languages toattempt to find out about the past. These theories about past languages andlanguage splits generally lead to theories about the origins and migrationsof peoples. In many cases, one can compare linguistic and archaeological hy-potheses in an effort to put both on a firmer footing.3.3.1. Origins of Oceanic SpeakersThe Oceanic subgroup’s position on the Austronesian family tree (figure 6)indicates that the speakers of Proto Oceanic migrated from Southeast AsiaThe History of the Austronesian Languages 51Figure 7. The Polynesian Subgroup52 CHAPTER 3Table 3. Languages of MelanesiaAustronesian Papuan TotalNew Caledonia 28 — 28Vanuatu 105 — 105Solomon Islands 56 7 63Papua New Guinea 210 540 750Irian Jaya 45 160 205Totals 444 707 1151to the Pacific region. This thesis is almost universally accepted. Some evi-dence suggests that the closest external relatives of the Austronesian lan-guages may be (1) the Thai-Kadai group of languages, spoken mainly inThailand and Laos, and (2) the languages of the neighboring Austroasiaticgroup, spoken mainly in Cambodia and Vietnam. Both of these groups alsohave members in southern China and in parts of Malaysia. Archaeologistssuspect that dramatic improvements in agricultural practices, accompaniedby significant population growth, led to expansions of human populations onthe Southeast Asian mainland around 5,000 B.C. (Bellwood 1995).The Austronesians were one of these populations. The linguistic familytree presented in figure 6 is compatible with the archaeological evidencepointing to an Austronesian homeland on the Asian mainland. The first no-ticeable expansion was into Taiwan, and then, after some centuries, fromTaiwan to the Philippines. Later some Austronesian speakers migrated toMalaysia, Indonesia, and Madagascar.The closest relatives of Oceanic are its immediate western neighborsin the Cenderawasih Bay area and the Halmahera Islands in western IrianJaya. The immediate ancestors of the Proto Oceanic speakers migrated fromeastern Indonesia through western Irian Jaya into the Bismarck Archipelago(Manus, New Britain, and New Ireland), and settled there—possibly aroundthe Willaumez Peninsula in New Britain—for some time. Map 14 gives someidea of the various migrations.3.3.2. The Dispersal of Oceanic SpeakersOceanic speakers were not the first to arrive in the New Guinea area; speak-ers of Papuan languages had been there for a long time. The New Britainarea, for example, has been settled for more than thirty thousand years,and parts of the mainland of New Guinea for much longer even than that.Contact between the original Papuan-speaking settlers and the invadingThe History of the Austronesian Languages 53Map 14. Austronesian MigrationsAustronesians must have been varied in nature. In some situations the twogroups probably engaged in open warfare. In others, the relationship wouldhave been uneasy but not particularly hostile. Yet others no doubt involvedtotal integration and intermarriage.Some speakers of Proto Oceanic and its early descendants limited theirsettlements, moving slowly to settle the Admiralties and New Britain. Otherswent farther: Yap may have been settled from the Admiralties, for example,as were New Ireland and the western Solomons. Oceanic speakers alsocrossed the Vitiaz Strait to reach the New Guinea mainland, with one groupprogressively settling the north coast from east to west, and another movinginto the Milne Bay area and the south coast.Some Oceanic speakers seem to have been more adventurous still. Ifindeed they originated in the New Britain area, they have left no tracethere, but seem to have moved first southeast into the Solomons, then southinto northern and central Vanuatu and north into Micronesia, probably theKiribati–Marshall Islands area, from which location they settled the rest ofMicronesia. There were also movements further south, into southern Vanu-54 CHAPTER 3atu, the Loyalty Islands, and New Caledonia, and further east to Fiji, fromwhere Polynesia was settled. Map 14 outlines these movements.We should be careful, however, not to think of all of these migrationsas major colonizing expeditions. Spriggs (1995), for example, suggests thatthere were probably initial long-distance scouting parties, followed by morethan one movement of people along fairly well defined routes. Back-migra-tions of some people also took place. The migrations may have been deliber-ate, as such factors as population pressure, food shortages, or political tur-moil forced people to seek somewhere else to live. They may also have beenaccidental, at least initially, as fishermen were blown off course and endedup on new islands. Many settlements succeeded, but a great number nodoubt failed because of disease, attacks by speakers of Papuan languages,and all kinds of other reasons.Such factors complicate the neat splitting of communities suggested byfamily trees.Ontheonehand,a languagecommunitymaynothaveactually split,but rather slowly diversified as contact between its subgroups became less andless intense. On the other hand, different related languages could have influ-enced each other, blurring any innovations that might have been developing inone or another of them. Speed of settlement is another complicating factor. Inthe islands east of the Bismarcks no one seems to have stayed in one place longenough for telltale linguistic innovations to appear. Under these circumstances,definitive higher-order subgroups of Oceanic are hard to establish.If the settlement of the Pacific proceeded in the direction and at thespeed discussed above, it begins to make sense that Micronesians and Poly-nesians, although originating in Melanesia, nevertheless physically resem-ble their Southeast Asian ancestors more than they do Melanesians. SomeOceanic speakers moved through Melanesia quickly enough to retain Asiangenetic features, and these people “became” Polynesians and Micronesians.Others remained in Melanesia, where centuries of intermarriage with thephysically different Papuan speakers have led to quite different genetic de-velopments (Pawley and Ross 1995, 60).3.3.3. Dating Dispersals: The “Lapita People”Trying to establish a chronological framework for these migrations purelyon linguistic grounds is presently—and will probably remain—impossible. Afamily tree provides relative datings of language divisions, telling us thatone such split occurred before or after another, but it does not offer anyabsolute dating.In the 1950s and 1960s, linguists made an attempt to derive actual datesfrom lexicostatistical data.3 (The term for this is glottochronology.) ConcreteThe History of the Austronesian Languages 55dates for the breakup of Proto Indo-European and its various subgroups were,for example, proposed. Glottochronology, however, was strongly criticized bymany scholars, not only because of some of the dates it generated, but also be-cause of inherent weaknesses in its methodology and underlying assumptions.The practice has been almost universally abandoned.But although there is no linguistic technique for determining absolutedates for divisions in protolanguages or for migrations, linguists can try tomatch their relative dating sequences with archaeological evidence, whichis on surer ground when it comes to absolute dating. In the Oceanic region,this cooperative enterprise has led to some interesting results.Archaeologists use the term Lapita to refer to a distinctive style of pot-tery. (The name comes from a place in New Caledonia, one of the first sitesexcavated with this pottery.) The term Lapita culture refers to the cul-tural complex associated with this pottery style, including the introductionof pigs, dogs, and chickens; distinctive stone adzes and shell ornaments;the development of larger villages; and the intensification of agriculture(Spriggs 1995; 116–118).Lapita culture first appears in the archaeological record of the BismarckArchipelago about 1600 B.C. It seems to have reached as far as Vanuatu andNew Caledonia by about 1200 B.C., and Fiji and western Polynesia by about1000 B.C. In Vanuatu and islands farther south and east, Lapita people werethe first settlers: There is no evidence of any pre-Lapita people (Papuans orothers) in eastern Melanesia and Polynesia, and this absence of competitionfor land would have made settlement much easier than it was farther northand west.This notion of a very rapid movement of people through island Melane-sia correlates very well with the linguistic subgrouping that I discussed inthe last section: That is, the fact that the Oceanic group seemed to havea number of first-order subgroups (a “flat” tree), rather than two or threesubgroups that themselves have only two or three subsubgroups, suggestsfairly quick movement over a wide area. Much slower settlement patternswould have allowed more time for distinctive innovations and would presenta more layered family tree, with the eastern languages much lower down thetree than the western ones.Archaeologists tell us that the original Polynesians settled in the Samoa-Tonga area about 1000 B.C., remaining in that area for five hundred or evena thousand years. At around the turn of the era, some moved into easternPolynesia, while others migrated to the western Pacific to establish the Out-liers. By about A.D. 1000, all the major eastern Polynesian island groups hadbeen settled (Bellwood 1978; 318).In Micronesia, there is evidence that the Mariana Islands may have been56 CHAPTER 3settled from Southeast Asia about 1000 B.C. The rest of Micronesia, however,appears to have been settled for only about two thousand years—probablyby Lapita people from somewhere in Melanesia, though neither linguisticsnor archaeology is able to tell us precisely where.Significantly less archaeological work has been done in the western andnorthern parts of the Pacific than in the eastern part, so that linguists work-ing on the Polynesian languages, who are dealing with a relatively shortperiod, have reliable archaeological information with which to correlatetheir findings. But those working in Melanesia and Micronesia have to dealwith a longer period of time, much less archaeological information againstwhich to test their hypotheses, and, in some areas at least, occupation bypre-Oceanic peoples.3.3.4. Rapid Diversification in MelanesiaMany linguists have commented on and tried to explain the much greaterdiversity exhibited by the Austronesian languages of Melanesia than by anyother part of the Austronesian family. This is partly a function of time. Aus-tronesian languages have had more time to change in Melanesia than inPolynesia or Micronesia, and so appear less similar to each other. But thereis more to the problem—and to Austronesian language history—than thetime factor. After all. Austronesians have not been in Melanesia for count-less eons longer than they have been in Polynesia and Micronesia.Some of the Austronesian languages of Melanesia seem to havechanged more rapidly than others. This is due in part to contact betweenAustronesian and Papuan languages. Fairly clear evidence shows that somelanguages of the Oceanic subgroup have changed radically as a result ofcontact with Papuan languages. Among the most radical are languages likeMagori and Maisin in Papua New Guinea, where linguists have had difficultyin deciding whether or not they are Austronesian at all! So the history ofthe Austronesian languages of Melanesia—especially western Melanesia—iscomplicated by the fact that they not only neighbor Papuan languages buthave in many cases been in intimate contact with them.But certainly all of the major differences between Melanesian languagescannot be explained by Papuan contact. Many of the more aberrant Oceaniclanguages in Melanesia, like those of New Caledonia, are far away from thenearest Papuan language. Rapid change can be an internal matter as wellas an external one, and many of the differences between languages in thisregion have come about without external influence. The small scale of manyMelanesian societies can allow changes to spread more quickly than theymight in larger societies, although smallness does not cause rapid change.The History of the Austronesian Languages 57The notion of the emblematic function (Grace 1981) of language inMelanesia is an important one to mention here. Linguistic differences canbe important as badges of membership in a particular social group, and peo-ple often focus on these differences as markers of in-group or out-groupstatus (in the same way that young people in many societies use slang ex-pressions to mark their in-group status). In Melanesia especially, differencesbetween neighboring languages may have been exaggerated—even man-ufactured—in order to preserve this emblematic function. Such a processleads to more rapid diversification than normally expected.3.4. Reconstructing CultureMuch of the effort of comparative-historical linguists has gone into the re-construction of the vocabulary of Proto Oceanic. An examination of thisreconstructed vocabulary gives us insights into the culture of the speakersof the language in a number of ways:1. An examination of words that can be reconstructed for ProtoOceanic can help us make inferences about the culture of thespeakers of that language.2. Identification of widespread cultural items for which terms can notbe reconstructed for Proto Oceanic suggests that such items weremore recent introductions.3. An examination of reconstructed Proto Austronesian words not re-flected in Proto Oceanic can indicate which original Austronesiancultural items were lost or abandoned by Oceanic speakers as theymoved eastward into the Pacific.As an example of the last point, we can reconstruct Proto Austronesianwords referring to different kinds of rice and millet, and to rice and milletcultivation, but no such reconstructions can be made for Proto Oceanic.Presumably these crops were abandoned by Oceanic speakers in their mi-gration from Southeast Asia to the Pacific.Terms we can reconstruct for Proto Oceanic embrace a wide culturalrange.4 A few of the subject areas are:• Canoes and fishing. Terms for two types of outrigger canoes (large andsmall), outrigger float and boom, matting sail, paddle, bailer, launch-ing rollers, rudder, and anchor, as well as terms for various parts of thecanoe and for steering and sailing. There are also many reconstructedterms for a number of aspects of fishing technology, and of coursenames of many different kinds of fish, shellfish, and crustaceans.58 CHAPTER 3• Pottery. Various kinds of pots, clay and techniques of clay pot manu-facture, decorations, and accessories like lids, as well as terms fordifferent kinds of cooking (roasting, boiling, steaming, stone or earthoven, etc.).• Food crops. Several kinds of yam, taro, banana, pandanus, bread-fruit, sago, and sugar cane, as well as terms associated with horti-cultural practices.• Fruits and nuts. A wide range of terms relating to the coconut hasbeen reconstructed, including those for different stages of growthand parts of the fruit or tree. The words for a number of fruit and nuttrees, for betel nut, and for plants like ginger and turmeric have alsobeen reconstructed.• Animals and birds. Proto Oceanic terms in this area include wordsfor wild and domesticated pig, dog, fowl, rat, bandicoot, cassowary,cuscus (possum), and numerous bird names.• Social structure. A fairly complete set of kinship terms has been re-constructed, as have terms relating to chieftainship and the societalhierarchy.These and other reconstructed words paint the following picture of earlyOceanic culture. The original speakers of Proto Oceanic were clearly a mar-itime people. They used outrigger canoes, fished with hooks and nets, andgenerally exploited the resources of the maritime environment. They grew anumber of crops, including yam, taro, banana, and sugar cane, and gatheredfruits and nuts. They had domesticated fowls, pigs, and dogs (and suffered therat!), used the spear and the bow and arrow for hunting or warfare, made claypots, and built houses with shelves and platforms (as well as probably build-ing more temporary shelters in gardens or on the beach). They had a fairlyhierarchical society, with chiefs and probably other social ranks as well. Theybelieved in gods or spirits and probably practiced sorcery.But some words cannot be reconstructed for Proto Oceanic despite thefact that the items they name are found in most parts of the Pacific today. Thesweet potato, for example, is grown and eaten across the Pacific, yet thereis no Proto Oceanic reconstruction for it. Apparently the sweet potato wasintroduced after the dispersal of Oceanic speakers. Archaeological evidenceconfirms this. Other items that also fall into this category include the paw-paw and the cassava (manioc). Our linguistic evidence, particularly whenpaired with the archaeological testimony, gives us a partial understanding ofPacific prehistory, although much remains to be done.The History of the Austronesian Languages 59CHAPTER4The History of the Papuanand Australian LanguagesAlmost a thousand languages spoken in the Pacific region do not belong tothe Austronesian family. Of these, more than seven hundred are spoken in ornear New Guinea and are known by the general term “Papuan”; the remain-ing two hundred or so are, or were, spoken in Australia. We know much lessabout the history of these languages than about the history of the Austrone-sian languages.The majority of Papuan languages are located in the interior of theisland of New Guinea. This area experienced no European contact untilshortly before (and even in some cases some time after) World War II. Sowhile many of the languages east of New Guinea had been written for ahundred years or more, and had been studied in some detail, most Papuanlanguages were unknown to the outside world until very recently.Missionary linguists (especially those working with the Summer Insti-tute of Linguistics) were largely responsible for dramatically increasing ourknowledge of Papuan languages in the decades after 1945, and the pictureis considerably clearer than it was in, say, the 1960s. Nevertheless, thereare still very many Papuan languages about which almost nothing is known,and the work of comparative linguistics has barely begun. Where Australiais concerned, the death of many languages before they had been properlyrecorded leaves us with gaps of a different Kind. Much of the evidenceneeded to make historical inferences has disappeared, and formulating andtesting historical hypotheses is hampered at every turn.As if these problems were not enough, we are faced with a much longerperiod of human habitation in both Australia and New Guinea than in mostof the rest of the Austronesian-speaking world. The longer a group of lan-guages have had to diversify, the fewer will be their apparent similarities.60In dealing with the history of both Papuan and Australian languages, I canmake only general and tentative statements.4.1. Interrelationships of Papuan Languages4.1.1. Papuan Language FamiliesThe term Papuan refers to those languages of the Pacific region, excluding Aus-tralia, that are not members of the Austronesian language family. It does notrefer to a single family of languages: “Papuan languages are not all geneticallyrelated. They do not all trace their origins back to a single ancestral language.On the basis of present knowledge, they belong to at least sixty different lan-guage families, all with their own common ancestral language” (Foley 1986, 3;emphasis mine). Some linguists prefer the label “Non-Austronesian” for theselanguages, since it does not imply the genetic unity that a positive label like“Papuan” does. “Non-Austronesian,” however, like any negative label, has itsown problems—Russian, Chinese, English, and Swahili, after all. are also non-Austronesian languages—so I use the term “Papuan” in this book.While Foley does not explicitly define the criteria he uses in decidingmembership or nonmembership of a family, it is clear from his conclusionsthat relatively close relationship is involved. As far as these sixty or so fami-lies are concerned, their “wider relations [are] not yet conclusively demon-strated. Undoubtedly, with more careful and complete comparative work,this picture will become simpler; a number of families will probably com-bine into larger families, as Romance, Germanic and Slavic combine into theIndo-European family” (Foley 1986, 3).In this initial discussion of Papuan language families, I follow Foley’sconservative view; later I discuss proposed combinations of these families.The list of Papuan families in table 4 proceeds generally on a west-to-eastbasis, with the number for each family corresponding to that on map 15. Thelocations given in table 4 refer to geographical regions in Irian Jaya and toprovince names in Papua New Guinea.The situation is, however, even more complicated than table 4 indicates.Not every Papuan language belongs in a (smaller or larger) family. A numberof Papuan languages are currently classified as isolates. The term isolaterefers to a one-member family, a language that, on the basis of current evi-dence, appears to have no relatives.4.1.2. Possible Wider Groupings of Papuan FamiliesNaturally enough, the existence of so many language families in such a rela-tively small geographical area has caused many linguists to look for widerThe History of the Papuan and Australian Languages 61Table 4. Papuan Language FamiliesFamily Locationa Number oflanguagesWest of the New Guinea mainlan.1 Timor-Alor-Pantar Timor area 182 Northern Halmahera Halmahera Islands 11Mainland Irian Jaya onlyb3 West Bird’s Head Bird’s Head 64 Central Bird’s Head Bird’s Head 45 Borai-Hattam Bird’s Head 26 South Bird’s Head Bird’s Head 107 East Bird’s Head Bird’s Head 38 Mairasi–TanahMerahwestern 49 West Bomberai western 310 East CenderwasihBaywestern 411 Tor–Lake Plain northern 2012 Nimboran northeast 313 Kaure northeast 314 Pauwasi northeast 415 Sentani northeast 416 Dani-Kwerba central 1117 Wissel Lakes central 418 Mek (Goliath) eastern 919 Kayagar southeast 320 Yelmek-Maklew southeast 221 Kolopom Frederick HendrikIsland3Both sides of the Irian Jaya–Papua New Guinea borderc22 Sko north coast 823 Border northern 1224 Kwomtari northern 525 Senagi northern 226 Central-South NewGuineacentral 5427 Marind southern 628 Trans-Fly south coast 2562 CHAPTER 4Mainland Papua New Guinea onlyd29 Torricelli East & West Sepik,Madang4830 Upper Sepik East Sepik 1631 Ram West Sepik 332 Tama East and West Sepik 533 Yellow River West Sepik 334 Middle Sepik East Sepik 1235 Sepik Hills East Sepik 1536 Leonhard Schulze East Sepik and West-ern637 Nor-Pondo East Sepik 638 Yuat East Sepik 639 Mongol-Langam East Sepik 340 Waibuk Enga, Madang 441 Arafundi East Sepik 242 Keram (Grass) East Sepik, Madang 543 Ruboni East Sepik, Madang 844 Goam Madang 1145 Annaberg Madang 346 Arai East Sepik 647 Amto-Musian West Sepik 248 Mugil-Isumrud-Pi-homMadang 2849 Josephstaal-Wanang Madang 1250 Brahman Madang 451 Mabuso Madang 2952 Rai Coast Madang 2953 East New GuineaHighlandsall Highlandsprovinces4254 Finisterre-Huon Morobe 6555 Gogodala-Suki Western 356 Kutubuan Southern Highlands 557 Turama-Kikorian Gulf 458 Teberan-Pawaian Simbu, Gulf 359 Inland Gulf Gulf 560 Eleman Gulf 761 Angan Gulf 1262 Binanderean Oro 1663 Central-SoutheastNew GuineaCentral, Milne Bay 36The History of the Papuan and Australian Languages 63East of the New Guinea mainland64 New Britain East New Britain,New Ireland865 South Bougainville Bougainville 466 North Bougainville Bougainville 467 Yele-Solomons Milne Bay, SolomonIslands568 Reefs–Santa Cruz Solomon Islands 4aGeographical designations in Irian Jaya; province names in Papua New Guinea.bThere are a number of isolates in addition to the languages listed here.cThe isolate Yuri belongs in this group.dSeveral isolates occur in this group.relationships between them. If the neighboring Austronesian languages canapparently be classified into a single large family, then can we not at leastreduce the number of Papuan language families? Scholars at the AustralianNational University, particularly S. A. Wurm, have attempted to establishlarger groupings of Papuan languages on the basis of what seem to beshared features. Lack of adequate information about many languages hashampered this work. While some of the proposals rest on solid data, othersare much more impressionistic. Map 16 shows the locations of proposedwider groupings.Wurm borrowed terms from the biological sciences to refer to someof these wider groupings of languages. A stock is a group of languagefamilies that appear to be reasonably closely related to each other, whilea phylum is a group of distantly related families or stocks. In table4, I have often treated as families groups that other linguists referto as stocks. The degree of relationship between Papuan languages ofthe same stock roughly parallels that between geographically dispersedmembers of the Austronesian family, but the concept of a phylum isquite different, as it implies only a very distant relationship. The tech-niques and procedures of comparative linguistics have not yet been ableto prove the existence of such attenuated relationships.One proposed phylum is the West Papuan phylum, consisting of theNorthern Halmahera, West Bird’s Head, Central Bird’s Head, and Borai-Hat-tam families (families 2 through 5 in table 4) along with the Amberbakenisolate, for a total of twenty-four languages, all in the extreme west of IrianJaya. These languages have in common a certain amount of lexical similarity64 CHAPTER 4The History of the Papuan and Australian Languages 6566 CHAPTER 4and some grammatical features (e.g., the marking of subject and object byverbal prefixes rather than suffixes [Wurm 1982, 208]).Another suggested wider grouping is the Sepik-Ramu phylum,consisting of more than one hundred languages belonging to sixteen differ-ent families (numbered 30 through 45 in table 4) and spoken mainly in theEast Sepik, West Sepik, and Madang provinces of Papua New Guinea. (A fewnearby isolates would also be members of this phylum.) These languagesshare a number of distinct phonological features, such as a very small num-ber of vowel phonemes, and also have some common grammatical features(Wurm 1982, 210).The Torricelli family (29 in table 4) is treated by Wurm as the Torricelliphylum, composed of perhaps five or six families. Foley (1986, 241–242),however, treats this as a single family, largely because these languagesshare a number of grammatical features not found elsewhere among Papuanlanguages. (Subject prefixes and complex noun-class systems are two exam-ples.)Wurm has also grouped the Papuan languages spoken east of the NewGuinea mainland into the East Papuan phylum. This consists of twenty-five languages belonging to the New Britain, South Bougainville, NorthBougainville. Yele-Solomons, and Reefs–Santa Cruz families (64 through 68in table 4). There appears to be some lexical and grammatical evidence forthe existence of this group, though it is not very strong, and the situation iscomplicated by the heavy Austronesian-language influence on some of themembers of the phylum.The largest and possibly most controversial genetic grouping Wurmproposes is the Trans–New Guinea phylum. This hypothesis, in its most ex-treme form, proposes that almost all the rest of the Papuan languages—withthe exceptions of a few small families and some isolates—belong to a singlegenetic group of about five hundred languages stretching from Timor in thewest to Milne Bay in the east. It would include all of the languages of thesouthern and central part of the mainland, as well as some spoken in thenorth (1, 6, 8, 9, 11–21, 23, 25–27, and 48–63 in table 4). There are certainphonological and grammatical features shared by at least some members ofthis group, but the existence of the phylum as a whole—at least at this stageof our research—seems tenuous, to say the least. Some support for the hy-pothesis can be found in Pawley (1995).A number of the families listed in table 4 cannot at present be assignedto any phylum even under the most liberal application of the comparativemethod. These lone families are the East Bird’s Head. Cenderawasih Bay(plus the isolate Yava). Sko, Kwomtari, Arai, and Amto-Musian families(see map 16).The History of the Papuan and Australian Languages 674.2. Interrelationships of Australian Languages4.2.1. Mainland AustraliaSome linguists have divided the languages of mainland Australia into twopseudogenetic groups. The Pama-Nyungan group of languages occupiesabout three-quarters of the mainland. Its name comes from the words mean-ing ‘man’ at the northeastern and southwestern extremes of the group(Dixon 1980, 221). These languages are very similar typologically in bothphonology and grammar. The remaining languages—referred to by the neg-ative term Non–Pama-Nyungan—occupy the northwest of the mainland(see map 11 in chapter 2). They are phonologically fairly similar to the Pama-Nyungan languages, but grammatically quite different.In the 1960s a lexicostatistical classification of the Australian languagesdivided the languages into twenty-six “phylic families” (those sharing 15percent basic vocabulary or less). Of these groups, one was Pama-Nyungan,and each of the remaining twenty-five—Non–Pama-Nyungan—groups washeld to be a “phylic family” on a par with Pama-Nyungan (Dixon 1980, 263).Dixon himself is highly distrustful of this classification. A majority of lin-guists now agrees that all the mainland languages belong to a single, Aus-tralian, family. The differences between Pama-Nyungan and Non–Pama-Nyungan languages are developmental rather than original: “It seems clear… that nearly all the languages of Australia form one genetic family, goingback to a single ancestral language, proto Australian” (Dixon 1980, 228). Be-cause of the thousands of years of contact between Australian languages,however, shared innovations supporting subgrouping hypotheses are ex-tremely hard to find: “Present knowledge of the relationships between Aus-tralian languages is not sufficient to justify any sort of fully articulated ‘fam-ily tree’ model…. It could perhaps be that the continual levelling due todiffusion of features of every sort has obscured those genetic splits that didtake place in the development of Australian languages, so that it will not bepossible to reconstruct them” (Dixon 1980, 264–265).4.2.2. TasmaniaGenocide in Tasmania has led to the loss of all Tasmanian languages. AnAboriginal population of possibly five thousand people at the time of first Eu-ropean contact, speaking somewhere between eight and twelve languages,was exterminated in less than eighty years. The last full-blooded Tasmaniandied in 1888, although there are still about four thousand people of partialTasmanian Aboriginal descent living in Tasmania and elsewhere. So littlewas recorded of these languages that it is almost impossible to say anything68 CHAPTER 4about them (Crowley 1993). As regards their history, Dixon (1980, 233) says,“All we can conclude is this—there is NO evidence that the Tasmanian lan-guages were NOT of the regular Australian type. They have been separatedoff for so long, and the available materials are so poor, that the likelihood ofa genetic connection cannot be confirmed. The genetic affiliation of Tasman-ian is, and must remain, unproven.”4.3. Possible External LinksSuggestions about the wider relationships of Papuan and Australian lan-guages have not been lacking, but given the long periods of time involved,most of these can remain no more than suggestions. Greenberg’s (1971)Indo-Pacific Hypothesis attempts to link Papuan languages with those ofTasmania (but not mainland Australia) and of the Andaman Islands in theIndian Ocean. Greenberg speculated that Australian languages are relatedto the Dravidian languages of South India. Scholars and amateurs have alsolooked for relationships between Papuan or Australian languages and thoseof Africa and Asia. None of these hypotheses seems to be based on any ev-idence more solid than typological similarities or a few possibly accidentallexical similarities.Foley (1986, 271–275), however, has recently presented a small but tan-talizing amount of evidence for the existence of a genetic link between Aus-tralian languages and the languages of the Eastern Highlands of Papua NewGuinea. A small number of basic vocabulary items look as if they might be cog-nate. But he says that this evidence “in no way constitutes proof of a geneticrelationship between Australian and Eastern Highlands languages…. Muchmore detailed and careful research needs to be done before a convincing proofis provided, and. given the time depth, that may never be possible. Rather, theabove data represent a first attempt at marshalling some evidence for a ge-netic link between Australian and Papuan languages” (Foley 1986, 275).Up until around eight thousand years ago. New Guinea and Australiawere one continent. Only then did sea levels start rising after the last Ice Ageto form what is now the Torres Strait. It is distinctly possible that Australiawas settled from the New Guinea area, so the idea of a genetic link betweenthe two areas cannot be ruled out.4.4. Implications for Prehistory4.4.1. OriginsThe New Guinea mainland was probably occupied at least fifty thousandyears ago, presumably by the ancestors of the speakers of (some) PapuanThe History of the Papuan and Australian Languages 69languages; Australia was also settled at about the same time. Since compar-ative linguistics cannot reach back more than about eight or ten thousandyears, most of that fifty-thousand-year period is lost to linguistics.It is possible that all the Papuan families are related, descending from asingle “Proto Papuan” ancestor that we cannot even dimly imagine. A singlelanguage, spoken somewhere in the New Guinea area around 50,000 B.C.,could have given rise, over time, to all of the modern Papuan languages, andthis language may have been the ancestral language from which all Aus-tralian languages ultimately derive.We also have no evidence to indicate the origins of the first speakers ofPapuan or Australian languages. Linguistic connections with Asia or Africaare nothing more than highly speculative, nor would we expect otherwise.If the time elapsed is too great to show interrelationships among all Papuanlanguages, it is certainly too great to show genetic relationships betweenthese languages and those to the north, south, or west.But perhaps this very lack of evidence for external relatives means thatthe Papuan languages do, or did, form a genetic unity, and that the same couldbe said about the Australian languages. If the diversity existing among mod-ern Papuan and Australian families is due to different origins and differentmigrations of people at various times from various locations, one might expectto find some genetic connections between individual Papuan or Australianfamilies and Asian or African language families. The fact that we do not, whilenot strong enough to be called evidence, does suggest that the Papuan lan-guages may have formed a single linguistic grouping in the very distant past,and that the same may be true of Australian, Tasmanian included.In only a few instances has there been anything in the way of comprehen-sive reconstruction of the phonology, grammar, and vocabulary of any of thelarger Papuan families, and the situation in Australia is pretty similar. Littlecan be said about relations with other families, origins and migration routes,and earlier stages of Papuan or Australian culture, and the little that has beensaid on these topics must be treated as highly speculative.4.4.2. DiversificationOne question that must be asked in any study of the Papuan and Australiansituations is, if both New Guinea and Australia have been settled for aboutthe same length of time, why do we find such incredible genetic diversityamong Papuan languages, whereas Australian languages all seem to belongto just a single family?Physical geography, and its effect on wide-ranging human movement,is one contributing factor: “Most of New Guinea is difficult country indeed,70 CHAPTER 4steep, forest-covered mountains with precipitous drops, swirling rivers,dense, nearly impenetrable rainforests and endless tracts of swampland.The terrain thus poses some genuine barriers to human social interactionand would certainly favour, rather than inhibit, linguistic diversity” (Foley1986, 9). Geographical barriers like these were often bolstered by socialbarriers. Hostile relations were the rule between neighboring communities,and the tendency of language to take on emblematic functions and to beconsidered as a mark of group identity throughout Melanesia is one sign ofcommunities’ desires to set themselves apart. People often created linguis-tic differences, or exaggerated differences that already existed, in order topreserve their group membership.Kulick (1992, 2–3), for example, quotes the following observation madeby Ken McElhanon, who worked among Selepet speakers in Papua NewGuinea: “The people living in the Selepet-speaking village of Indu had gath-ered together for a meeting. During this meeting, a decision was reached to‘be different’ from other Selepet speakers. It was agreed that the villagers ofIndu would immediately stop using their usual word for ‘no,’ bia, which wasshared by all their fellow speakers of Selepet. Instead, they would begin say-ing buŋε, which they did and have continued doing since that time.” Thereare many other similar examples. In Buin (spoken in Bougainville), speakersof the Usai dialect have reversed all gender agreements: masculine mark-ers in other dialects become feminine in Usai, and feminine markers becomemasculine (Laycock 1982a). Similar phenomena can be observed in Oceaniclanguages. Speakers of Ririo (Choiseul. Solomon Islands) seem to have de-liberately transposed the last consonant and vowel of words to make themsound more different from their counterparts in the neighboring closely re-lated language of Babatana (Laycock 1982b, 274–276):Babatana Ririososole susuel ‘naked’vumi vuim ‘beard’piru piur ‘wild’bose bues ‘man’The Australian continent is in some ways less difficult geographicallythan New Guinea, and physical barriers to long-distance communicationare generally much less extreme. Though Australians belonged to distincttribal and linguistic groups, there was much more social interaction be-tween those groups, typically accompanied by transfer of vocabulary itemsfrom one group to another. Rather that accentuating differences, Austral-ians seem to have made an active effort to keep different languages frombecoming too different. Dixon (1980, 239) refers to “a gradual but constantThe History of the Papuan and Australian Languages 71shifting of tribal groups,” through which people came into contact with dif-ferent languages. He also mentions mergers of different tribal groups whosenumbers had been reduced by famine or disease. Such factors conspired tokeep Australian languages more similar to each other than one might ex-pect, especially in comparison to Papuan languages.Both Papuan and Australian languages have been in the Pacific region fora very long time indeed. We know nothing of where they came from and littleof how their speakers moved around the region. We do not know how far eastor west of the New Guinea mainland Papuan speakers might have originallysettled or much about their connections with Australian languages. All we canreasonably deduce is that, by the time speakers of Austronesian languagesarrived in this area about four to five thousand years ago or so, speakers ofPapuan and Australian languages were very much entrenched.72 CHAPTER 4PART TWOStructureCHAPTER5Sound SystemsThe sound systems of languages in different parts of the Pacific vary enor-mously, sometimes even when the languages themselves are closely related.Major similarities and differences exist between languages of the threebroad genetic groups—Austronesian, Papuan, and Australian. Below I dis-cuss the vowel systems, consonant systems, stress and tone, and the way inwhich words are structured in each group, touching briefly as well on thedevelopment of orthographies.15.1. Oceanic Languages25.1.1. Vowel SystemsThe great majority of Oceanic languages have five vowel phonemes, whichis also the commonest system found among the world’s languages generally.A vowel’s position in the diagram corresponds to how it is described, e.g., iis a high front vowel.i ue oaThis system is universal in the languages of Polynesia and widespread inMelanesia, though among Micronesian languages only Kiribati has fivephonemic vowels. This same system has also been reconstructed for ProtoOceanic. In many languages there is also a phonemic (significant) differencebetween short vowels and long vowels, a long vowel being one that takesalmost twice as much time to articulate as a short vowel. The examples75below show, in various languages, that vowel length alone is sufficient todistinguish two otherwise identical words. A long vowel is marked with a fol-lowing colon: /a:/ is long, and /a/ is short.Samoan/malo/ ‘loincloth’ /malo:/ ‘hard’/lulu/ ‘barn owl’ /lu:lu:/ ‘shake’Nukuoro/nui/ ‘coconut’ /nu:i/ ‘green’/ahe/ ‘go back’ /ahe:/ ‘when?’Paamese/men/ ‘it’s ripe’ /me:n/ ‘his tongue’/vati/ ‘he stopped’ /va:ti/ ‘he’ll bite if’A handful of languages have fewer than five vowels. One Micronesianlanguage, Marshallese, has been analyzed as having only four vowelphonemes. These are written i,ę, e, and a, but they have wide variations inpronunciation. The vowel e, for example, is variously pronounced [ε], [ә] and[o], depending on the neighboring consonants. Some languages in the Mo-robe Province of Papua New Guinea also have fewer than five vowels: Mari,for example, has just /i a u/, Adzera /i a o u/.Quite a few languages have more than five phonemic vowels. Rotuman,for example, has ten. Almost all of the languages of Micronesia have morethan five vowels: Kosraean has twelve, Lagoon Trukese and Saipan Carolin-ian each have nine, Yapese and Ulithian eight, Mokilese seven, and Nau-ruan, Chamorro, and Palauan six. Some dialects of Ponapean have sevenvowel phonemes, others six. (See appendix 3 for the vowel inventories ofKosraean and Mokilese.) Vowel length is also significant in Micronesian lan-guages, as the example shows.Mokilese/paj/ ‘nest’ /pa:j/ ‘hollow of canoe’/ros/ ‘darkness’ /ro:s/ ‘flower’In Melanesia, most languages with more than five vowels have just one ortwo extra ones. In Tanna and Malakula (Vanuatu), as well as in New Ireland(Papua New Guinea), languages with six vowels generally add /ә/ (the sound of ain English words like ago or sofa). Some languages in Melanesia have developedseven-vowel systems, the basic five vowels plus either front rounded vowels (likethe vowels in French rue and heureux), or a contrast between two different e-sounds and two different o-sounds (/e/ and /ε/, /o/ and /ͻ/).The most complex Oceanic vowel systems, however, are almost cer-tainly those of New Caledonia (see appendix 3). Iaai in the Loyalty Islands,76 CHAPTER 5for example, has eleven short vowels, all of which can also occur long;while Xârâcùù, on the mainland, has ten oral and seven nasal vowelphonemes, each of which can occur short or long, yielding thirty-four vowelcontrasts!How do such complex vowel systems evolve out of an original five-vowelsystem? The changes that took place in different Oceanic languages are verydifferent. Here I give just two kinds of examples. First, phonemes often havemore than one pronunciation, depending on their phonetic environment.Imagine that the phoneme /a/ was pronounced [æ] (the sound representedby a in English cat) when the vowel in the next syllable was /i/, but as [a] (likein father) elsewhere. We would have pairs of words like:/mati/ ‘sick’ [mæti]/mata/ ‘eye’ [mata]The pronunciation of phonemic /a/—[æ] or [a]—is totally predictable. Nowimagine that this language drops out all vowels at the end of words, as hashappened in many Oceanic languages. The following changes occur:[mæti] > [mæt] ‘sick’[mata] > [mat] ‘eye’Now the contrast between [æ] and [a] creates a minimal pair, and /æ/ hasbeen added to the language’s phonemic (as opposed to phonetic) inventory.Rotuman illustrates a second kind of process. Most Rotuman wordshave “long” and “short” forms that are used in different grammatical con-texts.3 In some cases, the short form simply drops the final vowel of the longform. (Note that the symbol ŋ represents the ng sound in English sing, whileʔ represents the glottal stop.)RotumanLong form Short formhaŋa haŋ ‘feed’heleʔu heleʔ ‘arrive’Metathesis, however—two phonemes exchanging places—is more com-mon. With some vowel combinations, metathesis has no further phonologi-cal repercussions:RotumanLong form Short formhosa hoas ‘flower’tiko tiok ‘flesh’pepa peap ‘paper’Sound Systems 77But with other combinations, the two vowels that came into contact havefused to produce a third, different vowel. (The vowel ö is a bit like the vowelin French heureux, while ü is the vowel in French rue.)RotumanLong form Short formmose (> moes >) mös ‘sleep’futi (> fuit >) füt ‘pull’Because of this Rotuman, which originally probably had five vowels, now hasten.5.1.2. Consonant SystemsPolynesian LanguagesIn general terms, the Polynesian languages have the simplest consonantsystems of all the Oceanic languages. Tongan has the largest inventoryof consonant phonemes of all of the Polynesian Triangle languages, withtwelve. A number of Polynesian languages, for example, Hawaiian, have onlyeight consonants:Tongan HawaiianP t k ʔ P k ʔv wf s h hm n ŋ m nl lThe consonant systems of the Polynesian Outlier languages are gener-ally slightly more complex (Krupa 1982). In some cases this is a result ofcontact with neighboring non-Polynesian languages. First, unlike any Poly-nesian Triangle language, quite a few Outliers, among them West Futuna,Ifira-Mele, Emae, and Takuu, make a distinction between /l/ and /r/. Second,in addition to the normal Polynesian stop consonants /p t k ʔ/, some Outliersshow a contrast with the aspirated stops /ph th kh/ (e.g., Takuu and Kapinga-marangi), with the voiced stops /b d g/ (Fagauvea), or with the prenasal-ized stops /mb nd/ (e.g., Emae and Pileni). Third, there is contrast betweenthe ordinary nasals /m n ŋ/ and one or more of the voiceless nasals /m̥ n̥/ inKapingamarangi, Fagauvea, and Pileni.MicronesiaThe consonant systems of the languages of Micronesia are quite differentfrom those of the Fijian and Polynesian languages. Lagoon Trukese is fairly78 CHAPTER 5typical of the majority of these languages. It has the following fourteen con-sonants (/tʃ/ represents a sound something like ch in English church, butwith the tongue turned back).Lagoon Trukesepw P t tʃ kmw m n ŋf srw yAll consonants except /w/ and /y/ have both short and long forms.Lagoon Trukese/sɨk/ ‘appear’ /s:ɨk/ ‘bleed’/kamwe/ ‘clam’ /kamw:et/ ‘sweetheart’/tʃi:mw/ ‘head’ /tʃ:in/ ‘speedy’/takir/ ‘laugh’ /tak:itʃ/ ‘torch-fishing’Most other Micronesian languages have similar consonant systems (in-cluding the distinction between short and long consonants), although Kiri-bati has no phonemic fricatives. A number have, in addition to the trilled /r/̃,either a flapped /r/ or an /l/. Some, like Kosraean, Nauruan, and Yapese (seeappendix 3). have more complex systems of consonants.MelanesiaThere is a considerable variety of consonant systems in Melanesia, and al-though neighboring languages often have similar systems, one cannot makebroad generalizations on a geographical basis. It is fair to say, however, thatthe consonant systems of New Caledonia are considerably more complexthan those of the rest of this region.Some of the simpler consonant systems in this region are found in theNew Guinea area. Below, for example, are the consonants of the Tigak lan-guage of New Ireland:Tigakp t kb gsvm n ŋrlSound Systems 79Probably half of the Melanesian languages would fall into a category ofmedium complexity as far as any classification of consonant systems is con-cerned. This complexity usually involves one or more of the following: (1)contrast between oral and prenasalized stops; (2) contrast between simpleand aspirated stops; (3) contrast between voiced and voiceless fricatives;and (4) contrast between simple and labialized or velarized consonants.Standard Fijian and the To‘aba‘ita dialect of North Malaita (Solomon Is-lands) illustrate such phonological systems.Fijian To‘aba‘itap t k t k kw ʔmb nd ŋg mb nd ŋg ŋgwf s f θ sv ðm n ŋ m n ŋl lrw y wAn unusual phonological feature of some of the languages of north Malakulaand east Santo in Vanuatu are the apico-labial consonants /p̪ m̪/, whichare produced with the tip of the tongue touching the upper lip.Themostcomplexconsonantsystems inMelanesiaare thoseof the languagesof New Caledonia (see appendix 3 for two examples). The Drehu language of theLoyalty Islands has twenty-eight consonant phonemes, including a contrast be-tween the alveolar stops /t d/ and the retroflex stops /ṭ ḍ/ (similar to that found inmany Indian languages)—a fairly rare contrast /t d/ (similar to that found in manyIndian languages)—a fairly rare contrast in Oceanic languages. Both Drehu andPije,a languageofthenorthernmainlandthathasthirty-fiveconsonantphonemes,contrast voicedandvoicelessnasal, lateral, andsemivowel phonemes.5.1.3. Prosodic FeaturesThe system of consonants and vowels in a language is often referred to asthe segmental phonology of the language, since linguists break up (seg-ment) a stream of speech into discrete units. Other features of speech thatdo not belong to individual segments—consonants or vowels—but to sylla-bles or words are known as suprasegmental or prosodic features. Stressand tone are two of the most important of these.StressThe term stress refers to the relatively greater prominence given to onesyllable in a word through extra effort, extra loudness, a change in pitch,or some combination of these factors. The underlined syllables in the Eng-80 CHAPTER 5lish words temptation, absolute, absolutely, and resist receive greater stressthan the other syllables in those words.In the majority of Oceanic languages, the position of stress in a word ispredictable. Let us take Samoan as an example. The basic pattern in Samoanis one of penultimate stress. Stress (marked here by an acute accent overthe vowel of the syllable) falls on the next-to-last syllable of the word.Samoan/túli/ ‘dismiss’ /táma/ ‘child’/tulíŋa/ ‘dismissal’ /tamáʔi/ ‘young of animals’When a suffix is added to a word in Samoan, the stress shifts to the right sothat it still falls on the penultimate syllable: /túli/ becomes /tulíŋa/.When a Samoan word ends in a diphthong (like /ae ai au/, for example)or in a long vowel, stress falls on this final diphthong or long vowel:Samoan/atamái/ ‘clever’ /faifeʔáu/ ‘pastor’/tamá:/ ‘father’ /paʔú:/ ‘fall’Most Oceanic languages seem to have a predictable pattern of penulti-mate stress, but in some languages, while stress is predictable, the patternsare different. One such language is Māori. There are three rules involvedin the assignment of stress in Māori: (a) The first long vowel in a word isstressed, as in the examples in (a) below; (b) if there are no long vowels, thefirst vowel cluster is stressed, as in (b); and (c) if there are no long vowels orvowel clusters, as in (c), then the first vowel is stressed.Māori(a) /maná:ki/ ‘support’ /pá:tu:tahi/ ‘a village’(b) /tamáiti/ ‘child’ /táutau/ ‘barking’(c) /támariki/ ‘children’ /hóro/ ‘fast’Languages with unpredictable stress patterns are relatively uncommonin the Pacific, although they do exist. In many languages of this type, how-ever, there seems to be one common stress pattern, other patterns beingvery much in the minority. The Big Nambas language of Malakula in Vanuatuis an example of this type of language. In it the majority of words arestressed on the penultimate syllable:Big Nambas/áγau/ ‘go away!’ /patiráni/ ‘put it up’/ipáli/ ‘he’ll burn it’ /iputakmáni/ ‘he’ll spoil it’But sometimes stress falls on the final syllable. Compare the two pairs be-low, identical except for stress:Sound Systems 81Big Nambas/áγau/ ‘go away!’ /aγáu/ ‘chief’s wife’/ipáli/ ‘he’ll burn it’ /ipalí/ ‘he’ll tie it’Further, as is not the case in Samoan, the stress remains in its original posi-tion even when suffixes are added:Big Nambas/γápat/ ‘chief’ /γápatak/ ‘my chief’/prápar/ ‘sow (pig)’ /práparan/ ‘his sow’TonePhonemic tone refers to contrasting pitch occurring at the word level. Thesame string of consonants and vowels can mean different things if the pitchof the voice is high or low, rising or falling. While common in Asian andAfrican languages—and in Papuan languages as well—tone is fairly rare inthe rest of the Pacific. Among Oceanic languages, just a few in New Cale-donia (like Cèmuhî) and a few more in the Morobe Province of Papua NewGuinea (like Yabêm), have phonemic tone.Cèmuhî has three tones: high (marked here with an acute accent), mid(marked with a macron), and low (marked with a grave accent), as exempli-fied in the following words:Cèmuhî/tí:/ ‘destroy’/tī:/ ‘gather’/tì:/ ‘write’Yabêm has two tones, high and low:Yabêm/áwá/ ‘valuables’ /àwà/ ‘his/her mouth’/wá/ ‘mango’ /wà/ ‘crocodile’/sá?/ ‘to hammer’ /sà?/ ‘put on top of’/ólí/ ‘body’ /òlì/ ‘wages’Because tone is a rare phenomenon in Oceanic, we assume that the fewlanguages that have it have developed it some time after they split off frommost of their other relatives. But how do languages develop tone systems?Let us look briefly at what seems to have happened in Yabêm and closely re-lated languages (Bradshaw 1979, Ross 1993).At one time there was probably a rule in Yabêm that a syllable contain-ing a voiceless stop or fricative (like p t k s) would have high tone, but onewith a voiced stop or fricative (b d g j) would have low tone.4 For exam-ple, /kápúŋ/ ‘I plant’ and /kátáŋ/ ‘I make a sound,’ but /gàbù/ ‘I insult’ and82 CHAPTER 5/gàdùʔ/ ‘I bow.’ Some consonants that conditioned high or low tone havesince changed their voicing (or even disappeared), but they have left theirtone “trace” behind. For example, earlier *s remained /s/ in Yabêm and, be-cause it is, and was, voiceless, it is associated with high tone.Yabêm*sipo > /sép/ ‘go down’*saqit > /sí/ ‘sew’On the other hand, earlier *j was voiced, and it conditioned low tone on thefollowing syllable, but later became voiceless /s/:Yabêm*jóŋi > /sóŋ/ ‘stop up, plug’*joRi > /sò/ ‘tie’*lejan > lέsέŋ ‘nit’5.1.4. Word StructureSome Oceanic languages allow only open syllables, meaning that eachsyllable may begin with a consonant but may not end with one. These lan-guages do not permit consonant clusters—two or more consonants com-ing together without an intervening vowel. Using C for consonant, V forvowel, and ( ) to indicate that whatever is enclosed is optional, the generalstructure of words in languages of this type is built on the pattern (C)V(C)V…, where vowels (and, in some languages, consonants) may be short or long.Languages that allow only open syllables occur in some parts of PapuaNew Guinea and Vanuatu, the southeastern Solomons, most of Fiji, and Poly-nesia. Examples:Mekeo/akaikia/ ‘great’/oisofai/ ‘off you go!’/ekapaisau/ ‘he made me’Arosi/taroha/ ‘news’/amamu/ ‘your father’/haʔaheuheu/ ‘change form’Fijian/veitau/ ‘friends’/vakasalataka/ ‘advise’/mbatambata:/ ‘cold’Sound Systems 83Hawaiian/pauloa/ ‘everything’/hoaha:nau/ ‘cousin’/ku:konukonu/ ‘excessive’Probably the majority of Austronesian languages, however, allow bothopen and closed syllables (syllables ending in a consonant). In some cases,only a few consonants (most frequently nasals) can close a syllable. In suchcases there are few consonant clusters, and they mainly occur across mor-pheme boundaries. Here are some Banoni examples (note that /ts/ repre-sents a single phoneme in Banoni, not a consonant cluster):Banoni/matam/ ‘your eye’/βatamumam/ ‘make us eat’/teŋtapatsi/ ‘broken off and scattered’In other cases, however, consonant clusters are frequent and can occur insyllable-initial position as well as across syllable boundaries:Adzera/tatariʔ/ ‘fowl’/romgam/ ‘yourself’/tafa-ŋga-ŋʔ/ ‘our ancestors’Maringe/fnakno/ ‘famous’/kñaokñaroo/ ‘be stringy’/snaplu/ ‘slip out’Big Nambas/prapar/ ‘sow (female pig)’/vənmaran/ ‘old woman’/kətəγsrasr/ ‘you’ve swept’Most Oceanic languages have a large amount of reduplication, aprocess wherein all or part of a word is repeated. Look at the following ex-amples from Hawaiian:Hawaiian/ʔaki/ ‘to take a nip and let go’/ʔakiʔaki/ ‘to nibble (as a fish)’/ʔaʔaki/ ‘to nip repeatedly’84 CHAPTER 5The basic verb is /ʔaki/. The verb /ʔakiʔaki/ shows complete reduplication,with the whole verb root being repeated, while the verb /ʔaʔaki/ is an exam-ple of partial reduplication, in which only part of the verb (in this case,the first syllable) is repeated. Reduplication commonly has a number offunctions in the languages in which it is productive. Take a look at these ex-amples.1. Repetition or continuous action.Māori/paki/ ‘pat’ /pakipaki/ ‘clap’/kimo/ ‘wink’ /kimokimo/ ‘blink, wink repeatedly’2. Intensity.Tahitian/hiʔo/ ‘look at’ /hiʔohiʔo/ ‘stare at’/parau/ ‘converse’ /parauparau/ ‘talk a lot’3. Similarity or diminution. The reduplicated word refers to some-thing similar to, but often smaller or more moderate than, itsunreduplicated counterpart.Tongan/viku/ ‘wet all over’ /vikuviku/ ‘damp’/havili/ ‘strong wind’ /havilivili/ ‘gentle wind, breeze’4. Change in part of speech, e.g., making a noun into an adjective.Kosraean/pΛk/ ‘sand’ /pΛkpΛk/ ‘sandy’/pweŋ/ ‘news’ /pweŋpweŋ/ ‘famous’5. Change from transitive to intransitive. (In the transitive verbs be-low, the suffix /-i/ marks the third person singular object.)TigakTransitive Intransitive/nol-i/ ‘think about’ /nonol/ ‘be thinking’/vis-i/ ‘hit him’ /visvis/ ‘fight’/kalum-i/ ‘see it’ /kalkalum/ ‘look, appear’6. Indication of plurality, usually of the subject of a verb, but some-times of some other aspect of the action. (In the examples below,the reduplicated form is used if the subject of the verb is plural.)Sound Systems 85SamoanSingular Plural/ʔai/ /ʔaʔai/ ‘eat’/tu:/ /tutu:/ ‘stand’/ŋalue/ /ŋalulue/ ‘work’Nearly all the examples so far have been from Polynesian and Microne-sian languages. Here is a set of examples from a Melanesian language, theNguna Island dialect of Nakanamanga (Vanuatu). The function of each ex-ample of reduplication is given in the right-hand column.Nakanamanga (Nguna dialect)/kati/ ‘bite’ /katikati/ ‘nibble’ diminution/ta:ki/ ‘throw’ /tata:ki/ ‘continuallythrow’repetition/namalo/ ‘piece’ /namalomalo/ ‘pieces’ plurality/vano/ ‘go’ /vanovano/ ‘travel around’ randomness/ta:re/ ‘white’ /ta:reare/ ‘very white’ intensificationWhen reduplication is partial, it may be prefixed, suffixed, or infixed, oc-curring before, after, or in the middle of the root. A rare example of infixedreduplication, given above, is Samoan /ŋalue/ ‘work (singular),’ /ŋalulue/‘work (plural).’ Below are four examples from Manam. The first two showpartial prefixed reduplication and the last two partial suffixed reduplication:Manam/salaga/ ‘be long’ /sasalaga/ ‘long (plural)’/eno/ ‘sleep’ /eneno/ ‘always sleep’/sapara/ ‘branch’ /saparapara/ ‘having branches’/ʔulan/ ‘desire’ /ʔulanlaŋ/ ‘desirable’The last Manam example shows that there are often morphophonemicchanges involved with reduplication, so that the reduplicated part of the wordis not always phonologically identical to the unreduplicated part. In Tongan,vowels undergo changes in many reduplicated words. Some of these changesinvolve differences in length, others differences in vowel quality:Tongan/poʔuli/ ‘be dark’ /po:po:ʔuli/ ‘be somewhat dark’/mafi/ ‘powerful’ /ma:fimafi/ ‘almighty’/teliŋa/ ‘ear’ /taliŋeliŋa/ ‘fungus’/muʔa/ ‘front’ /muʔomuʔa/ ‘go in front’In Ponapean, when certain categories of consonants come togetheracross a morpheme boundary as a result of reduplication, the first is re-86 CHAPTER 5placed by a nasal, as in (a) below. In other cases, a vowel is introduced tobreak up the consonant cluster, as in (b).Ponapean(a) /pap/ ‘swim’ /pampap//kak/ ‘able’ /kaŋkak//sas/ ‘stagger’ /san̪sas//ti̪t/̪ ‘build a wall’ /ti̪n̪ti̪t/̪(b) /tsep/ ‘begin’ /tsepitsep//katso:re/ ‘subtract’ /katsikatso:re//kate̪k/ ‘be kind’ /kata̪kate̪k//masukun̪/ ‘be blind’ /masamasukum̪/5.2. Papuan Languages5.2.1. Vowel SystemsThe majority of Papuan languages have the standard five-vowel systemfound among the Austronesian languages as well:i ue oaAlthough this is the most common system, some Papuan languages, in-cluding many of those in the Sepik area of Papua New Guinea, have fewerthan five phonemic vowels, while others have more. Compare Iatmul’s threevowels to Vanimo’s eight:Iatmul Vanimoɨ i uə e ə oɛ ͻa aFoley (1986, 54) says that no Papuan language with more than eight phone-mic vowels has been attested.A number of Papuan languages, for example, Pawaian, contrast oral andnasalized vowels. (The examples below are all low tone.)Pawaian/sù/ ‘ginger’ /yè/ ‘ancestor’/sṹ/ ‘road’ /yẽ̀/ ‘type of nut’Distinctions of vowel length do occur in Papuan languages, though this fea-ture is much rarer than it is in Oceanic languages.Sound Systems 875.1.2. Consonant SystemsConsonant inventories in many Papuan languages are relatively small (asample of Papuan consonant inventories is given in appendix 3). No lan-guage in the world has a smaller consonant inventory than Rotokas (spokenon Bougainville), which has only six consonant phonemes.5Rotokasp t kv r gThere are, however, Papuan languages with more complex consonantsystems. A number of languages distinguish prenasalized and simple stops,while some languages (like Kâte, for example) have coarticulated labial-ve-lar stops. In addition to the labial stops /p/ and /b/, made by closing the lips,and the velar stops /k/ and /g/, made by putting the tongue up in the back ofthe mouth, there are the coarticulated stops /kp/ and /gb/ produced by simul-taneously closing the lips and raising the tongue at the back of the mouth.Languages of the Highlands of Papua New Guinea are well known for,among other things, their range of laterals (or l-like sounds). Kobon, forexample, has three laterals: an alveolar lateral /l/, rather like English l; aretroflex lateral /ḷ/, with the tip of the tongue turned back to the roof of themouth; and a palatal lateral /λ/, a bit like the ly in the English word hal-yard. Melpa also has three laterals: dental /l/̪ (made with the tongue betweenthe teeth), velar /ɫ/ (with the tongue raised at the back of the mouth), andflapped (where the tongue flaps against the tooth ridge). Both Kobon andMelpa also have an /r/ phoneme that contrasts with all of these laterals.Perhaps the most complex Papuan phonological system, however, isfound in Yele (or Yeletnye), the language of Rossel Island. In addition to aset of simple phonemes, Yele also has labialized, palatalized, prenasalized,and postnasalized consonants, plus in some cases coarticulated consonantsas well. So in addition to simple /p/, there is labialized /pw/, palatalized /py/,prenasalized /mp/, postnasalized /pm/, and coarticulated /tp/ and /kp/. Andsimilar statements could be made about many other Yele consonants!5.2.3. Prosodic FeaturesMany descriptions of Papuan languages do not mention stress, perhapsbecause it is often associated with tone, and it is difficult to find general pat-terns. In some languages, stress appears to be predictable, though there isa range of patterns. Waskia, for example, tends to stress the last syllable ofa word, whereas Kewa prefers the first.88 CHAPTER 5Waskia/kadí/ ‘man’/naúr/ ‘coconut’/bagesán/ ‘it stays’/namerukó/ ‘he must go’Kewa6/póna/ ‘cut’/rúmaa/ ‘portion out’/rógoma/ ‘clay’In other Papuan languages, though, stress is not predictable, as the fol-lowing examples from Koita illustrate.Koita/ómo/ ‘head’ /omó/ ‘adze’/γúdi/ ‘digging stick’ /γudí/ ‘lime’/γúma/ ‘path’ /γumá/ ‘axe’Quite a number of Papuan languages have phonemic tone. Tone lan-guages are mainly found in the central Highlands and in parts of the Morobeand Sepik provinces of Papua New Guinea, but they do occur in other partsof the Papuan region as well. Most Papuan tone languages contrast only highand low tones.Pawaian/sú/ ‘tooth’ /sù/ ‘ginger’/yé/ ‘new’ /yè/ ‘ancestor’Fore/àsìyúwè/ ‘I stand up’ /àsìyùwè/ ‘I peel it’/nàyà:né/ ‘my hair’ /nàyá:né/ ‘my kidney’Foley (1986, 63) says that in many such languages tone is closely associatedwith the stress system, with high tone correlating with accented syllables,and that these are not, strictly speaking, tone languages.7In some languages—especially in the Eastern Highlands of Papua NewGuinea—tonal systems are more complex. These seem to be true tonal sys-tems. The following words in Awa, which has four phonemic tones, illustratethis.8Awa/pǎ/ ‘fish’ rising tone/nâ/ ‘taro’ falling tone/ná/ ‘breast’ high tone/nà/ ‘house’ low toneSound Systems 895.2.4. Word StructureSome Papuan languages have only open syllables. A number of these lan-guages allow combinations of vowels, sometimes quite a few vowels appear-ing in sequence without any intervening consonant.Toaripi/pasisa/ ‘ladder’/easo/ ‘fish spear’/maeamariti/ ‘shame’/eae/ ‘erroneously’Mountain Koiari/neinuvueabe/ ‘their mothers’/neiniai/ ‘properly’/saiamo/ ‘slow’/ialelua/ ‘consequently’Some Papuan languages that generally have open syllables (see the firsttwo words in the example below), allow syllables to be closed with a nasal.Buin/itaka/ ‘freshwater shrimp’/topituumoru/ ‘fish-killer’/kuikuiŋ/ ‘driftwood’/rempo/ ‘battle axe’Probably the majority of Papuan languages allow fairly widespread conso-nant clustering. Words may end in a range of consonants.Wahgi/amŋa/ ‘yawn’/oks̪nal/̪ ‘avoid’/molmŋe/ ‘they were’/end̪z̪mo/ ‘waste?’/kops̪nde/ ‘cut open’/kand̪z̪Ip/ ‘they saw’Kamasau/beryi/ ‘bean’/torbiŋ/ ‘mouth harp’/fraŋgi/ ‘tomorrow’/suŋgrum/ ‘type of grass’/surog/ ‘caterpillar’/wand/ ‘speech’90 CHAPTER 5Reduplication is a much less common feature of Papuan than of Oceaniclanguages.5.3. Australian LanguagesIn comparison with Oceanic and Papuan languages, Australian languagesare probably of moderate phonological complexity. None of them hasphonemic tone, for example, and in most stress is predictable, occurringon the first syllable of the word. Many have quite small vowel inventories,though a few Australian languages rival those of New Caledonia in theirlarge number of vowels. Consonant inventories are neither small norlarge.5.3.1. Vowel SystemsMost Australian languages have just three vowel phonemes, though many ofthese also distinguish vowel length, for a total of six vowel contrasts.i u i: u:a aExceptions are generally of two kinds. First, there are a few languagesin Central Australia that have only two vowel phonemes: Kaitij, for example,has just /ɨ/ and /a/ (though each of these has a number of different pronuncia-tions in different phonetic contexts). Second, some languages in the northand northwest have a four-or five-vowel system, for example, Alawa andKunjen.Alawa Kunjeni u i ue e oa aBut a few languages, especially those in the Cape York area, havedeveloped complex vowel systems from what was probably an ancestralthree-vowel system. One such system, that of Anguthimri, appears in ap-pendix 3.5.3.2. Consonant SystemsIn discussing the consonants of Australian languages it is helpful to use twotechnical terms: Apical refers to sounds made with the tip of the tongue,and laminal describes sounds made with the blade of the tongue. ManySound Systems 91Australian languages distinguish apical and laminal stops and nasals, andmany have two sets of apicals and two sets of laminals. Apicals include theapico-alveolar (tongue tip on the tooth ridge) consonants /d t n/ and theapico-postalveolar, or retroflex (tip on the roof of the mouth) consonants/ḍṭṇ/. Laminals occur as laminodentals (tongue blade on the teeth), namely/d̪tn̪̪/, and laminopalatals (blade on the roof of the mouth), /dy ty ñ/.Australian languages generally have bilabial (/b p m/) and velar (/g kŋ/) stops and nasals as well. Along the east coast, languages usually haveonly one lateral, but elsewhere they have two or more. Most Australian lan-guages have two rhotics, or r-sounds. One is usually a retroflex semivowel/ṛ/ (rather like English r), and the other a flapped or trilled r.Consonant inventories for four languages illustrate some general pat-terns. Wargamay is an example of an east-coast language, with no contrastbetween apicals or between laminals, and with one lateral. Kunjen is an east-ern language with a laminal contrast but no apical contrast, and with onelateral. Wajarri, a western language, exhibits apical contrast but no laminalcontrast, and has more than one lateral. Pitta-Pitta is a central Australian lan-guage that contrasts both apicals and laminals and has more than one lateral.Wargamayb d̪ d gm n̪ n ŋlṛw yKunjenp t ̪ t ty kb d̪ d dy gf ð γm n̪ n ñ ŋlṛw yWajarrip t ̪ t ṭ km n̪ n ṇ ŋl ̪ l ḷr ṛw y92 CHAPTER 5Pitta-Pittap t ̪ t ṭ ty km n̪ n ṇ ñ ŋl ̪ l ḷ λr ṛw yTwo other patterns emerge from an examination of the four consonantsystems given above. First, contrast between voiceless and voiced stops, i.e.,between /p t k/ and /b d g/, is not common, though it does occur in a minority oflanguages. Second, fricative phonemes are rare. Of the languages above, onlyKunjen has fricative phonemes (/f ð γ/). (But in some languages stops like /b/are pronounced as fricatives, say [f] or [v], in some phonetic contexts.)5.3.3. Word StructureAustralian languages show remarkable similarity in the way in which conso-nant and vowel phonemes combine to form words. As in other Pacific lan-guages, words of one syllable are extremely rare. Most words contain twosyllables, some more than two. Words seldom begin with a vowel, and se-quences of vowels are also rare. Two-consonant clusters are common in themiddle of words, but not initially or finally. Words may end in either a conso-nant or a vowel. The typical pattern is CVC(C)V(C), and words of more thantwo syllables simply build on this pattern.There are commonly restrictions on where consonants occur. Typically,laterals and rhotics do not occur in word-initial position, and stops do notoccur finally. Rules also govern the formation of two-consonant clusters inmedial position. Here are some examples from Bandjalang, showing the dis-tribution of laterals, rhotics, and stops, as well as a limited range of medialtwo-consonant clusters (rb, ñb, ŋb, mb):Bandjalang/dya:dyam/ ‘child’ /ba:baŋ/ ‘grandmother’/burbi/ ‘koala’ /ŋu:ñba/ ‘snake’/guluŋbay/ ‘flu’ /yalañ/ ‘tongue’/dyimbaŋ/ ‘sheep’ /bala:ya/ ‘die’There are exceptions to these constraints. Anguthimri, mentionedabove as an atypical Australian language for its vowel system, is excep-tional in other ways as well. It contrasts voiceless and voiced prenasal-ized stops and possesses five fricative phonemes. It also has a phonemicglottal stop (see appendix 3). Besides these phenomena, Anguthimri hasSound Systems 93many monosyllabic words and allows word-initial vowels and consonantclusters. It does not, however, allow word-final consonants (except /w/and /y/). Some examples:Anguthimri/pwe:ke/ ‘groper’ /pæŋa/ ‘elbow’/kyabara/ ‘alligator’ /iγiti/ ‘brown’/ubu/ ‘red gum’ /baw/ ‘tooth’/d̪wa/ ‘eye’ /drya/ ‘wing’Reduplication is often used in Australian languages to form the plural ofnouns and adjectives:Dyirbal/bari/ ‘axe’ /baribari/ ‘axes’/bulgan/ ‘big one’ /bulganbulgan/ ‘big ones’It sometimes has such other functions as intensity (Kalkatungu),diminution (Diyari), or unreality (Western Desert).Kalkatungu/jagabi/ ‘listen’ /jagabijagabi/ ‘listen intently’/buyud/ ‘hot’ /buyudbuyud/ ‘Very hot’Diyari/kinta̪la/ ‘dog’ /kinta̪lakinta̪la/ ‘puppy’Western Desert/wati/ ‘man’ /watiwati/ ‘child playing atbeing an adult’5.4. OrthographiesNo Pacific languages were written before European contact,9 and even to-day, not all Pacific languages are written. This usually means that no mis-sionaries or linguists have done sufficient work on these languages to designan orthography. Languages in this category are found almost exclusively inMelanesia and Australia.Many languages in Melanesia and Australia are used for a much nar-rower range of written purposes than are other Pacific languages: The mainwriters are probably linguists! One reason for this has to do with the rela-tively small numbers of speakers of these languages, and the fact that theygenerally write in a more widely understood language (English, French, orMelanesian Pidgin, for example).94 CHAPTER 55.4.1. General IssuesThe Latin alphabet (in which English and most European languages are writ-ten) is universally applied to the writing of Pacific languages. Orthographiesfor most of the written languages of the Pacific were developed by Chris-tian missionaries during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, althoughlinguists have also made their contributions.In developing orthographies for Pacific languages, missionaries andlinguists faced a number of problems that reliance on the spelling systemof, say, English or French could not always resolve. The first of these, ofcourse, is that the spelling systems of these two European languages arethemselves not always consistent—or at least not transparently so. In Eng-lish, for example, we now spell Fiji as Fiji, but earlier explorers wrote it asFejee or Feejee; the French write it as Fidji. The “correct” Fijian spelling,however, is Viti.There are also distinctive phonological features in Pacific languages thatlanguages like English or French do not have. For these there is no “natural”orthographic representation. Two examples common to many parts of the re-gion are (1) the contrast between short and long vowels and (2) the glottalstop phoneme. Different solutions were often found for these kinds of prob-lems in different areas. For vowel length, the macron (as in ā, ē) has been usedin many Polynesian languages, although double vowels (aa, ee) are used inothers. The glottal stop has most often been indicated in Polynesia by a quota-tion mark (as in Hawai‘i), though in some parts of Melanesia letters like c or q,which are not otherwise needed in the spelling system, have been used.The problem with additional marks like apostrophes and macrons isthat, because they are not perceived as “normal” letters, they are veryoften left out by people when they are writing the language.10 For example,although Hawaiian has both the glottal stop and the distinction betweenlong and short vowels, many people do not indicate either of these distinc-tions when they write Hawaiian. Thus the words /pau/ ‘finished’ and /pa:ʔu:/‘lavalava, sarong’ are often both written as pau, although a more accuratewriting system (and the one recently officially re-endorsed) would write theword for ‘finished’ as pau and the word for ‘lavalava’ as pā‘ū.The problems have not only been technical, however. There are generalprinciples on the basis of which a good orthography can be developed, butthere is often a certain amount of choice even after the application of thesescientific principles. For example, it makes equal scientific sense to write /a:/as ā, as aa, or in a number of other ways (like ah in parts of Micronesia).Orthographic design in many parts of the Pacific has often revolved aroundthese areas of choice, and reflects the fact that speakers of a language—andSound Systems 95outsiders—have very strong feelings about how a language ought to be writ-ten, regardless of any scientific approach to the situation.Factionalism of various kinds shows itself in spelling controversies allover the Pacific. There has been a long debate in Kiribati over whether towrite b’ and m’ or bw and mw for the phonemes /bw/ and /mw/. The NauruanLanguage Board is currently preparing a Nauruan dictionary in two differ-ent orthographies, pending a final decision on spelling. One of these systemsderives from the Protestant Bible translation, while the other was developedby Catholics and endorsed by an earlier official body. In the spelling of TokPisin in Papua New Guinea before the Second World War, there were the fol-lowing competitive orthographic decisions.11/g/ /ŋ/Lutherans g ŋCatholics g ngMethodists q gThere have also been other nonlinguistic factors at work. English andFrench, as international languages, have considerable prestige in the Pa-cific. Although linguists have their own phonetic symbols for sounds, manyof these are not standard letters in the English or French writing systems—βð θ ʔ ə ŋ, for example. Attempts to use letters like these to represent soundsin Pacific languages are often met with resistance by speakers of those lan-guages, who don’t want their languages to look “funny” in comparison withEnglish or French.Other problems are also related to the orthographies of the prestige lan-guages. In general, a scientific approach to orthographic design requiresthat, wherever possible, each phoneme should be represented by a singleletter.12 Following this principle, the early missionaries used the single let-ter g to represent the phoneme /ŋ/ (the sound written ng in English singer)in a number of Polynesian languages: Pago Pago, the capital of AmericanSamoa, for example, is pronounced /paŋopaŋo/. This principle was extendedby Methodist and related missionaries to some other parts of Polynesia, toFiji, and to certain areas in Melanesia.But though this decision may follow scientific rationality, there is aconflict with the spelling system of English, where the letter g has a verydifferent value. In Tongan, for example, original g was later changed tong, since it was felt that Tongans learning English would be confusedby the two different values of the letter g in these two languages. Manylanguages in Melanesia and Micronesia use ng for this sound, but thishas led to problems of a different sort. On the one hand, English ngrepresents both the sound /ŋ/ as in singer and the sounds /ŋg/ as in fin-96 CHAPTER 5ger, and outsiders often mispronounce words written in Pacific languageswith this letter combination (Tonga frequently being pronounced by Eng-lish speakers as if it were Tongga, for example). On the other hand, ifng is used for /ŋ/, then designers of writing systems are often forced touse the somewhat unsightly three-letter combination ngg to represent/ŋg/. There have, then, been a number of problems in the development ofspelling systems in the Pacific, by no means all of them having to do withthe nature of the languages.5.4.2. Polynesia and FijiBecause of their relatively simple phonological structures, the developmentof writing systems for the Polynesian languages has been a fairly straightfor-ward matter. There have been different approaches to the velar nasalphoneme /ŋ/, written g or ng, and to long vowels, written with macrons orwith double vowels. Sometimes even in the same language some writershave used macrons and some double letters, while others have ignoredvowel length altogether: Māori, Maaori, and Maori have all had some cur-rency in New Zealand, for example, though the first seems now to be thepreferred spelling.The designers of the Fijian writing system fairly consistently applied theone-phoneme-one-letter principle, although not without controversy.13 In Fi-jian, the prenasalized stops /mb nd ŋg/ have been written with the singleletters b, d, and q rather than mb, nd, and ngg. According to the same prin-ciple, /ŋ/ is written as g and /ð/ as c (rather than the ng and th of English).Where vowel length is written, the macron is used, but many writers of Fi-jian ignore this feature.5.4.3. Melanesia and MicronesiaIn some parts of Melanesia, the early missionaries made similar kinds of de-cisions as those made for Fijian and Polynesian languages. In a number oflanguages in Vanuatu especially, g is used for /ŋ/, and in some c is used for/γ/. Additional single symbols were created to try to adhere to this principle,p̃ and m̃ being used to represent /pw/ and /mw/. Many of these languages,along with those of the Solomons, have only five vowels, which caused noproblems. Vowel length (where it was recognized), however, was generallyrepresented by doubling vowels.Further west, in the New Guinea area, the Methodist traditions fromFiji and Polynesia had less influence, and orthography designers have gen-erally kept fairy closely to English spelling, at least as far as consonantsSound Systems 97are concerned. In these languages, for example, the prenasalized stops /mbnd ŋg/ tend to be written b, d, and g in word-initial position (where the pre-nasalization is fairly weak), and mb, nd, and ngg in other positions. Thevelar nasal [ŋ] is usually written ng, although in some areas where theLutheran church is strong, the letter ŋ is used. The occurrence of morethan one lateral in Highlands languages has required the use of two lettersto represent a single phoneme, like tl, dl, gl, and so on, in addition to sim-ple l, while gh is frequently used for the velar fricative /γ/. In dealing withlanguages which have more than five phonemic vowels, both digraphs(two-letter combinations) and diacritics (additional marks like accents)have been used. Thus where there is a contrast between /i/, /I/, and /e/ (asin English seat, sit, set), for example, these vowels are written i, î, e; or i,ê, e; or ii, i, e.The complex nature of the consonant and vowel systems of most NewCaledonian languages has forced linguists to use both diacritics and combi-nations of letters. The vowels of Xârâcùù, for example, are a â ä e é è ê ë i î oô ö u ù û ü, and the long vowels are written by doubling these letters. Writingthe consonant phonemes of Pije involves single letters (p, m, h, w), digraphs(pw, ph, hm, hw) and even trigraphs—combinations of three letters repre-senting a single phoneme—like phw, hmw, hny, hng.In Micronesia, digraphs are usually used to help represent complexvowel and consonant systems. A number of Micronesian languages use oafor /ͻ/ when this contrasts with /o/ (written o), and h is often used to marklong vowels: thus i represents /i/, while ih represents /i:/.14 Digraphs and tri-graphs are also widely used in writing consonant phonemes. Carolinian, forexample, distinguishes bw, gh, mw, pw, rh, sch, and tch from b, g, m, p, r, s,and t. Long consonants are usually represented by doubling the consonant(as in ll for long /l:/). In the case of digraphs, only the first letter is doubled(mmw represents long mw).5.4.4. AustraliaIn general, the small number of vowel phonemes in Australian lan-guages has not posed many problems for designers of orthographies. Longvowels have sometimes been written as double vowels, sometimes with a fol-lowing h; thus /a:/ is written aa in some languages, but ah in others.Decisions made about writing consonants vary, but a common patternis to write retroflex sounds with a preceding r, dentals with a following h,and palatals with a following y; palatal stops are sometimes written j. InGooniyandi, for example, the stop and nasal phonemes given on the left be-low are written with the letters on the right:98 CHAPTER 5GooniyandiPhonemes Lettersb d̪ d ḍ dy g b th d rd j gm n̪ n ṇ ñ ŋ m nh n rn ny ngSimilarly, multiple laterals are generally written lh, l, rl, and ly (or lj), whilethe two rhotics are generally written r and rr.I have adopted these spelling conventions here and transliterated sym-bols in this way from sources that use phonetic symbols. Note, however, thatthere is pressure to spell Australian languages following English conven-tions. For example, the Bandjalang (/bañdyalaŋ/) people now choose to writetheir language name Bundjalung, to avoid its possible mispronunciation as/bæñdyəlæŋ/ by English speakers.5.5. SummaryPacific languages show a great diversity of phonological systems. Vocalicallythey range from Australian languages with just three short vowels to NewCaledonian languages with seventeen short vowels. Consonant inventoriescan be very small and simple, or extremely large and complex. Some lan-guages have phonemic tone, others do not. Some allow a great deal ofconsonant clustering; others allow none.Various social issues surround and affect the development of orthogra-phies for these languages. In the remainder of this book, I use the standardwriting system, in italics, for each language from which I give examples. Inthe case of languages without a generally accepted writing system, I use amodified set of phonetic symbols, also in italics.Sound Systems 99CHAPTER6Oceanic Languages:Grammatical Overview6.1. PronounsI use the term “pronoun” fairly loosely. Oceanic languages generally haveonly one set of free pronouns, but they also have one or more sets of pronom-inal forms that are more or less bound to nouns, verbs, or other morphemes.While only the free forms might qualify as pronouns under a strict definition,I discuss the other forms here as well.6.1.1. PersonAlmost all Oceanic languages make a distinction between inclusive firstperson, referring to the speaker and the addressee or addressees (“I +you”) and exclusive first person, referring to the speaker and some otherindividual or individuals (“I + he/she/it/they”). For example:Motu Mono-Alu Nakanamanga PuluwatSingularI lau maha kinau ngaangyou oi maito niigo yeenhe/she/it ia e‘a nae yiiyPluralwe:INC ita maita nigita kiirwe:EXC ai maani kinami yáámemyou umui maang nimu yáámithey idia relana‘i naara yiir100Exceptions to this general statement are found in a few languages that seemto have lost the inclusive/exclusive distinction. These include the five lan-guages of the Siau family in the West Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea(Sera, Sissano, Ali, Tumleo, and Ulau-Suain), Kiribati, and possibly also oneor two varieties of Fijian.Sissano KiribatiSingularI ya ngngaiyou e ngkoehe/she/it i ngaiaPluralwe eit ngairayou om ngkamiithey ri ngaiiaVery few Oceanic languages mark gender in pronouns. In all the exam-ples above, the third person singular refers to male or female animates aswell as to inanimates. Maringe (Isabel, Solomon Islands) is one of the fewOceanic languages that does have a gender distinction, though it differsfrom the English one. Female speakers use only one set of third personforms, but male speakers use two sets—one referring to males, and the otherin all other cases.MaringeMale speaker Female speakerhe mana na‘ashe/it na‘a na‘athey (males) mare re‘ethey (non-males) re‘e re‘eSome languages in Melanesia have no third-person pronouns at all.Mari (Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea) is one such: It uses demonstra-tives (roughly translated, “this one,” “those ones”) instead of pronouns like“he/she/it” or “they.”6.1.2. NumberA three-way distinction between singular, dual, and plural number is per-haps the commonest pattern in Oceanic languages, the dual number refer-ring to two and only two. This pattern is found in Polynesian languages andOceanic Languages: Grammatical Overview 101Rotuman, as well as in many languages in Melanesia and Micronesia. For ex-ample:Yapese Nakanai A‘jië SamoanSingularI gaeg eau gènya a‘uyou guur eme gèi ‘oehe/she/it qiir eia ce iaDualwe two:INC gadow etalua görru tā‘uawe two:EXC gamow emilua gövu mā‘uayou two gimeew emulua göu ‘ouluathey two yow egirua curu lā‘uaPluralwe:INC gadaed etatou gèvé tātouwe:EXC gamaed emiteu gèrré mātouyou gimeed emutou gëvë ‘outouthey yaed egiteu céré lātouThere are two common departures from this pattern. A number of lan-guages in Melanesia and Micronesia show only a two-way distinction be-tween singular and plural. The examples given in 6.1.1 above from Motu,Mono-Alu, and Nakanamanga (in Melanesia), and Puluwat and Kiribati (inMicronesia) illustrate this.The other variation is quite common in Melanesia (including Fiji),though not elsewhere in the Pacific. It involves a four-way distinction, be-tween singular, dual, trial or paucal, and plural. Some of these languageshave a trial number, which refers to three and only three:Tolai Anejom̃Singular he/she/it ia aenDual they two dir aarauTrial they three dital aattajPlural they (>three) diat aaraOthers have a paucal number, which refers to a few (perhaps three to six orso), or to a small group in comparison with a larger group.1Paamese Nadrau FijianSingular he/she/it kaie i kwayaDual they two kailue i kirau102 CHAPTER 6Paucal they (a few) kaitelu i kiratouPlural they (many) kaile i kira6.1.3. FunctionsThe pronouns cited so far are known as independent pronouns. They maystand alone as the answer to a question and may also act as subject of averb (though they often have an emphatic function in this usage). There are,however, other pronominal forms in many Oceanic languages, although theymay not always be able to stand alone.Most Oceanic languages, for example, have a separate set of subjectmarkers, which are formally different from the independent pronouns.These subject markers mark the person and number of the subject and usu-ally occur within the verb complex. In some languages they are preverbalparticles, in others prefixes to the verb. In many of these languages, the in-dependent pronoun is used in subject position only for emphasis. Contrastthe following sentences in Lenakel:LenakelI-es-ol-aan.I-not-do-not‘I didn’t do it.’Io i-es-ol-aan!I I-not-do-not‘I didn’t do it!,’ ‘It wasn’t I who did it!’In both sentences, the person and the number of the subject are markedwithin the verb by the prefix i- ‘I.’ The first sentence, with no independentpronoun, is a neutral statement. In the second, however, emphasis is placedon the subject, ‘I,’ through the use of the independent pronoun io.Below are some examples—in just singular and plural num-bers—illustrating the formal difference between independent pronouns andsubject markers. The Nehan and Fijian subject markers are free preverbalparticles, while the Trukese ones are verbal prefixes.2Nehan Trukese FijianIND. SUBJ. IND. SUBJ. IND. SUBJ.SingularI ingo ku ngaang wú- o yau auyou inga ko een ke- o iko ohe/she/it git ke iiy e- o koya eOceanic Languages: Grammatical Overview 103Pluralwe:INC ingeg ki kiich si- o keda dawe:EXC ingam king áám éwú- o keimami keimamiyou ingam kung áámi wo- o kemunī nīthey gisit ka iir re- o ira raRather fewer Oceanic languages have formally distinct object mark-ers, many using the independent pronoun in this role. Above, for example,we saw the use of the Lenakel independent pronoun io ‘I’ as an emphaticsubject. This same form is also used in object position.LenakelR-ɨs-aamh-aan io.he-not-see-not me‘He didn’t see me.’Languages with distinct object pronouns are found in Melanesia and Mi-cronesia. In some of these languages (like Anejom̃ in the example below)these are free forms, while in others (like Kiribati) they are suffixed to theverb.3Anejom̃ KiribatiIND. OBJ. IND. OBJ.SingularI añak ñak ngngai -aiyou aek yic ngkoe -ikohe/she/it aen yin ngaia -iaPluralwe:INC akaja caja ngaira -iirawe:EXC ajama camayou ajowa cowa ngkamii -ingkamithey aara ra ngaiia -iia, -iFor more about the functions of both subject and object markers, see section6.4.Virtually all Oceanic languages also have a set of possessive affixes(normally suffixes) marking the person and number of the possessor. Thesediffer from independent pronouns and subject markers (though they are fre-quently identical or similar to object markers). The grammar of possessionin Oceanic languages is quite complex (refer to section 6.3 below). For exam-ple, the Fijian possessive suffix -qu ‘my’ is attached directly to certain typesof possessed nouns (like tama ‘father’ in the example below), but when usedwith nouns of other types it is attached to a possessive marker or classifier(as with vale ‘house’).104 CHAPTER 6Fijianna tama-qou but na no-qau valethe father-my the POSS-my house‘my father’ ‘my house’These affixes are almost always suffixes. But in a few languages they occuras prefixes in some grammatical contexts.Wayan Fijiano mna-m but m-uluthe mother-your your-head‘your mother’ ‘your head’A comparison between the singular and plural independent, object, andpossessive pronouns in Anejom̃ and Kiribati is given below.Anejom̃ KiribatiIND. OBJ. POSS. IND. OBJ. POSS.SingularI añak ñak -k ngngai -ai -uyou aek yic -m̃ ngkoe -iko -mhe/she/it aen yin -n ngaia -ia -n(a)Pluralwe:INC akaja caja -ja ngaira -iira -rawe:EXC ajama cama -mayou ajowa cowa -mia ngkamii -ingkami -miithey aara ra -ra ngaiia -iia, -i -iaIt follows from all of this that, while some Oceanic languages have apronoun system as simple as that of English, many have pronoun systemsof considerable complexity. Table 5 lists the full set of independent, object,and possessive pronouns in Anejom̃, along with the three sets of subjectmarkers used in the aorist, past, and inceptive tenses, to illustrate thiscomplexity.6.2. NOUNS AND NOUN PHRASESThe notion of parts of speech as we understand it in English, does not nec-essarily apply to Oceanic languages. While some Oceanic languages clearlydistinguish nouns from other parts of speech in some formal or functionalway, many others do not. The Fijian word tagane, for example, can functionas a noun meaning ‘man,’ as a verb meaning ‘to be male,’ and as an adjectivemeaning ‘male.’Oceanic Languages: Grammatical Overview 105Table 5. Anejom̃ Pronouns1. INC 1. EXC 2. 3.IndependentSingular — añak aek, aak aen, aanDual akajau ajamrau ajourau aarauTrial akataj ajamtaj ajoutaj aattajPlural akaja ajama ajowa aaraObjectSingular — ñak yic, -c yin, -nDual cajau camrau courau rauTrial cataj camtaj coutaj ettajPlural caja cama cowa raPossessiveSingular — -k -m̃ -nDual -jau -mrau -mirau -rauTrial -taj -mtaj -mitaj -ttajPlural -ja -ma -mia -raSubject (aorist)Singular — ek na etDual tau ekrau erau erauTrial taj ettaj ettaj ettajPlural ta ekra eka eraSubject (past)Singular — kis as isDual tus eris arus erusTrial tijis eris atijis etijisPlural eris ekris akis erisSubject (inceptive)Singular — ki an iñiyiDual tu ekru aru eruTrial tiji etiji atiji etijiPlural ti ekri aki eri106 CHAPTER 6FijianE lako mai na tagane oyā (tagane = noun).he come here the man that‘That man is coming.’E tagane na vuaka oqō (tagane = verb).he male the pig this‘This pig is male.’E mate na vuaka tagane (tagane = adjective).he die the pig male‘The boar died.’In this and subsequent sections, when I use the word “noun,” I am referringto words functioning as nouns in a particular context. For our purposes,then, tagane is a noun in the first Fijian sentence above, though not in theother two.6.2.1. Form of the NounNouns in Oceanic languages are generally invariable in form. That is, a noundoes not change form to mark singular and plural, nor generally do nounstake prefixes and suffixes (apart from possessive affixes, discussed later). Fi-jian vuaka and Hawaiian pua‘a, for example, both mean ‘pig’ or ‘pigs.’In languages of this type, plurality is expressed either by a separatemorpheme in the noun phrase (see 6.2.5) or by a subject or object marker inthe verb complex. Often, a combination of strategies is used, as in the Vin-mavis example below, in which the noun itself (matoro ‘old man’) remainsinvariable:VinmavisMatoro i-fwelem.old:man he-come‘The old man came.’Matoro ar at-fwelem.old:man PL they-come‘The old men came.’There are, however, some exceptions to the generalization that nounsare invariable in form. First, in some languages of Polynesia and Melanesia,there is a small set of nouns referring to human beings that form the pluralby a change in the position of stress or by partial reduplication, as in Motu,or by lengthening a vowel, as in Māori and Hawaiian.Oceanic Languages: Grammatical Overview 107Singular PluralMotutau ‘man’ tatauhahíne ‘woman’ háhinemero ‘boy’ memerokekéni ‘girl’ kékeniMāoritangata ‘man’ tāngatatupuna ‘ancestor’ tūpunatuahine ‘sister’ tuāhineHawaiianluahine ‘old woman’ luāhinekahuna ‘priest’ kāhunakupuna ‘grandparent’ kūpunaIn Kiribati, vowel lengthening also occurs in nouns, but it indicates genericreference rather than plurality:Kiribatite tina ‘(the) mother’ tiina ‘mothers in general’te ika ‘(the) fish’ iika ‘fish in general’te ben ‘(the) coconut’ been ‘coconuts in general’te bong ‘(the) day’ boong ‘days in general’te biti ‘(the) knife’ biiti ‘knives in general’In Rotuman, the long form of a noun (see 5.1.1 above) marks a noun asdefinite. Indefinite nouns occur in the short form.4RotumanFamori ‘ea.people say‘The people say.’Famör ‘ea.people say‘(Some) people say.’There are also some languages, geographically and genetically fairlywidespread, that mark plurality of nouns by a prefix or a suffix. Among theseare the non-Oceanic languages Palauan and Chamorro:Singular PluralPalauanchad ‘person’ rę-chad108 CHAPTER 6kangkodang ‘tourist’ rę-kangkodangsęchel-ik ‘my friend’ rę-sęchel-ikChamorroestudiante ‘student’ man-estudiantepale‘ ‘priest’ mam-ale‘saina ‘parent’ mañ-ainaSome languages in Vanuatu have fairly complex pluralization strategies.In Sye, for example, there is a general plural prefix ovn-. (This varies slightlyaccording to the following consonant.) Kinship terms without possessive suf-fixes (like namou ‘mother’) may take this prefix and also the suffix -me: theymust take one of these. Kinship terms with possessive suffixes (like asu-g‘my husband’ and ma-n ‘her brother’) must take the suffix -me, and may takethe prefix r(o)-. Thus:SyeSingular Pluralkuri ‘dog’ ovn-kurinakeh ‘axe’ ov-nakehneteme ‘person’ ovo-temenamou ‘mother’ ov-namou, namou-me, ov-namou-measu-g ‘my husband’ asu-g-me, r-asu-g-mema-n ‘her brother’ ma-n-me, ro-ma-n-meIn Anejom̃, nouns beginning with n or in drop this in the plural. Nounsreferring to humans must take a plural prefix elpu-; those referring to thehigher animates may take this prefix; other nouns take no plural prefix.Anejom̃Singular Pluralnatam̃añ ‘man’ elpu-atam̃añnatimi ‘person’ elpu-atiminepcev ‘shark’ elpu-epcev, epcevincai ‘tree’ caiinhat ‘stone’ hatSome Oceanic languages make no formal distinction between nounsand, say, verbs or adjectives. Those that do make this distinction (and alsosome that do not), have one or more nominalizers—morphemes that con-vert verbs or adjectives into nouns. Some examples are presented below.Lenakelaklha ‘steal’ i-aklha ‘thief’Oceanic Languages: Grammatical Overview 109n-aklha-aan ‘theft, robbery’k-aklha ‘house-breaking tool’Mokilesekaraja ‘explain’ karaja-poa ‘example’wia ‘make’ wia-poa ‘construction’woaroai ‘to last’ woaroai-n ‘duration’Māorikimi ‘to seek’ kimi-hanga ‘a search’noho ‘sit’ noho-anga ‘seat’inu ‘to drink’ inu-manga ‘a drink’6.2.2. ArticlesArticles are morphemes marking the class or reference of a noun. InEnglish, the article the marks a noun as definite, while a/an marks it assingular indefinite; in French, un and le mark singular masculine nouns(indefinite and definite, respectively), while une and la mark singularfeminine nouns.Generally speaking, the languages of the New Guinea mainland and theislands of Papua, and those spoken in Vanuatu, have no articles.5 Examples:ManamTamoata roa to‘a i-ti‘in-i.man his:spouse his:older:brother he-show-her‘The man showed his wife to his older brother.’KilivilaE seki Kilagola yena guyau.he give Kilagola fish chief‘The chief gives Kilagola the fish.’SyeNatmonuc y-omonki nacave.chief he:DISTANT:PAST-drink kava‘The chief drank (the) kava.’Most of the remaining Oceanic languages—those of the islands to thenortheast of New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, New Caledonia, Micronesia,Fiji, and Polynesia—do have articles, although there are some exceptions.Fijian languages generally have two articles. In Standard Fijian, o is theproper article and is used before pronouns, proper nouns (names of specificpeople or places), and some kinship terms. Na is the common article and is110 CHAPTER 6used before other nouns that are definite in some sense.6 Indefinite nouns (likeyaqona in the second example below) are not marked by articles. Examples:FijianE gunu-va na yaqona o Seru.he drink-TRANS the kava the:PERSONAL Seru‘Seru is drinking the kava.’E gunu yaqona o Seru.he drink kava the:PERSONAL Seru‘Seru is drinking kava.’Polynesian languages have a slightly larger number of articles. InHawaiian, for example, the articles are:Hawaiianka, ke7 definite article, singular: ‘the’nā definite article, plural: ‘the’he indefinite article: ‘a’a personal articleMokilese and Yapese provide illustrations of different kinds of Microne-sian article systems. In Mokilese, a noun may occur with no article (ordemonstrative). The reference is usually generic.MokileseMahnsang kin wia ahr paj in pohn suhkoa.bird HABITUAL make their nest in top tree‘Birds build their nests in treetops.’A koah kak wiahda war?QUESTION you can build canoe‘Can you build canoes?’When the reference is specific but indefinite—the addressee does not knowwhich individual is being referred to—Mokilese nouns take as a suffix the ap-propriate numeral classifier (see 6.2.5 below) in the singular, and -pwi in theplural:MokileseNgoah kapang lih-men o.I see woman-CLASSIFIER there‘I saw a woman there.’Ngoah kapang lih-pwi o.I see woman-a:PL there‘I saw women there,’ or ‘I saw some women there.’Oceanic Languages: Grammatical Overview 111When the reference is both specific and definite, the suffix -o (sometimes-u)is used.MokileseNgoah kapang lih-o.I see woman-the‘I saw the woman.’Yapese is similar to Fijian or the Polynesian languages, in that it hasthree articles, all of which come before the noun: fa definite, ba indefinitesingular, and ii, which is used optionally before personal names.Yapesefa rea kaarroothe SG car‘the car’ba kaarrooa car‘a car’ii Tamag (or just Tamag)the:PERSONAL Tamag‘Tamag (a man’s name)’Most languages of the Bismarck Archipelago and the Solomon Islandsalso have a small number of articles that precede the noun. Gender distinc-tion is not uncommon. To‘aba‘ita, for example, has a common article nga,and two personal articles, tha (used with masculine names) and ni (usedwith feminine names).To‘aba‘itanga ‘ai lakoo kithe wood this PL‘the firewood’ai tha Gereawife the:MASCULINE Gerea‘Gerea’s wife’maka ni ‘Oinafather the:FEMININE ‘Oina‘Oina’s father’The most complex article systems are those of New Caledonia. In theselanguages articles precede the noun and mark—among other features—def-112 CHAPTER 6initeness, number, and gender. Drehu has the following articles and article-like particles:Drehula definite, near speaker, visiblelai definite, near addressee, visiblelo definite, not present or visibleketre indefinite singularxaa indefinite non-singularisa ‘each’itre, o paucalnöjei pluralhaa collectiveCèmuhî has an even more complex system. Its articles distinguish gen-der—feminine and nonfeminine, which both treat the noun as a person orindividual, as well as neuter, which treats the noun as a thing or idea);number—singular, dual, and plural; and reference—definite, indefinite, andneutral. (Neutral reference marks the noun as a noun without specifyingwhether it is definite or indefinite.)CèmuhîNeutral Definite IndefiniteSingular Nonfeminine pā pācɛ pāliFeminine ɛ̀ ɛ̀cɛ ɛ̀giNeuter ā ācɛ āliDual Nonfeminine lūpwɔ̄ lūpwɔ̄cɛ lūpwɔ̄liFeminine lū lū cɛ lū liPlural Nonfeminine lēpwɔ̄ lēpwɔ̄cɛ lēpwɔ̄liFeminine lē lēcɛ lēliNeuter ni cɛ li, ili6.2.3. DemonstrativesDemonstratives are words that locate the noun in space and/or time, gen-erally with reference to the speaker and the addressee, though sometimeswith reference to some other focus. English has a simple two-way distinction(between this/these and that/those), and this system is found in a fewOceanic languages in Melanesia.Manam Maringengae gne ‘this’ngaedi gre ‘these’Oceanic Languages: Grammatical Overview 113ngara gno ‘that’ngaradi gro ‘those’Almost universal in Oceanic languages, however, is a three-way direc-tional/locational/temporal distinction in demonstratives, corresponding tothe three grammatical persons. The three categories are often referred toas proximate—near the speaker and corresponding to the first person (thespeaker); intermediate—near the addressee and corresponding to the sec-ond person (the person spoken to); and distant—away from both speakerand addressee and corresponding to the third person (some other person orthing).Some languages simply mark this distinction without specifying number:Motu Fijian Māoriina (o)qō nei PROXIMATE: ‘this’ena (o)qori na INTERMEDIATE: ‘this/that’una (o)yā ra DISTANT: ‘that (yonder)’Others, however, not only make the three-way contrast but also indicate sin-gular and plural:Nakanai Kiribati Rotumanaleie aei te‘isi PROXIMATE: ‘this’ini aikai ‘i ‘these’alele anne ta‘a INTERMEDIATE: ‘this/that’ene akanne ‘o ‘these/those’aleio arei tæe DISTANT: ‘that (yonder)’unu akekei ‘ie ‘those (yonder)’There are further complications in some languages. To‘aba‘ita, for ex-ample, has not only a regular distant demonstrative labaa, but two othersspecifying vertical orientation: loo ‘that, yonder and higher up,’ and fuu‘that, yonder and lower down.’ Anejom̃ possesses not only the three-way dis-tinction noted above, but also has a set of anaphoric demonstratives, whichmark a noun as having been previously referred to. Example:Anejom̃niom̃ iyiikihouse that‘that house (the one I was talking about before)’In addition, Anejom̃ distinguishes number in demonstratives, and so has thefollowing:114 CHAPTER 6Anejom̃Singular Dual PluralProximate iniñki erañki ijiñkiIntermediate enaanai — ijeknaaDistant enaikou erañkou ijeknaikouAnaphoric iyiiki eraaki ijiiki (recent)ijekeñ (distant)6.2.4. AdjectivesI mentioned earlier that there is often difficulty in rigidly assigning a wordto a specific part of speech in Oceanic languages. This is especially apparentin the distinction, or lack of it, between verbs and adjectives.Words that translate into English as adjectives generally have two func-tional possibilities in most Oceanic languages. First, they may occur withina noun phrase, almost always following the noun which they modify.Fijianna waqa levuthe canoe big‘the big canoe’Samoan‘o le teine putaFOCUS the girl fat‘the fat girl’Second, and more frequently, adjectives function as stative verbs. That is,they function in the same way as other intransitive verbs (being marked forsubject, tense, and so on), but they express a state rather than an action,with the subject being the experiencer of that state.FijianE levu na waqa.it big the canoe‘The canoe is big.’SamoanUa puta le teine.STATIVE fat the girl‘The girl is fat.’Many languages in Melanesia, however, do have a category of adjectivesthat differs from the category of stative verbs, although both of these cate-Oceanic Languages: Grammatical Overview 115gories include words that would translate as adjectives. Lenakel, for exam-ple, has a set of stative verbs similar to those illustrated for Fijian andSamoan: vɨt ‘good’ and esuaas ‘small’ may function as adjectives, followingthe noun in a noun phrase:LenakelR-ɨm-aamh nimwa v ɨ t ker.he-PAST-see house good one‘He saw a good house.’Kova esuaas ka r-ɨ s-apul-aan.child small that he-not-sleep-not‘The small child is not asleep.’They may also occur as the head of a verb complex, taking prefixes markingsubject and tense aspect just like any nonstative verb (compare the behaviorof vɨt and esuaas in the examples below with that of aamh ‘see’ and apul‘sleep’ above).LenakelNimwa taha-n r-ɨm-vɨt akɨn.house POSS-his it-PAST-good very‘His house was/used to be very nice.’Kova ka r-ɨs-esuaas-aan.child that he-not-small-not‘That child is not small.’There is, however, a set of words that can only be adjectives, like vi ‘new’and ituga ‘foreign.’ These also follow the noun in a noun phrase.LenakelR-ɨm-ol nimwa vi.he-PAST=make house new‘He built a new house.’Nɨkava ituga r-ɨs-vɨt-aan.kava foreign it-not-good-not‘Alcohol (lit., foreign kava) is not good.’Words in this category never function as stative verbs, and utterances likethe following ones are unacceptable.Lenakel*Nimwa r-(ɨm)-vi.house it-(PAST)-new116 CHAPTER 6*Nɨkava r-ɨs-ituga-aan.kava it-not-foreign-not6.2.5. Numerals and QuantifiersTwo classes of words or morphemes relate to counting. Numerals are exactnumbers in a counting system: one, two, three, four, and so on. Oceaniclanguages exhibit a range of numeral systems; the commonest are simpledecimal (base 10) or quinary (base 5) systems, but there are variations onthese systems, and other systems are also represented (see chapter 11 fora detailed discussion). Quantifiers are morphemes that mark grammaticalnumber (singular, dual, plural) or express less mathematically exact quanti-ties, like “some,” “many,” “few,” “all,” and so forth.In many Oceanic languages, numerals and quantifiers function as sta-tive verbs. The following Fijian examples illustrate this.FijianE moce na gone.he sleep the child‘The child slept/is sleeping.’E dua na gone.he one the child‘(There is) one child.’Two features of such systems are (1) that a noun modified by a numeraloccurs in what is effectively a relative clause in the sentence, and (2)that numerals above one usually take singular rather than plural subjectmarkers.FijianErau moce e rua na gone.they:two sleep he two the child‘The two children slept/are sleeping.’Such systems are common in Polynesia and are also found in some lan-guages in Melanesia.Tahitian‘Ua ho‘i mai na ta‘ata ‘e toru.PAST return here the:PL person it:is three‘Three people came back here.’Oceanic Languages: Grammatical Overview 117Anejom̃A noupãn is ithii, is amen a natimi is esej.at time it:PAST one, it:PAST live SUBJECT person PAST three‘Once upon a time, there were three people.’In most other Oceanic languages—which tend to be those that distin-guish adjectives from stative verbs (like Lenakel in 6.2.4 immediatelyabove)—numerals and quantifiers function much like adjectives. That is,they occur within the noun phrase, not as stative verbs. For example:Manam Lenakelaine rua peravɨn (mil) kiuwoman two woman (DUAL) two‘two women’ ‘two women’‘aleti ‘o‘o‘o neram ituga asuul (miin)white:man many people foreign many (PL)‘many Europeans’ ‘many foreigners’This is perhaps the commonest pattern among the languages of Melanesia,and it is also found in a few Micronesian languages.There are in many of these languages, however, vestiges of an earliersystem in which the numerals were once stative verbs. Compare the Vin-mavis and Lenakel numerals for two through five with the Proto Oceanicforms from which they originate.8Proto Oceanic Vinmavis Lenakel‘two’ *rua iru kiu‘three’ *tolu itl kɨsil‘four’ *vati ifah kuvɨr‘five’ *lima ilim katilumHere we can see that the roots of the numerals have something in front ofthem: i in Vinmavis, k (+ vowel) in Lenakel. In Vinmavis, i- is a third personsingular non-future verbal prefix, and in Lenakel k (+ vowel) is a third per-son non-singular verbal prefix. Many languages of this type may once havetreated numerals as stative verbs, but over time the verbal prefix has be-come attached to the numeral, and the numeral has lost its verbal nature.The third kind of system involves what are known as numeral clas-sifiers. Some Micronesian languages have an elaborate system of theseclassifiers, and they are perhaps the best known representatives of this type,although such classifiers also occur in the Admiralty Islands languages. AsRehg says of Ponapean: “Every concrete noun in Ponapean belongs to one ormore classes. When we use a numeral with a noun, an appropriate numeral118 CHAPTER 6classifier must be employed. More simply stated, the choice of the numeralsystem one uses is dependent upon what one is counting” (Rehg 1981, 125).Here are three such numeral systems in Ponapean, with the forms ofthe numerals one through nine. The words in the second column are usedwith the word mwutin ‘heap or pile of.’ Those in the third column are usedto count stalks of things. And those in the last column are used for countingslices or chips of something.Ponapean‘heaps of’ ‘stalks of’ ‘slices of’1 emwut osop edip2 riemwut riasop riadip3 silimwut silisop silidip4 pahmwut pahsop pahdip5 limmwut limisop limadip6 wenemwut wensop wenedip7 isimwut isisop isidip8 walimwut welisop welidip9 duwamwut duwasop duwadipExamples:Ponapeanmwutin dihpw pahmwutpile:of grass four-CLASSIFIER‘four piles of grass’sehu pah-sopsugarcane four-CLASSIFIER‘four stalks of sugarcane’dipen mei pah-dipslice:of breadfruit four-CLASSIFIER‘four slices of breadfruit’As you can see from these examples, the numeral is made up of a mor-pheme representing the number itself (sili- ‘three,’ pah- ‘four,’ etc.), anda suffix, which is the classifier. Ponapean has twenty-nine such classifiers,which include the following (the first three being those exemplified above).-mwut used to count heaps or piles-sop used to count stalks-dip used to count slices, chips, or shavings of something-pak used to count timesOceanic Languages: Grammatical Overview 119-pit used to count strips or strands of something-mwodol used to count small round objects-pali used to count body extremities-pwoat used to count long objects-men used to count animate beingsIt has as well a general classifier -u, which can be used with a range of nouns.These classifiers may also be used without any numeral, in which case theyfunctionas indefinitearticles (comparesection6.2.2 in relation toMokilese).Ponapeanpwihk men tuhke pwoatpig CLASSIFIER tree CLASSIFIER‘a tree’ ‘a pig’Other languages in Micronesia with elaborate systems of numeralclassifiers include Kiribati (with sixty-six classifiers), Ulithian (forty-three),Trukese, Nauruan, and Yapese. In contrast, Mokilese has only four classi-fiers and Marshallese only vestiges of a classifier system; Kosraean mayhave never had a classifier system at all. (See Bender and Wang [1985, 79]for a brief discussion of this.)The languages of the Kilivila family in the Trobriand Islands in PapuaNew Guinea (Kilivila, Muyuw, and Budibud) have sets of classifiers like thoseof Ponapean, but they are used with other items in noun phrases as well (seesection 6.2.6). Other Oceanic languages have numeral classifiers, but thesesystems are more limited than the Micronesian ones. Some Polynesian lan-guages fall into this category. Tongan, for example, requires the classifiertoko when numerals refer to persons or animals.Tonganha kau faifekau ‘e toko fitua PL minister it:is CLASSIFIER seven‘seven ministers’Other quantifiers behave similarly. Compare the following Tongan phrasewith the one above.Tonganha kau faifekau ‘e toko fiha?a PL minister it:is CLASSIFIER how:many‘how many ministers?’6.2.6. Noun Phrase StructureAs a general rule, articles (where they occur) precede the noun in a nounphrase in Oceanic languages, while adjectives and demonstratives follow120 CHAPTER 6the noun. The position of numerals and quantifiers is more variable. In somelanguages, these precede the noun, in others they follow it. In the examplesbelow, the head noun is underlined to illustrate these patterns.Labugwa kege ànì hanô anamô maipi lenecanoe small one house big five this‘a small canoe’ ‘these five big houses’Banonina tavana kota numa ghoom bangana bubuPL person all house new big red‘all people’ ‘the big new red house’To‘aba‘itaroo wela loo ki nga fau ba‘itatwo child this PL the stone big‘those two children’ ‘a/the big stone’Port Sandwichnavüs xavoi minac ngail pwici isa-n raibow real other PL all POSS-his only‘all his other real bows only’Ponapeanpwutak reirei sili-men-oboy tall three-CLASSIFIER-that‘those three tall boys’Kiribatiteni-ua te boki akannethree-CLASSIFIER the book those‘those three books’Fijianna wai batabatā na vinivō damudamu oqōthe water cold the dress red this‘(the) cold water’ ‘this red dress’Tahitiante mau pōti‘i purotu tē-ra ta‘ata ‘inothe PL girl beautiful the-that man bad‘the beautiful girls’ ‘that bad man’The Kilivila language has a system of classifiers similar to, but muchricher than, the Bantu languages of Africa, with close to two hundred dif-Oceanic Languages: Grammatical Overview 121ferent classifiers altogether. Not only numerals, but also demonstrativesand adjectives have to be attached to a classifier. The examples belowillustrate the use of the classifiers to ‘male humans’ and bwa ‘trees orwooden things.’Kilivilatau m-to-na to-kabitamman this-CLASSIFIER-this CLASSIFIER-intelligent‘this intelligent man’ma-bwa-si-na bwa-tolu kaithis-CLASSIFIER-PL-this CLASSIFIER-three tree‘these three trees’6.3. Possessive ConstructionsIn virtually all Oceanic languages, the grammar of possession is more com-plex than it is in English (as mentioned briefly in chapter 2). In this discus-sion of possession we look first at those languages that most closely reflectthe reconstructed Proto Oceanic system, then at major departures from thissystem.6.3.1. Possessive Constructions Similar to Proto OceanicThe languages most closely reflecting the original Proto Oceanic system ofpossession are found in parts of Island Melanesia, especially the more east-erly parts of this region (including Fiji). These languages indicate whetherpossession is direct or indirect, and then discriminate between several dif-ferent types of indirect possession.In direct possession, the possessive pronoun is attached directly to thepossessed noun. These constructions generally encode a semantic relation-ship between the possessor and the possessed noun that has been referredto as close, or subordinate, or inalienable. They most commonly imply thatthe possessor has little if any control over the fact of possession and are typ-ically used with normally irremovable and integral parts of the body and ofthings, and with all or some kinship terms. For example:Paamesenati-n mete-nchild-his/her eye-his/her/its‘his/her child’ ‘his/her/its eye’122 CHAPTER 6Fijianna tina-qu na ulu-quthe mother-my the head-my‘my mother’ ‘my head’In indirect possession, on the other hand, the possessive pronoun isnot attached to the possessed noun, but rather to a separate morphemethat I refer to as a possessive marker. These constructions generally en-code a relationship between possessor and possessed that can be calledremote, or dominant, or alienable. They most commonly imply that the pos-sessor has control either over the possession itself or at least over the fact ofpossession. Such constructions are typically used with items of disposableproperty, nominalized verbs of which the possessor is the underlying sub-ject, and nouns that the possessor owns or controls in some way or another.The languages with which I am dealing in this section have a smallnumber of subclasses of indirect possession, each with its own possessivemarker. Paamese and Fijian, for example, have the following markers.9Paameseaa- food, passivemo- drink or for domestic useso- social relationship determined by law or customono- general, activeFijianke- food, passiveme- drinkno- general, activeSome examples:Paameseauh aa-k ipu aa-myam POSS:FOOD-my loss POSS:PASSIVE-your‘my yam (to eat)’ ‘your loss/disadvantage’oai mo-m aisin mo-nwater POSS:DRINK-your clothes POSS:DOMESTIC-his‘your water (to drink)’ ‘his/her clothes’meteimal so-m telai ono-mvillage POSS:CUSTOM-your axe POSS:GENERAL-your‘your village’ ‘your axe’Oceanic Languages: Grammatical Overview 123Fijianna ke-mu madrai na ke-na itukutukuthe POSS:FOOD-your bread the POSS:PASSIVE-his report‘your bread (to eat)’ ‘his report (the one madeabout him)’na me-qu bia na no-na valethe POSS:DRINK-my beer the POSS:GENERAL-his house‘my beer (to drink)’ ‘his house’When the possessor is a noun, what is known as a construct suffix(abbreviated here C:S) is often added to the possessed noun in a directconstruction and to the possessive marker in an indirect construction. InPaamese, for example, the construct suffix is -n:Paamesemete-n huli kailueye-C:S dog DUAL‘the two dogs’ eyes’vakili one-n isei?canoe POSS:GENERAL-C:S who‘whose canoe?’The distinction between direct and indirect possession, and between thevarious types of indirect possession, depends partly on the semantics of thepossessed noun and partly on the nature of the relationship between the pos-sessor and the possessed. It follows, therefore, that at least some nouns mayparticipate in more than one kind of possessive construction, depending onthe nature of that relationship. For example:Fijianna yaca-qu na no-qu yacathe name-my the POSS:GENERAL-my name‘my name’ ‘my namesake’na ke-na niu na me-na niuthe POSS:FOOD-his coconut the POSS:DRINK-his coconut‘his coconut (meat, to eat)’ ‘his coconut (water, to drink)’na ke-mu itaba na no-mu itabathe POSS:PASSIVE-your photo the POSS:GENERAL-your photo‘your photo (the one taken ofyou)’‘your photo (the one you tookor have)’124 CHAPTER 66.3.2. Simplification of Indirect PossessionOne common departure from this original system, the loss of contrast betweensome or all of the half-dozen or so indirect possessive subtypes, is widespreadin western Melanesia and occurs also in parts of Micronesia (for example, inYapese and Kiribati). Many of the languages of New Guinea and Solomon Is-lands distinguish direct and indirect constructions, but have only two indirectpossessive markers. One of these refers to food and drink (and often to itemsinvolved in producing or cooking food), and the other to all other alienablepossessions. In Manam, the markers are ‘ana- (food and drink) and ne- (other):Manammata-ng tama-gueye-your father-my‘your eye’ ‘my father’bang ‘ana-gu suru ‘ana-θtaro POSS:FOOD-my soup POSS:FOOD-his‘my taro’ ‘his soup’uma ‘ana-ng ‘aula ‘ana-gugarden POSS:FOOD-your fishhook POSS:FOOD-my‘your garden’ ‘my fishhook’‘usi ne-gu mata ne-dalavalava POSS:GENERAL-my custom POSS:GENERAL-our:INC‘my lavalava’ ‘our custom’Other languages—distributed somewhat randomly throughout thisarea—simply contrast direct and indirect constructions, with no subclassifi-cation of indirect possession:Syenoru-g etme-nhand-my father-his‘my hand’ ‘his/her father’nimo horu-g nup horo-mhouse POSS-my yam POSS-your‘my house’ ‘your yam’Kiribatitina-na kuni-umother-his skin-my‘his mother’ ‘my skin’Oceanic Languages: Grammatical Overview 125a-na boki a-u benPOSS-his book POSS-my coconut‘his book’ ‘my coconut’6.3.3. Development of Classifier SystemsBy contrast, some Oceanic languages have developed a complex systemof classifiers (similar to those discussed in relation to the numerals) tomark categories of indirect possession.10 Many Micronesian languagesfall into this category, as do a few in Melanesia (like Iaai in the LoyaltyIslands).Ponapean, like almost all Oceanic languages, distinguishes direct andindirect constructions:Ponapeanmoange-i nime-i uhpwhead-my CLASSIFIER-my coconut‘my head’ ‘my drinking coconut’Indirectly possessed nouns belong to a number of different classes in Pona-pean, the members of each class usually having some semantic feature thatdistinguishes them from other nouns. Possessive classifiers mark the nounas belonging to a particular class, and possessive suffixes and the constructsuffix are attached to these classifiers. There are more than twenty posses-sive classifiers in Ponapean, some of which are:PonapeanClassifier Used with nouns referring tokene- edible thingsnime- drinkable thingssapwe- landwere- vehicleskie- things to sleep onipe- things used as coveringspelie- peers, counterparts, opponentsmware- garlands, names, titlesnah- small or precious things, and people or things overwhich the possessor has a dominant relationshipThere is also a general classifier ah-, which is used with nouns that do notfall into any other class. Examples:Ponapeanah-i seht ‘my shirt’ah-i pwutak ‘my boyfriend’126 CHAPTER 6ah-i mahi ‘my breadfruit tree’ah-i rong ‘my news’Many nouns may occur with more than one classifier, with slight seman-tic changes. So the noun pwihk ‘pig’ may be possessed with the dominantclassifier nah-, the general classifier ah-, and the edible classifier kene-, eachwith different meanings:Ponapeannah-i pwihk ‘my (live) pig’ah-i pwihk ‘my (butchered) pig’kene-i pwihk ‘my pork, my pig (as food)’The system in Iaai is similar to that of Micronesian languages like Pon-apean. Kinship terms, body parts, and certain other nouns closely related tothe possessor are directly possessed.Iaaihinyö-k ba-nmother-my head-his‘my mother’ ‘his/her head’hwakeci-m i-fuuc-incustom-your NOM-speak-his‘your custom’ ‘his/her way of speaking’But there is also quite a large number of markers used in indirect con-structions.Iaaia- foodbele- drinkhanii- something caught (e.g., through hunting or fishing)höne- a contributionhwa- a noiseiie- a piece of something to chewii- landdee- a roadhnââ- something done to oneanyi- general (none of the above)Examples include:Iaaianyi-k thaan a-n könyingCLASSIFIER-my chief CLASSIFIER-his taro‘my chief’ ‘his taro (to eat)’Oceanic Languages: Grammatical Overview 127bele-n trii hanii-ny wââCLASSIFIER-his tea CLASSIFIER-his fish‘her tea (to drink)’ ‘his fish (which he caught)’There are also specific possessive markers in Iaai. These are derived fromnouns and are used to indicate possession of those same (or related) nouns.Iaaiumwö-k uma ‘my house’nuu-k nu ‘my coconut tree’huu-k hu ‘my boat’waii-k wai ‘my reef’6.3.4. Loss of Direct ConstructionsA few languages in the New Guinea area, and Rotuman and all the Polyne-sian languages, have for the most part lost the distinction between directand indirect constructions. Only indirect constructions are used.11 In Labu,for example, there is only one set of possessive pronouns, and it is used withall nouns.Labuyê na ana yê na hanôyou your mother you your house‘your mother’ ‘your house’Rotuman has two indirect possessive-markers: ‘e(n), used with possessednouns that refer to food, drink, a person’s turn at doing something, and withsome nouns to do with contests and challenges, and ‘o(n), used with all othernouns, including kinship terms and nouns referring to parts of things.Rotuman‘e-n ‘a‘ana ‘a‘an ‘e le FauholiPOSS:FOOD-his taro taro POSS:FOOD the:PERSONAL Fauholi‘his taro’ ‘Fauholi’s taro’‘o-n lele‘a ‘o-n ‘alaPOSS:GENERAL-his children POSS:GENERAL-his teeth‘his children’ ‘his teeth’‘o-n ‘eap ‘eap ‘o le FauholiPOSS:GENERAL-his mat mat POSS:GENERAL the:PERSONALFauholi‘his mat’ ‘Fauholi’s mat’128 CHAPTER 6Almost all Polynesian languages (except Niuean and Takuu) have re-tained the dichotomy between inalienable (or subordinate) and alienable(or dominant) possession, but this is expressed by two different indirectconstructions. Generally speaking, inalienable or subordinate possessionis expressed by a possessive morpheme based on the vowel o, whilealienable or dominant possession is expressed with the vowel a. For ex-ample:Samoan‘o lo-‘u tama ‘o le ulu o TavitaFOCUS POSS-my father FOCUS the head POSS DAVID‘my father’ ‘David’s head’‘o la-‘u ta‘avale ‘o le naifi a TavitaFOCUS POSS-my car FOCUS the knife POSS David‘my car’ ‘David’s knife’Nukuoro12to -no potu te potu o SoanPOSS-his wife the wife POSS John‘his wife’ ‘John’s wife’ta-na naivi te naivi a SoanPOSS-his knife the knife POSS John‘his knife’ ‘John’s knife’As in most other languages we have looked at, there are many examplesof the same noun being possessed in both constructions, with a concomitantsemantic difference.Nukuoroto-ku ngavesi ta-ku ngavesi‘POSS-my box ‘POSS-my box‘my coffin’ ‘my storage box’to-no potopoto ta-na potopotoPOSS-his short POSS-his short‘his shortness (perma-nent condition)’‘his shortness (temporary condition, aswhen hunched over)’te kkai o Vave te kkai a Vavethe story POSS Vave the story POSS Vave‘Vave’s story (told abouthim)’‘Vave’s story (that he tells)’Oceanic Languages: Grammatical Overview 129Niuean has lost even this distinction, using only a- forms in all cases:Niueanhaa-ku ihu haa-ku falePOSS-my nose POSS-my house‘my nose’ ‘my house’6.4. Verbs and the Verb ComplexI use the term verb complex to refer to a phrase consisting of a verb, whichmay be preceded and followed by particles of various kinds.13 In someOceanic languages, the verb itself is fairly simple in structure, but numer-ous particles may occur in a verb complex. In others, a verb may take quitea number of prefixes and suffixes, and the verb complex is usually simpler instructure.6.4.1. General Structure of the VerbIt is common in many Oceanic languages for the verb to consist simply of theverb root (underlined in the next set of examples), with no prefixes or suf-fixes. This is particularly true of the Micronesian and Polynesian languages,but is also common in languages of Melanesia.NehanA mahoh ene pak-e rikin wah.the old this should-he:NONPAST lie rest‘This old man should lie down and rest.’To‘aba‘itaNau ku bi‘i fula.I I just:now arrive‘I arrived just now.’A‘jiëGö yé vi köyö.I will CONTINUOUS play‘I am going to go on playing.’PonapeanSoulik kin pirida kuloak isuh.Soulik HABITUAL get:up clock seven‘Soulik gets up at seven o’clock.’130 CHAPTER 6FijianE lailai na vale.it small the house‘The house is small.’Rotuman‘Eap ta la hoa‘.mat the FUTURE take‘The mat will be taken.’MāoriI kai te rangatira.PAST eat the chief‘The chief ate.’Languages of this type do, however, have a fairly small set of verbalprefixes and suffixes. The most frequently used prefixes mark causativity(see the To‘aba‘ita example below) and reciprocality (A‘jië), while suffixescommonly mark the person and number of the object (To‘aba‘ita, A‘jië),transitivity (Fijian), or the passive (Māori).To‘aba‘itaNia ‘e fa‘a-faalu-a rabo‘a.he he CAUSATIVE-clean-it bowl‘He cleaned the bowl.’A‘jiëCuru vi-ya‘-ru.they:two RECIPROCAL-hit-them:two‘They hit each other.’FijianE rai-ci ira.he see-TRANS them‘He saw them.’MāoriKa pūhi-a te poaka e wai?INCEPTIVE shoot-PASSIVE the pig by who‘By whom was the pig shot?’Grammatical features that are marked by particles in languages likethese are marked by prefixes in another set of languages found mainly inMelanesia. In these languages, the verb root almost never occurs alone.When it does, it marks the (singular) imperative.Oceanic Languages: Grammatical Overview 131LenakelAmnuumw!drink‘Drink (it)!’In such languages, however, verbs typically take prefixes and suffixes mark-ing subject, tense-aspect, and a range of other grammatical features. In theexamples below, the verb root is underlined:Manam‘U-lele-‘ama.you-look:for-us:EXC‘You looked for us.’Ma‘asi-lo i-ngara-ngara.ocean-in he-CONTINUOUS-swim‘He is swimming in the ocean.’Natu i-laba-doi.child he-big-COMPLETIVE‘The child has grown up.’Robu‘a i-ro-ro‘a‘-i-ramo-la.rubbish it-HABITUAL-throw-them-randomly-persistently‘He keeps throwing rubbish all over the place.’LenakelR-ɨm-kɨn mun akɨn.he-PAST-eat again very‘He ate a lot again.’K-n-ai-ami ru apus am nɨkom.they-COMPLETIVE-PL-urinate try extinguished just fire‘They just tried to put the fire out by urinating on it.’K-ɨm-am-ai-akar-atu-pn kam ilar miin.they-PAST-CONTINUOUS-PL-talk-RECIPROCAL-thereto they PL‘They (pl.) were talking to one another.’K-ɨm-uɨni-uas to nahuto.they-PAST-DUAL-say-together to crowd‘They were both talking at once to the crowd.’132 CHAPTER 66.4.2. Tense, Aspect, and MoodTense refers to the time of the action or state referred to by the verb. Forexample, in English one makes a basic tense distinction between past, pre-sent, and future. Aspect refers to the way in which the action is carried outor is seen to be carried out. English distinguishes completive, habitual, con-tinuous, and punctiliar aspects in each tense.14 In many languages, there aresome markers of tense, some of aspect, and some that mark a combination oftense and aspect. Descriptions of these languages often refer to the tense-aspect system.Some languages have tense systems similar to or simpler than that ofEnglish. For example, Fijian has only two markers of tense, ā ‘past’ and na ‘fu-ture,’ which are particles coming before the verb. The past tense marker isoptional once the time has been established, as in the second example below:FijianE ā̱ lako mai o Jone.he PAST go here the:PERSONAL John‘John came.’E nanoa, e (ā) lako mai o Jone.on yesterday, he (PAST) go here the:PERSONAL John‘John came yesterday.’E na lako mai o Jone.he FUTURE go here the:PERSONAL John‘John will come.’Rotuman has only one tense-marker, la (sometimes tæla), which marks thefuture. The non-future is unmarked.RotumanIa ‘ea ia la leum.he say he FUTURE come‘He says he will come.’ or ‘He said he would come.’Tͻn ta sun-‘ia.water the hot-STATIVE‘The water is (now) hot.’Fā ta leume-a.man the COME-COMPLETIVE‘The man has already come.’Other languages have more complex tense systems than that of English.Lenakel, for example, distinguishes four non-future tenses:Oceanic Languages: Grammatical Overview 133Lenakeln-ak-ol ‘you do it’n-ɨm-ol ‘you did it’n-n-ol ‘you have done it’n-ep-ol ‘you did it (after you did something else)’A future prefix, t-, can be used in combination with two of the tense prefixesabove to produce two different future tenses.Lenakelt-n-ak-ol ‘you will do it soon’t-n-ep-ol ‘you will do it some time later’In yet other languages, tense is not really marked at all. Let us considerwhat Rehg (1981, 268) has to say about Ponapean:Ponapean may be described as a tenseless language. This is not to saythat in Ponapean it is impossible to express notions of time…. What ismeant by saying that Ponapean is tenseless is that it expresses consid-erations of time in a way different from English. Rather than using atense system to signal time relations, Ponapean employs what we willcall an aspect system. The basic difference between these two sys-tems is this: in a tense system, when an event occurred is important;in an aspect system, the time contour of the event is crucial.This idea of a time contour can be clarified by looking at four aspects markedin Ponapean:1. Habitual aspect is marked by the preverbal particle kin: this im-plies that the action is or was a customary or habitual one, which isor was done regularly.2. Continuous aspect (Rehg calls this “durative”), marked by redupli-cating the verb, signals that the action or state of the verb iscarried out or takes place over some length of time.3. Completive aspect, marked by the suffix -ehr, indicates that theaction has reached or is on the way to reaching some kind of con-clusion or completion.4. Irrealis aspect, marked by the preverbal particle pahn, impliesthat the action is not complete or realized (often it corresponds toa future tense in other languages).Some examples:PonapeanSoulik kin kang rais.Soulik HABITUAL eat rice‘Soulik eats rice.’134 CHAPTER 6Soulik kang-kang rais.Soulik CONTINUOUS-eat rice‘Soulik is eating rice.’Soulik kang-ehr rais.Soulik eat-COMPLETIVE rice‘Soulik has eaten rice.’Soulik pahn kang rais.Soulik IRREALIS eat rice‘Soulik will eat rice.’A verb may also occur without any of these aspect markers, as in:PonapeanSoulik kang rais.Soulik eat rice‘Soulik is eating rice,’ ‘Soulik ate rice,’ etc.This simply indicates that Soulik was involved in eating rice. No time is spec-ified, although this can of course be included if it is necessary:PonapeanSoulik kang rais nan sounpar samwalahro.Soulik eat rice on year last‘Soulik ate rice last year.’Soulik kang rais met.Soulik eat rice now‘Soulik is eating rice now.’Ponapean illustrates the use of an aspect rather than a tense system. AsI mentioned above, however, many Oceanic languages have particles or af-fixes that mark both tense and aspect. Here is the list of Māori tense-aspectparticles:Māorika inceptive Beginning of a new actioni past Action in the pastkua completive Action (fairly recently) completedkia desiderative Desirability of an actionme prescriptive Action should take placee non-past Present or future (when used with anafollowing the verb, indicates incompleteor continuous action)Oceanic Languages: Grammatical Overview 135kei warning ‘Don’t’ or ‘lest’ina conditional ‘If’ or ‘when’Examples:MāoriKa takoto te tamaiti ka moe.INCEPTIVE lie the child INCEPTIVE sleep‘The child lay down and slept.’Kua mate ta-ku hoa.COMPLETIVE die POSS-my friend‘My friend has died.’Me hoki te tamaiti ra ki te kāinga.PRESCRIPTIVE return the child that to the home‘That child should go home.’E haere ana te wahine ki te moana.NONPAST go CONTINUOUS the woman to the sea‘The woman is going to the sea.’Kia āta kōrero tātou kei rongo mai a-ku hoa.DESIDE-RATIVEcareful talk we: INC LEST hear here POSS:PL-my friend‘We should talk quietly lest my friends hear.’A final set of examples, from Nakanamanga, illustrates a different fea-ture, the concept of mood, and shows a pattern of root-initial consonantalternation that is found in a few areas within Oceanic (particularly cen-tral Vanuatu and the Morobe Province of Papua New Guinea). Mood(sometimes referred to as modality) does not relate so much to time asto actuality. An actual state or event is said to be in the realis mood,while a nonreal or non-actual state or event is in the irrealis mood.Realis often refers to something that happened, is happening, or will def-initely happen, whereas irrealis refers to something that only might takeplace. Oceanic (and other) languages differ in the treatment of negatives.In some languages, the negative is in the realis mode (because it actuallydid not happen); in others, it is in the irrealis mode, because the actionwas not real.Nakanamanga has a set of preverbal particles marking tense-aspect.Some of these are used in realis mood, others in irrealis mood. It is alsoone of the many central Vanuatu languages in which there is alternation be-136 CHAPTER 6tween some initial consonants of verbs. Verbs with initial v, w, k, and r retainthese consonants in irrealis mood, but change them to p, p,̄ g, and t, re-spectively, after any preverbal particle. (The verb root is underlined in theexamples.)NakanamangaIrrealis mood Realis mooda ga vano e panoI INTENTIONAL go he go‘I’m going’ ‘he goes’e pe rogo e poo togohe CONDITIONAL hear he COMPLETIVE hear‘if he hears’ ‘he has heard’6.4.3. SubjectMost Oceanic languages mark the person and the number of the subjectsomewhere in the verb complex—either as a prefix to the verb, or as a pre-verbal particle.15 In some cases, a single morpheme marks both person andnumber:PaameseNa-mū mon alok.I-make:it pudding‘I made the pudding.’Ro-mūmon alok.we:INC-make:it pudding‘We (inclusive) made the pudding.’Ma-mūmon alok.we:EXC-make:it pudding‘We (exclusive) made the pudding.’KiribatiE ata-ai.he know-me‘He knows me.’A ata-ai.they know-me‘They know me.’Oceanic Languages: Grammatical Overview 137In other languages, person and number are marked by separate mor-phemes:LenakelN-ak-am-kɨn menuk ua?you-PRESENT-CONTINUOUS-eat chicken or‘Are you (singular) eating chicken?’N-ak-am-ia-kɨn menuk ua?you-PRESENT-CONTINUOUS-DUAL-eat chicken or‘Are you two eating chicken?’N-ak-am-ar-kɨn menuk ua?you-PRESENT-CONTINUOUS-PL-eat chicken or‘Are you (plural) eating chicken?’In a number of languages in Melanesia, the marking of tense-aspect ormood is combined with the marking of the subject’s person and number ina single morpheme. Manam, for example, has two sets of subject prefixes toverbs, one used in realis mood and the other in irrealis mood:ManamSingular PluralRealis Irrealis Realis Irrealis1 u- m- 1 INC ta- ta-2 ‘u- go- 1 EXC ‘i ga-3 i- nga- 2 ‘a- ‘ama-3 di- da-For example:ManamEu i-mate.dog it:REALIS-die‘The dog died.’Eu nga-mate ‘ana.dog it:IRREALIS-die likely‘The dog’s going to die.’In languages like these, the subject marker occurs whether the subjectis a full noun phrase or a pronoun, and whether that subject is expressed inthe sentence or not. By contrast, languages in western Polynesia use prever-bal subject-marking pronouns only when the subject is a pronoun:138 CHAPTER 6TonganNa‘e ‘alu ‘a e tangata. (noun phrase subject)PAST go SUBJECT the man‘The man went.’Na‘a ne ‘alu. (pronoun subject)PAST he go‘He went.’SamoanUa sau le ali‘i. (noun phrase subject)COMPLETIVE come the chief‘The chief has come.’Ua ‘uo sau. (pronoun subject)COMPLETIVE I come‘I have come.’Languages in eastern Polynesia have lost this preverbal subject-markingsystem altogether:Tahitian‘Ua tāpū te vahine ‘i te vahie. (nounphrase subject)PAST cut the woman OBJECT the wood‘The woman cut the wood.’‘Ua tāpū vau ‘i te vahie. (pronoun subject)PAST cut I OBJECT the wood‘I cut the wood.’6.4.4. Object and TransitivityMost Oceanic languages have suffixes that mark a verb as transitive —thatis, as having an object.NakanamangaA ga munu.I INTENTIONAL drink‘I’ll drink.’A ga munu-gi noai naga.I INTENTIONAL drink-TRANS water that‘I’ll drink that water.’Oceanic Languages: Grammatical Overview 139FijianE bulu.he bury‘He/she/it is buried.’E bulu-t-a na benu.he bury-TRANS-it the rubbish‘He/she buried the rubbish.’There are a number of features of the marking of transitive and object.The first is the form of the transitive suffix. In many languages this is simply-i:Anejom̃Adapõ-i upni yin aak!cover-TRANS good him you‘Cover him up well!’In other languages, however, the transitive suffix is -Ci, where C is a the-matic consonant. This consonant (1) is not present when the root occurs byitself, (2) is present when the suffix is added, and (3) is different with differ-ent verbs. Look at the following Fijian intransitive and transitive verbs (thetransitive is in the form used before a pronoun or proper noun).FijianIntransitive Transitivebulu bulu-ti ‘bury’rai rai-ci ‘see’tuku tuku-ni ‘tell’kaci kaci-vi ‘call’viri viri-ki ‘throw at’kila kila-i ‘know’As you can see from the examples, the form of the suffix (which is sometimessimply -i) is unpredictable. One simply has to learn that bulu, for example,takes -ti, but rai takes -ci.16The second feature is that many Oceanic languages in fact have twotransitive suffixes, the first deriving from Proto Oceanic *-i and the secondfrom *-aki or *-akini. This second suffix is sometimes called the applicative.It often refers to the instrument with which the action is carried out, the rea-son for performing the action, or some other more indirect transitive notion.In the Fijian examples below, I have used the form of the suffix that incor-porates a third person singular object -a. In Fijian, -Ci-a becomes -Ca, and-Caki-a becomes -Caka. In some cases the thematic consonant is the same inboth suffixes.140 CHAPTER 6FijianTransitive Applicativecici-va ‘run for it’ cici-vaka ‘run with it’cabe-ta ‘ascend it’ cabe-taka ‘ascend with it’oso-va ‘bark at it’ oso-vaka ‘bark because of it’uso-ra ‘poke it’ uso-raka ‘poke with it’In other cases, the thematic consonants are different.FijianTransitive Applicativekaki-a ‘scrape it’ kaki-taka ‘scrape with it’yaqa-va ‘crawl to it’ yaqa-taka ‘crawl with it’masu-ta ‘pray to it’ masu-laka ‘pray for it’tala-a ‘send him’ taka-vaka ‘send it’Mention of the Fijian third person singular object suffix -a brings us toa third feature, the specific marking of object. Marking the object’s personand number within the verb complex is less common than marking subjector transitivity. For example, although in Lenakel separate prefixes mark boththe person and the number of the subject, and although some verbs take atransitive suffix, the object is not marked in the verb complex at all. Evenpronominal objects occur as free forms.17LenakelR-ɨm-eiua-in mun iik.he-PAST-lie-TRANS again you‘He lied to you again.’A large number of languages, however, do mark the person and the num-ber of the object within the verb complex, either with a suffix to the verb (asin Manam and Kiribati) or as a postposed verbal particle (as in Fijian):ManamBang u-naghu-sere‘-i.taro I:REALIS-pierce-split-it‘I split the taro by piercing it.’KiribatiE ata-a tama-u.he know-him father-my‘He knows my father.’Oceanic Languages: Grammatical Overview 141FijianE ā rai-ci irau na yalewa.he PAST see-TRANS them:two the woman‘He saw the two women.’Generally, if a language has transitive and object suffixes, both occur suf-fixed to the verb in that order.18UlithianYule-mi-ya cale lee!drink-TRANS-it water this‘Drink this water!’Xa-si-ya doxo cale laa!carry-TRANS-it here water that‘Bring that water here!’In other languages, the object suffix occurs when the object is a pronoun,but not when it is a noun or noun phrase.NakanamangaA ga munu-gi-a.I INTENTIONAL drink-TRANS-it (pronoun object)‘I’ll drink it.’A ga munu-gi noai naga.I INTENTIONAL drink-TRANS water that (noun object)‘I’ll drink that water.’6.4.5. The PassiveOnly a small number of Oceanic languages contrast active and passive voice.A couple of Micronesian languages mark the passive by means of a suffix tothe verb (e.g., Kosraean -yuhk). The example below contrasts an active sen-tence with the corresponding passive one.KosraeanTuhlihk sacn tuhlakihn pinsuhl nuhtih-k ah.child that snatch pencil CLASSIFIER-my the‘That child snatched my pencil.’Pinsuhl nuhtih-k ah tuhlakihn-yuhk (sin tuhlihk sacn).pencil CLASSIFIER-my the snatch-PASSIVE (by child that)‘My pencil was snatched (by that child).’142 CHAPTER 6Most languages of eastern Polynesia have a passive. This is usually markedby the suffix -Cia, where C once again represents a thematic consonant.19Examples:HawaiianUa ‘ai ka māka‘i i ka poi.COMPLETIVE eat the policeman OBJECT the poi‘The policeman ate the poi.’Ua ‘ai-‘ia ka poi (e ka māka‘i).COMPLETIVE eat-PASSIVE the poi (by the policeman)‘The poi was eaten (by the policeman).’MāoriI inu te tangata i te wai.PAST drink the man OBJECT the water‘The man drank the water.’I inu-mia te wai (e te tangata).PAST drink-PASSIVE the water (by the man)‘The water was drunk (by the man).’Tahitian‘Ua hohoni te uri ‘i te tamaiti.PAST bite the dog OBJECT the boy‘The dog bit the boy.’Ua hohoni-hia te tamaiti (‘et e uri).PAST bite-PASSIVE the boy (by the dog)‘The boy was bitten (by the dog).’In examples of the passive given so far, I have put the agent in paren-theses. In these languages a passive sentence may occur with or without anagent.Tahitian‘Ua hohoni-hia te tamaiti ‘e te uri.PAST bite-PASSIVE the boy by the dog‘The boy was bitten by the dog.’ (agent specified)‘Ua hohoni-hia te tamaiti.PAST bite-PASSIVE the boy‘The boy was bitten.’ (no agent specified)Oceanic Languages: Grammatical Overview 143Very few languages in Melanesia have a passive. Those that do are spo-ken in the western Solomons. In these languages, only the passive withoutagent is permitted. Indeed, in Roviana at least, the passive is used only whenthe agent is generic or is not recoverable from the context.RovianaSeke-a sa tie sa siki.hit-it the man the dog‘The man hit the dog.’Ta-seke sa siki.PASSIVE-hit the dog‘The dog was hit.’6.4.6. The Causative and the ReciprocalA very widespread causative prefix in Oceanic languages whose form de-rives from Proto Oceanic *paka- expresses the notion that the subject makesor causes the action of the verb to happen. The causative can convert a sta-tive or an intransitive verb into a transitive one.FijianE davo-r-a.he lie-TRANS-it‘He lay on it.’E vaka-davo-r-a.he CAUSATIVE-lie-TRANS-it‘He made him/her/it lie down.’Further examples of this function are:ManamDang i-a‘a-gita-i.water he-CAUSATIVE-hot-it‘He heated the water.’RovianaLopu va-mate tie si rau.not CAUSATIVE-die person SUBJECT I‘I didn’t kill anybody.’144 CHAPTER 6MokileseLih-o ka-loau-i mwingeh-u.woman-the CAUSATIVE-be:cooked-TRANS food-the‘The woman made sure the food was cooked.’West FutunaNe-i faka-sara aia ta vetoka.PAST-he CAUSATIVE-be:open he the door‘He opened the door.’The causative prefix often has a number of other functions in these lan-guages. One common one is to form ordinal or multiplicative numerals fromcardinal numerals, which are stative verbs.20Kiribatiteniua ‘three’ ka-teniua ‘third’nimaua ‘five’ ka-nimaua ‘fifth’Samoanlua ‘two’ fa‘a-lua ‘twice’tolu ‘three’ fa‘a-tolu ‘three times’There is also a widespread reciprocal prefix deriving from ProtoOceanic *paRi-, that marks both reciprocality (the subjects perform the ac-tion on each other) and often also mutual, common, united, or concertedaction. The following pair of examples illustrates reciprocality.FijianE loma-ni koya.he love-TRANS she‘He loves her.’Erau vei-loma-ni.they:two RECIPROCAL-love-TRANS‘They (two) love each other.’The next examples show concerted action.FijianEra butu-k-a.they tread-TRANS-it‘They trod on it.’Era vei-butu-yak-a.they CONCERTED-tread-TRANS-it‘They trampled it all over.’Oceanic Languages: Grammatical Overview 145Samoan has taken this one step further. There the reciprocal prefix fe-, inaddition to normal reciprocal functions, has also come to mark some verbsas having plural subjects (perhaps deriving from the idea of united or con-certed action).SamoanSingular Plurala‘a fe-a‘a ‘kick’inu fe-inu ‘drink’fefe fe-fefe ‘be afraid’tagi fe-tagi-si ‘cry’oso fe-oso-fi ‘jump’6.4.7. The Structure of the Verb ComplexIn some Oceanic languages, the verb root may take a fairly large numberof verbal affixes, but the verb complex usually contains relatively few parti-cles. Languages of this type are mainly found in Melanesia, though not allMelanesian languages fit this pattern. There is no clear correlation betweenthe morphological complexity of the verb and the geographical location orgenetic affiliation of the language.In other languages—especially those of Polynesia, Micronesia, Fiji, andsome parts of Melanesia—the verb is simpler morphologically. The verbcomplex usually contains a number of particles, marking tense, aspect, andvarious other adverbial features.This difference can best be illustrated by looking at a couple of verbcomplexes in two languages: Fijian, which uses a range of preverbal andpostverbal particles, and Lenakel, which relies heavily on affixes. The Fijianexamples below are from Schütz (1985), while the Lenakel sentences aretranslations of these. The verb root is underlined in each example.FijianE sā qai tau-r-a mai.she ASPECT then bring-TRANS-it here‘Then she brought it here.’Eratou sā lako vata sara yani.they:few ASPECT go together intensive there‘They (few) went off there together.’E ā wili-k-a tale.he PAST read-TRANS-it again‘He read it again.’146 CHAPTER 6LenakelR-ep-os-i-pa.she-then-take-TRANS-here‘Then she brought it here.’K-ɨm-hal-vɨn-uas.they-PAST-TRIAL-go:there-together‘They (three) went off there together.’R-ɨm-avhi-in mun.he-PAST-read-TRANS again‘He read it again.’One further complication in Oceanic languages, as in members ofmany other language families around the world, is that a single verb com-plex may consist of more than one verb, through a process known as verbserialization. Usually, the same participants (like subject and, if a verb istransitive, object) are involved with each verb in the series. The followingexamples illustrate simple intransitive serialization. Each serialized verb isunderlined.RovianaTotoso ene nuguru la ghami …when walk enter go we:EXC‘When we walked in …’Turu saghe pule mae si rau.stand rise return come SUBJECT I‘I stood back up.’In a transitive sentence, transitivity or an object’s features are usuallymarked only once. In the following example, note that the transitive suffixappears not on the first verb in the series (the transitive verb seke ‘hit’), buton the last verb (the intransitive verb mate ‘die’).RovianaLopu seke mate-i rau pa lima-gu.not hit die-TRANS:them I with hand-my‘I didn’t kill them with my hands.’Paamese is a language in which negation is marked by a discontinuousaffix (see 6.5.4 below), that is, a verb in the negative must take both the pre-fix ro- and the suffix -tei.Oceanic Languages: Grammatical Overview 147PaameseNi-ro-kan-tei ouh.I:FUTURE-not-eat-not yam‘I will not eat the yam.’In serial constructions in Paamese, the first verb in the series takes the pre-fix ro-, while the last verb takes the suffix -tei:PaameseNi-ro-kan vīs-tei ouh.I:FUTURE-not-eat try-not yam‘I will not try to eat the yam.’6.5. SentencesEnglish normally requires sentences to contain (at least) one verb, butOceanic languages do not. Below I follow Krupa (1982) in distinguishing be-tween verbal sentences and nominal sentences.6.5.1. Nominal SentencesNominal sentences have no verb. They consist of a subject and a predicate(sometimes referred to as a topic and a comment about that topic), but thepredicate is usually a noun phrase specifying a person, thing, place, andso on. In languages in which the subject normally precedes the verb in averbal sentence (see below), the subject/topic comes before the predicate/comment in nominal sentences:Subject PredicateTolaiIau mamati.I from:here‘I am from here.’MotuIa na tau bada-na.he FOCUS man big-SG‘He is a big/elderly man.’To‘aba‘itaThata-mu ni tei?name-your the:PERSONAL who‘What is your name?’148 CHAPTER 6MokilesePediro kahdilik-men.Pediro Catholic-CLASSIFIER‘Pedro is a Catholic.’RotumanIa gagaja-t.he chief-a‘He is a chief.’In languages in which the verb normally precedes the subject (see below),the predicate in a nominal sentence comes before the subject.Predicate SubjectYapeseChitamngii-g Tamag.father-my Tamag‘Tamag is my father.’RovianaVineki zingazingarana si asa.girl light:skinned SUBJECT she‘She is a light-skinned girl.’FijianNa ke-na i-liuliu na kānala.the POSS-its NOM-lead the colonel‘The colonel is its leader.’TonganKo e faiako au.FOCUS a teacher I‘I am a teacher.’MāoriHe kātiro ātāhua a Mārama.a girl beautiful the:PERSONAL Mārama‘Mārama is a beautiful girl.’Kiribati, in which the verb comes first in a verbal sentence, apparently al-lows either subject + predicate or predicate + subject with little if anydifference in meaning.Oceanic Languages: Grammatical Overview 149KiribatiTe berititenti ngaia. (subject + predicate)the president he‘He is the president.’Ngaia te berititenti. (predicate + subject)he the president‘He is the president.’The translations of all these sentences contain some form of the verb“to be,” which is used in equational sentences (“He is the president.”), insome kinds of locational sentences (“I am from here.”), and so on. ManyOceanic languages have no such verb, expressing equational and locationalsentences as nominal sentences.6.5.2. Accusative and Ergative LanguagesIn discussing the structure of verbal sentences in Pacific languages (Oceanicand other), we need to introduce a distinction between accusative struc-tures and ergative structures.21 English, for example, is a wholly accusativelanguage. The subjects of transitive and intransitive verbs are marked in thesame way, but the object of a transitive verb is marked differently.For example:1. She is sleeping.2. She saw the man.3. The man saw her.Sentences (1) and (2) are intransitive and transitive, respectively. Both haveshe as subject. In sentence (3), the form of the object is her, not she.The majority of Oceanic languages are accusative languages. In the fol-lowing examples, the subject is underlined:Anejom̃Et amjeg a natam̃añ iyii.he sleep SUBJECT man that‘That man is sleeping.’Et ecta-i natam̃añ iyii a kuri.he see-TRANS man that SUBJECT dog‘The dog saw that man.’Et ecta-i kuri a natam̃añ iyii.he see-TRANS dog SUBJECT man that‘That man saw the dog.’150 CHAPTER 6Southwest TannaKɨmlu i-ɨmn-la-gɨn.we:two:EXC we-PAST DUAL-afraid‘We (two) were afraid.’K ɨ mlu i-ɨ mn-la-hai pukah.we:two:EXC we-PAST DUAL-stab pig‘We (two) stabbed the pig.’Pa l- ɨ mn-hai amlu?who he-PAST-stab us:two:EXC‘Who stabbed us (two)?’In Anejom̃, the subject of intransitive and transitive sentences is markedwith a preceding a, while the object is unmarked. In Southwest Tanna, thesubject pronoun in both intransitive and transitive sentences is the same inform (kɨmlu ‘we two EXC’), but it is amlu as the object of a transitive verb. Inboth languages, the subject is marked by its position in the sentence—at theend in Anejom̃, at the beginning in Southwest Tanna.Some Oceanic languages, however, have ergative structures. In thesestructures, the subject of a transitive verb, called the agent, is marked inone way (by the ergative case), while the subject of an intransitive verb (thesubject) and the object of a transitive verb (the object) are marked differ-ently by the absolutive case.Look at the following examples from Samoan. In thefirst—intransitive—sentence, the subject is underlined, while in the secondand third—transitive—sentences, the agent is underlined.SamoanSa ma‘i le fafine.STATIVE sick the woman‘The woman is sick.’Na mana‘o-mia le fafine e le tama.PAST want-TRANS the woman ERGATIVE the child‘The child wanted the woman.’E salu-ina e le fafine le fale.PRESENT sweep-TRANS ERGATIVE the woman the house‘The woman sweeps the house.’In Samoan, the absolutive case is unmarked: le fafine ‘the woman’ is subjectof the intransitive verb in the first sentence, and object of the transitive verbOceanic Languages: Grammatical Overview 151in the second. In the second and third sentences, however, le tama ‘the child’and le fafine are subjects of the transitive verb and are marked as such bythe ergative marker, e.Note a similar pattern in Motu. Morea is unmarked in the first two sen-tences, where it is subject of the intransitive verb and object of the transitiveverb, respectively. But when it occurs as subject of the transitive verb, as inthe third example, it is marked by the following ergative marker ese.MotuMorea e-mahuta.Morea he-sleep‘Morea is sleeping.’Boroma ese Morea e-ala-ia.pig ERGATIVE Morea he-kill-it‘The pig killed Morea.’Morea ese boroma e-ala-ia.Morea ERGATIVE pig he-kill-it‘Morea killed the pig.’6.5.3. Basic Structure of Verbal SentencesDifferent Oceanic languages have different basic phrase orders. The orderof subject, object, and verb within the simple verbal sentence varies fromlanguage to language.SV(O) LanguagesIn the majority of Oceanic languages, the subject (whether it is a pro-noun or a noun phrase) precedes the verb in both intransitive and transitiveclauses. In transitive clauses, the object follows the verb. This order is foundin most languages of island Melanesia (including many of the PolynesianOutliers), as well as in nearly all languages of Micronesia. For example:Subject Verb ObjectNakanaiE pusi tetala eia parakukuru.the cat his it black‘His/her cat is black.’E Baba kue-a la paia.the Baba hit-it the dog‘Baba hit the dog.’152 CHAPTER 6LabuAse eme?who come:PAST‘Who came?’Êmaha mô-sôhô hanô.we:EXC we:EXC-build house‘We built the house.’To‘aba‘itaNau kwa-si mata‘i.I I-not sick‘I am not sick.’Kini ‘e ngali-a redio.woman she take-it radio‘The woman took the radio.’PaameseMail he-to.Mail he:DISTANT-bald‘Mail is going bald.’Letau kail a-mūmo-n alok.woman PL they-make-TRANS pudding‘The women made/are making the pudding.’LenakelNakankɨp r-ɨm-am-apul.Nakankɨp he-PAST-CONTINUOUS-sleep“Nakankɨp was sleeping.”Pehe r-n-os nau ka?who he-COMPLETIVE-take knife that‘Who has taken that knife?’PonapeanLamp-o pahn pwupwidi.lamp-that FUTURE fall‘That lamp will fall down.’Oceanic Languages: Grammatical Overview 153Kidi-e ngalis Soulik.dog-this bite Soulik‘This dog bit Soulik.’S(O)V LanguagesWhile the Oceanic languages of much of the mainland of Papua NewGuinea, particularly the southern part, also prefer subject + verb order inintransitive sentences, in transitive sentences the preferred order is subject+ object + verb.22subject Object VerbMotuMorea e-mahuta.Morea he-sleep‘Morea is sleeping.’Morea ese boroma e-ala-ia.Morea ERGATIVE pig he-kill-it‘Morea killed the pig.’MaisinPita-ka i-maa-matu.Peter-TOPIC he-CONTINUOUS-sleep‘Peter is asleep.’Tamaate-seng sikoo-ka ti-fune-si.MEN-ERGATIVE pig-TOPIC they-cut-it‘The men cut up the pig.’Verb-Initial LanguagesLanguages whose rules demand that the verb complex come first in thesentence are found in various parts of the Oceanic area.23 Anejom̃ in Vanu-atu, many New Caledonian languages, a few languages in Micronesia, andmost Polynesian languages (especially those of the Polynesian Triangle) areverb-initial languages. In some of these languages, the normal order is verb+ object + subject.Verb Object SubjectAnejom̃Ek hag añak.I eat I‘I am eating.’154 CHAPTER 6Is ecet Deto a Tosei.PAST see Deto SUBJECT Tosei‘Tosei saw Deto.’IaaiA me walak wanakat.he CONTINUOUS play child‘The child is playing.’A me kot wanakat thaan.he CONTINUOUS hit child chief‘The chief is smacking the child.’KiribatiE a mataku Itaia.he CONTINUOUS watch Itaia‘Itaia is watching.’E tenaa Itaia te kirii.it bite Itaia the dog‘The dog bit Itaia.’In others verb + subject + object is the norm.Verb Subject ObjectYapeseBea mool Tamag.PRESENT sleep Tamag‘Tamag is sleeping.’Kea guy Tamag Tinag.he see:her Tamag Tinag‘Tamag saw Tinag.’MāoriI kai te rangatira.PAST eat the chief‘The chief ate.’I inu te tangata i te rongoa.PAST drink the man OBJECT the medicine‘The man drank the medicine.’Oceanic Languages: Grammatical Overview 155Tahitian‘Ua tāmā‘a te vahine.PAST eat the woman‘The woman has eaten.’‘Ua tāpū te vahine ‘i te vahie.PAST cut the woman OBJECT the wood‘The woman cut the wood.’Flexibility of Phrase OrderTo some extent, all Oceanic languages, like most other languages in theworld, allow some flexibility in basic phrase order. In English, for example,emphasis or contrast can be laid on the object by moving it to sentence-ini-tial position: Compare I just can’t stand that fellow with That fellow I justcan’t stand.In Oceanic languages, it is generally possible to focus attention on anynoun phrase by moving it to the beginning of the sentence. In some lan-guages, there is a pause (marked in the examples below by a comma) ora special focusing morpheme after this phrase. The first set of examples isfrom languages that are normally verb-initial. The focus is on the subject:Subject Verb ObjectA‘jiëMë‘u, wè, na kani.yam, FOCUS, it grow‘As for the yam, it’s growing well.’IaaiWanakat, a me walak.child, 3SG CONTINUOUS play‘As for the child, he/she is playing.’Mā‘oriKo Wahieroa kua moe i a Kura.FOCUS Wahieroa COMPLETIVE marry OBJECT the:PERSONAL Kura‘Wahieroa [not someone else] has married Kura.’The next couple of examples show focus on the object.156 CHAPTER 6Object Verb SubjectAnejom̃Nev-atimi iyii na ecta-i aek?which-man that you see-TRANS you‘Which man was it that you saw?’Object Subject VerbFijianE dua na qito levu keimami ākī-tak-a.it one the game big we:EXC:PL PAST do-TRANS-it‘It’s a big game we played.’The examples below are from normally subject-initial (either SVO or SOV)languages, with attention focused on the object.Object Subject VerbNakanaiLa paia taume, eau kama hilo-a.the dog your, I not see-it‘As for your dog, I haven’t seen it.’To‘aba‘itaNiu ne‘e ki na ku ngali-a mai.coconut this PL FOCUS I carry-it here‘It was these coconuts that I brought.’MotuBoroma Morea ese e-ala-ia.pig Morea ERGATIVE he-kill-it‘The pig, Morea killed it.’LenakelNimwa aan nɨmataag-asuul r-ɨm-atakɨn.house that wind-big it-PAST-destroy‘That house was destroyed by the cyclone.’The following extract from a Banoni story (Lincoln 1976, 229) showshow discourse features influence word order in these languages. The nounphrase we are interested in is natsu-ri ‘their child.’Oceanic Languages: Grammatical Overview 157BanoniVi natsu-ri ke vakekariana me-riathen child-their COMPLETIVE play with-them‘Their child was playing withna dzoko na kanisi. Vi ka teviri na-riathe child the some then COMPLETIVE eat POSS-theirsome youngsters. But they ateborogho ke kota, ke tai-ma natsu-ri.pig COMPLETIVE all, COMPLETIVE come-here child-their‘all the pork (before) their child came.’The story is about a man and his wife cooking pork. When their child(natsu-ri) is introduced into the story, it is obviously in focus. It comes beforethe verb of which it is the subject (ke vakekariana ‘he was playing’). Oncethe child has been introduced, however, there is no necessity to focus on thechild again. In the last clause in the above example, natsu-ri follows the verbof which it is the subject (ke tai-ma ‘he came’).In some Oceanic languages, however, this variability in phrase order isa requirement of grammar. Tolai, for example, has SV(O) in most sentencetypes, but V(O)S in stative sentences. Compare examples 1 and 2 with exam-ples 3 and 4.TolaiSubject Verb Object1. A pap i pot.the dog it come‘The dog came.’2. Iau gire ra pap.I see the dog‘I saw the dog.’Verb Object Subject3. I ga buka ra evu rat.it FAR:PAST full the two basket‘Two baskets were filled.’4. I ga tup dir a vinarubu.it FAR:PAST tire them:two the fight‘The fight tired them.’158 CHAPTER 6Rotuman also has SV(O) as its normal order, but this can change to VS incertain kinds of intransitive sentences (e.g., imperatives). Compare the firsttwo examples below with the last one.RotumanSubject Verb ObjectFā ta joni-en.man the run:away-he:STATIVE‘The man ran away.’Iris tauɔki-a fuag ta.they repair-TRANS breach:in:wall the‘They are repairing the breach (in the wall).’Verb SubjectLeum ‘æe!come you‘(You) come!’6.5.4. NegationThere is some variety in the ways in which negation is marked in Oceaniclanguages. The most widespread pattern is for negation to be marked by apreverbal negative particle:ManamTamoata tago nga-te-a.man not he:IRREALIS-see-me‘The man will not see me.’BanoniMa to tai no, Ken ma to tai.IRREALIS not go you, Ken IRREALIS not go‘If you don’t go, Ken won’t go either.’NakanamangaA ko taa munu.I INCOMPLETE not drink‘I haven’t drunk yet.’Oceanic Languages: Grammatical Overview 159A‘jiëCéré daa të ka‘u.they not still big‘They are not big yet.’KiribatiE aki kiba te moa.it not fly the chicken‘The chicken didn’t fly.’NukuoroIa e te hanohe PRESENT not go‘He is not going.’TonganNa‘e ‘ikai ‘alu ‘a Siale.PAST not go SUBJECT Siale‘Siale didn’t go.’In a considerable number of Oceanic languages, negation is marked bya discontinuous morpheme. Two separate particles must both occur, butthey are separated by some other elements (compare French Je suis malade‘I am sick,’ with Je ne suis pas malade ‘I am not sick’). Generally, one of theseparticles occurs before the verb and the other after it.RagaRan hav gita-u tehe.they:COMPLETIVE not see-me not‘They didn’t see me.’RotumanTaunæ‘ ta kat sok ra.meeting the not:NON-FUTURE happen not‘The meeting did not take place.’Taunæ‘ ta kal sok ra.meeting the not:FUTURE happen not‘The meeting will not take place.’West FutunaA tata ni se kauna ma avau ki ta skul.the parent PAST not send not me to the school‘My parents didn’t send me to school.’160 CHAPTER 6Special mention must be made of the Lewo language of Epi Island, Vanuatu,which is probably unique in the world in requiring (in some grammaticalcontexts) a triple marking of negation:LewoPe ne-pisu-li re Santo poli.not I-see-try not Santo not‘I’ve never seen Santo.’Sa-na puruvi lala pe ka-la kinan-ena re si poli.POSS-his brother PL not POSS:FOOD-their eat-NOM not again not‘His brothers didn’t have any more food.’In languages with complex verbal morphology, the negative is oftenmarked by a verbal affix rather than by a particle. In a number of cases (likePaamese and Lenakel below), this affix is a discontinuous morpheme, incor-porating a prefix and a suffix to the verb:MotuB-asi-na-ita-ia.FUTURE-not-I-see-it‘I won’t see it.’PaameseInau na-ro-mesai-tei.I I-not-sick-not‘I am not sick.’LenakelWusuaas ka r-ɨs-ho-aan peravɨn taha-m.boy the he-not-hit-not woman POSS-your‘The boy didn’t hit your wife.’Other Oceanic languages mark negation with a negative word thatcomes at the beginning of the clause or sentence but is not part of the verbcomplex. Discontinuous marking also occurs in some of these languages(Rapanui in the examples below).Tahitian‘Aita te ta‘ata ‘i hohoni-hia ‘e te ‘uri.not the man COMPLETIVE bite-PASSIVE by the dog‘The man was not bitten by the dog.’Oceanic Languages: Grammatical Overview 161MāoriKāhore ngā wāhine e kōrero ana.not the:PL woman NONPAST talk CONTINUOUS‘The women are not talking.’RapanuiIna matou kai ma‘a i te vānaga Magareva.not we:EXC not know OBJECT the language Mangareva‘We ourselves don’t know the Mangareva language.’In some Oceanic languages the negative is marked by a negative verb.The first Southwest Tanna sentence below is in the affirmative, and the verb(asim ‘to garden’) takes subject and tense prefixes.Southwest TannaMagau l-ɨmn-asim niɨv.Magau he-PAST-garden yesterday‘Magau worked in the garden yesterday.’In the negative equivalent of this sentence, person and tense marking oc-curs on the negative verb apwah, and the verb asim is nominalized.Southwest TannaMagau l-ɨmn-apwah n-asim-ien niɨv.Magau he-PAST-not NOM-garden-NOM yesterday‘Magau did not work in the garden yesterday.’Fijian behaves similarly with the negative verb sega.FijianE sega na kākana.it not the food‘There is no food.’Au sega ni kilā na vosa.I not that know:TRANS:it the language‘I don’t know the language.’6.5.5. Prepositional and Postpositional PhrasesA preposition comes before a noun phrase and specifies that phrase’srelationship to the verb or to other phrases in the sentence. Typically,prepositions mark relationships like location, time, instrument, cause,162 CHAPTER 6and so on. A prepositional phrase, therefore, is a noun phrase intro-duced by a preposition.Most Oceanic languages have a small, closed set of prepositions. To‘aba-‘ita and Samoan are typical:To‘aba‘ita‘i location, directionni purpose, instrumentmala ‘like, as’‘ana instrument, goal, comparisonSamoani location, direction toward, instrument, causema comitative, ‘with’mā, mō beneficiary ‘for’ (the a/o distinction parallelingthat ofpossessives)mai ablative, ‘from’In the examples below, the prepositional phrases are underlined.To‘aba‘itaThaina-mare‘a ‘e nii ‘i luma.mother-our:two:EXC she be in house‘Our mother is in the house.’Kasi-a ‘oko ‘ena ‘ana nini ‘ena.cut it rope that with knife that‘Cut the rope with the knife.’SamoanUa sau le tama ma se ‘au-fa‘i.STATIVE come the boy with a bunch-banana‘The boy is coming with a bunch of bananas.’‘O Malia oleā moe i le pō.FOCUS Maria FUTURE sleep in the night‘Maria will sleep in the evening.’As if to compensate for the fairly small number of basic prepositions, mostof these languages make considerable use of compound prepositions. Acompound preposition (underlined in the examples below) is composed of ageneral preposition plus a noun (often a body part) for greater specificity.Oceanic Languages: Grammatical Overview 163To‘aba‘itaKa takalo-a gano fuu ‘i maa-na bi‘u fuu.he:then scatter-it soil that in face-its house that‘Then he scattered the soil in front of the house.’‘Ono ‘i ninima-ku.sit:down at side-my‘Sit down beside me.’Ni ‘Oina ‘e nii ‘i laa luma.the:FEMININE ‘Oina she be:located in inside house‘Oina is inside the house.’Although the languages of Polynesia and Micronesia and the majority ofthe languages of Melanesia use prepositions, many of the languages of theNew Guinea mainland and the nearby offshore islands use postpositions tomark the same kinds of grammatical functions. As the name implies, a post-position comes after the noun phrase to which it refers rather than beforeit. This kind of phrase is known as a postpositional phrase. There is a verystrong correlation among the world’s languages between SOV basic sen-tence order and postpositions. Within Oceanic as well, the languages thathave postpositions are usually also those in which the object comes beforethe verb.Below are the postpositions of Manam and Sinagoro. The last twoManam forms are suffixes; the Sinagoro forms are clitics, suffixed to thelast word in the noun phrase, whatever its grammatical category.Manamzaiza comitative, ‘with’‘ana causeane, oti, ono instrumentbo‘ana ‘like, as’-lo location-o ‘on’Sinagoroai location, ‘in, at’na instrument, ablativeγoti accompanimentγana direction towardBelow are some examples in these two languages of sentences containingpostpositional phrases.164 CHAPTER 6ManamRoa-gu uma-lo i-malipi-lipi.wife-my garden-in she-work-CONTINUOUS‘My wife is working in the garden.’Tanepwa zaiza ‘i-pura.chief with we:EXC-come‘We came with the chief.’SinagoroAu γe-γu koko-na a-kwari-a-to.I POSS-my axe-with I-hit-it-PAST‘I hit it with my axe.’Kila na kwayalu baraki-na-γana γio piu-a-to.Kila ERGATIVE dog old-SG-toward spear throw-it-PAST‘Kila threw a spear toward the old dog.’As with their preposition-using relatives, many of these languages havecompound postpositions, like the following in Sinagoro:Sinagoronuma gabule-na-aihouse underneath-its-at‘under the house’numa muli-na-aihouse back-its-at‘behind the house’mimiga potiati-aihole gone:through-at“through the hole”6.6. Similarities and DifferencesOceanic languages exhibit a number of areas of similarity, but also many ar-eas of difference. Given the period of time in which many of these languageshave been developing separately from their relatives, the quite large degreeof similarity is perhaps more surprising than the differences.Oceanic Languages: Grammatical Overview 165CHAPTER7Papuan Languages: Gram-matical OverviewThe seven hundred or so Papuan languages of the Pacific belong to a num-ber of distinct and apparently unrelated families. For this reason alone, it ismuch more difficult to make grammatical generalizations about them thanabout the Oceanic languages treated in chapter 6. I attempt here to give avery general feel for the diversity of Papuan languages, focusing specificallyon differences between them and Oceanic languages. The interested readeris referred to Foley’s excellent survey of these languages (Foley 1986).7.1. PronounsPronoun systems vary widely among Papuan languages, but in general theyare not so complex as Oceanic systems. Many Papuan languages distinguishonly singular and plural (sometimes only in some persons, like Kuman in theexamples below). Some languages in Irian Jaya do not even do this. Theysimply distinguish person, though they usually have a special plural mor-pheme preceding or following (like king- in Manem):Manem Kuman KoitaSingularI ga na dayou sa ene ahe/she/it angk ye auPluralwe king-ga no noyou king-sa ene yathey king-angk ye yau166Some Papuan languages, however, have a dual as well as a plural number inpronouns:Wiru AlamblakSingularI no nanyou ne ninhe/she/it one rërDualwe two tota nënyou two kita nifɨnthey two kita rëfPluralwe toto nëmyou kiwi nikëmthey kiwi rëmThe Wiru examples show another not uncommon feature of Papuan pro-nouns, conflation of non-singular second and third persons.A number of Papuan languages distinguish gender in pronouns, mostcommonly in the third person singular, but occasionally in other persons aswell. Note the following singular pronouns in Abelam:AbelamI wnǝyou masculine mǝ nǝyou feminine ñǝ nǝhe dǝshe lǝVery few Papuan pronominal systems distinguish inclusive and exclu-sive first person. Nimboran in Irian Jaya is one language that makes thisdistinction, though it does not distinguish singular and plural:Nimboranio I, we inclusivengo I, we exclusiveko you (singular and plural)no he, she, it, theyThe Papuan languages of Solomon Islands also have the inclusive/exclu-sive distinction. All of them distinguish gender in the third person, and somelanguages do so in other persons as well. They also mark dual and in somePapuan Languages: Grammatical Overview 167cases trial number. The most complex of these pronoun systems is that of Ba-niata (see table 6).Table 6. Baniata Independent PronounsUnspecifieda Masculine Feminine NeuterSingular1 eei2 noe3 zo vo na, ñoDual1INC be bebe1EXC eere eerebe2 bere berebe3 sere robe redeTrial1INC meno menu1EXC eebeno eebenu2 mebeno mebenu3 nomo numo nafiPlural1INC memo1EXC eebo2 mebo3 mo mo noaGender is not distinguished in these persons and numbers.Many Papuan languages mark person and number of subject (and, lessoften, object) by verbal affixes, usually suffixes, but sometimes prefixes. In-terestingly, a number of languages make more distinctions in these affixesthan they do in free pronouns. Kuman is one such language:KumanIndependentpronounsSubject suffixesSingularI na -iyou ene -nhe/she/it ye -uw168 CHAPTER 7Dualwe two — -buglyou two — -bitthey two — -bitPluralwe no -munyou ene -iwthey ye -iwKuman (1) contrasts dual and plural in the subject pronoun suffixes; (2) likeWiru, it conflates non-singular second and third persons in the subject suf-fixes. Neither of these features appears in the independent pronouns.Bilua, on the other hand, has subject prefixes. One small class of verbsmarks the object by prefixes, but most verbs take object suffixes. Here are thesingular forms of these pronouns (along with the independent pronouns).BiluaSubject ObjectIndependent Prefixes Prefixes SuffixesI anga a- l- -lyou ngo ngo- ng- -nghe vo o- v- -vshe ko ko- k- -k7.2. Nouns and Noun Phrases7.2.1. Noun Class SystemsMany Papuan languages, especially those in the central north of the main-land of New Guinea, have elaborate noun class systems. While a languagelike French, for example, grammatically distinguishes two genders (mascu-line and feminine), and a language like German three (masculine, feminine,and neuter), Abu‘, the language I use to exemplify this system in Papuan lan-guages (Nekitel 1986), has nineteen different noun classes. These classesare based on a combination of semantic and phonological factors. So whileclass 1 contains nouns referring to males and class 2 nouns referring to fe-males, class 5 (which contains such diverse nouns as the words for “song,”“leg,” “sago,” “vine,” and “tooth”) is distinguished by the fact that the singu-lar form ends in h while the plural ends in lih.What is of interest in these systems is that other words in a clause that re-late to a noun—the verb of which it is subject, adjectives, demonstratives, andso on—are all marked morphologically to indicate that they refer to a noun of aPapuan Languages: Grammatical Overview 169particular class. The word order in the examples below is /noun + demonstra-tive + adjective + verb/. The class marker is underlined in each case.1Abu‘Noun Dem. Adj. VerbAleman ana afuni n-ahe‘ ‘This good man went.’Alemam ama afumi m-ahe‘ ‘These good men went.’Numata‘ au‘a afu‘i kw-ahe‘ ‘This good woman went.’Numatawa awa afuweri w-ahe‘ ‘These good women went.’Aul ala afuli l-ahe‘ ‘This good eel went.’Akuh akuha afukuhi h-ahe‘ ‘These good eels went.’Bahiataf afa afufi f-ahe‘ ‘This good river fish went.’Ihiaburuh aha afuhi h-ahe‘ ‘This good butterfly went.’7.2.2. Articles and DemonstrativesArticles are virtually nonexistent in Papuan languages. As far as demonstra-tives are concerned, some Papuan languages show the three-way distinctioncommon to Austronesian languages.Koitao PROXIMATE: ‘this’e INTERMEDIATE: ‘this, that’vire DISTANT: ‘that’Other Papuan languages are more like English, with a two-way contrast indemonstratives between proximate (near the speaker) and distant (not nearthe speaker). Barai, though closely related to Koita, is one such language,but the demonstrative situation is complicated by the fact that other aspectsof the location of the noun referred to are also incorporated into the system.BaraiProximate Distantig- ij- general— gar-, gur- to the side— gam- down at an angle— gaf- up at an angle— gum- straight down— guf- straight upIn languages with strongly developed noun class systems, thedemonstratives usually incorporate a marker of the class membership of thenoun referred to. The earlier examples from Abu‘ illustrate this.170 CHAPTER 77.2.3. Noun Phrase StructureAlthough there are exceptions, in general the noun phrase in Papuan lan-guages has the head noun first and all modifying and descriptive wordsfollowing. Below are a few examples, with the head noun underlined in eachcase.Koitaata ahu inuhati vireman old all that‘all those old men’Dagagutut otu ame uiwastory little that last‘that last little story’Abu‘ba-kuh a-kuha bia-kuh afu-kuhistick-CLASS this-CLASS two-CLASS good-CLASS‘these two good sticks’Engaakáli épé kitúmende dúpaman good four those‘those four good men’7.3. Possessive ConstructionsPossessive constructions are less complex in Papuan languages than inOceanic languages. Many Papuan languages simply mark a noun as beingpossessed, with none of the various subtypes found in Oceanic languages.In Koita, for example, the noun possessed is preceded by the independentpronoun and takes the suffix -Ce, where the thematic consonant varies de-pending on the noun to which it is suffixed.Koitadi hete-re di ava-γeI chin-POSS I mouth-POSS‘my chin’ ‘my mouth’di vaiγa-de di muni-veI spear-POSS I stone-POSS‘my spear’ ‘my stone’Papuan Languages: Grammatical Overview 171Other Papuan languages show a distinction between alienable and in-alienable nouns rather like that of the simplest systems in Oceanic. In Daga,for example, kinship nouns take possessive suffixes.Dagane goani-naI younger:sibling-my‘my younger sibling’nu mama-nuwe father-our‘our father’Other nouns do not take these possessive suffixes, but are followed insteadby an independent pronoun plus a possessive marker.Dagane anu-t ne-gaI thing-NOM I-POSS‘my thoughts’nu dugup nu-gawe clan we-POSS‘our clan’7.4. Verbs and the Verb Complex7.4.1. Person and Number; Tense and AspectThe majority of Papuan languages mark person, number, and sometimesnoun class of the subject, as well as tense-aspect and related categories bysuffixes to the verb stem. In many cases, this leads to complex strings of suf-fixes, with concomitantly complex morphophonemics. This complexity canalso mean that a clause, or indeed a whole sentence, may consist only of averb. In the following examples from widely separated languages, the verbroot is underlined.MagiOni-la-es-a.go-IMPERFECTIVE-PRESENT-he‘He is going.’Oni-bi-ava-i!go-CONDITINOAL-you:two-IMPERATIVE‘You two go!’172 CHAPTER 7Oni-sa-‘a-i-dei.go-FUTURE-I-IMPERATIVE-short:time‘I will go now for a short time.’WahgiNa-pi-s-a-mbiɫ-mo?not-hear-CLASSIFIER-FUTURE-two-QUESTION‘Will you two not hear?’No-n-a-mb-ua?eat-CLASSIFIER-FUTURE-they-QUESTION‘Can they eat?’Na-no-tang-e-r-ind.not-eat-HABITUAL-COMPLETIVE-CLASSIFIER-I‘I do not always eat.’Abelamwʌ-kʌ-wtǝ-kwʌ.talk-FUTURE-I-NONPAST‘I will talk.’gǝra-kʌ-ñǝnǝ-gwʌ.cry-FUTURE-you: FEMININE-NONPAST‘You (fem.) will cry.’kʌ-kʌ-wtǝ-kwʌ-yeat-FUTURE-I-NONPAST-not:FUTURE‘I will not eat.’There are Papuan languages, however, in which at least some of thegrammatical information is carried by prefixes rather than suffixes. In thefollowing examples from Yimas, the verb root is again underlined.Yimasyan na-ka-kumprak-asa-ttree OBJECT:CLASS-I-broken-CAUSATIVE-COMPLETIVE‘I broke the tree.’ka-n-wa-nlikely-he-go-PRESENT‘He’s likely to go.’antɨ-ka-wa-ntutmight-I-go-FAR:PAST‘I would have gone.’Papuan Languages: Grammatical Overview 173An almost bewildering variety of tense-aspect situations may be markedin the verbs of Papuan languages. Let us take Korafe as an example. Korafeverbs take one of a number of tense-aspect suffixes:Korafe-e present-are future-ete immediate past (something that happened today)-imuta very near past (something that happened yesterday)-a recent past (something that happened before yesterday,but not very long ago)-ise far past-erae habitualThese tense-aspect markers are followed by suffixes marking the subject’sperson and number, and then by a further set of suffixes markingmood—indicative (statements), interrogative (yes-or-no questions), ques-tion (information questions), hortative, subjunctive, and imperative. Theverb root is underlined in the examples.KorafeY-are-s-a.go-FUTURE-you-STATEMENT‘You will go.’Re-da y-are-s-i?what-to go-FUTURE-you-QUESTION‘Where will you go?’Y-a-s-a.go-RECENT:PAST-you-STATEMENT‘You went (recently).’Re-da y-a-s-i?what-to go-RECENT:PAST-you-QUESTION‘Where did you go (recently)?’A further feature of the verb in Papuan languages is that complexmorphophonemic processes are involved. It is often difficult to break downwhat follows a verb into its component suffixes. Here are a few examplesfrom Kuman:KumanUnderlying form Surface form/pit-i-ka-a/ > prikahear-I-REALIS-STATEMENT‘I hear.’174 CHAPTER 7/kumbt-uw-ka-a/ > kumbrukwatwist-it-REALIS-STATEMENT‘It twists.’/ne-kit-mbugl-ka-a/ > nekulkaeat-not-we:two-REALIS-STATEMENT‘We two didn’t eat (it).’/kan-nagl-mba-t-a/ > kanaglmbrasee-FUTURE-hopefully-EMPHATIC-STATEMENT‘(I) will hope to see it.’7.4.2. Adjunct and Serial ConstructionsAdjunct and serial constructions, a feature of many Papuan languages, canbe introduced by examples from Kuman. Look first at the following sen-tences (the relevant morphemes are underlined).KumanBugla kinde suŋgwa.pig bad it:hit‘The pig is sick.’Ambai giglaŋge duŋgwa.girl song she:say‘The girl is singing.’These two sentences are examples of what are called adjunct con-structions, in which the verb of the sentence is preceded by a morpheme ofsome other word class, usually a noun or an adjective, which is known as anadjunct. Some other examples in Kuman are:Kumanka di gaugl ereword say laughter do‘say’ ‘laugh’kai ere nigl paitears do water lie‘cry’ ‘wash (self)’Serial constructions are similar but not identical to adjunct construc-tions, as illustrated in the following examples.Papuan Languages: Grammatical Overview 175KumanYe mbo mbat narukwa.he sugarcane cut he:give‘He cut sugarcane for me.’Ye komboglo ake suŋgwa.she stone hold she:hit‘She hit it with a stone.’In serial constructions, the final verb is preceded by one or more otherverbs. Some more examples include:Kumandi te di presay give say perceive‘tell’ ‘ask’si bogl si goglhit cut hit die‘sew’ ‘kill’ere kan pre pol sido see perceive undo hit‘try’ ‘understand’In all of these cases, what other languages often view as a single state orevent and express by a single verb is broken up into components. For exam-ple, the sentence Ye komboglo ake suŋgwa is idiomatically translated ‘Shehit it with a stone,’ but is more literally ‘She held a stone and hit it.’ In themore literal translation, the two components of holding the stone and hittingsomething with it are separated.While many Papuan languages, like Kuman, make quite frequent use of ad-junct and serial constructions, “the closely related Kalam and Kobon are themost remarkable in applying this idea in the most thoroughgoing fashion….Kalam immediately strikes one as a language in which the speakers are exces-sively specific in their description of events” (Foley 1986, 113). An example likethe following one gives an idea of just how specific these languages can be.KalamYad am mon pk d ap ay-p-yn.I go wood hit hold come put-COMPLETIVE-I‘I fetched firewood.’While the sentence “translates” as “I fetched firewood,’ the act of fetching isbroken down into its components in Kalam. What the Kalam speaker is sayingis something like ‘I went and chopped wood and got it and came and put it.’176 CHAPTER 7In languages with these kinds of constructions, the number of actualverbs is often much smaller than in other languages. “Kalam has under 100verb stems and, of these, only about twenty-five are commonly used” (Foley1986, 115). The Kalam sentence above shows five verbs in a serial construc-tion. Other serial constructions in Kalam include the following. (The hyphenafter the last element indicates where subject and tense suffixes occur.)Kalamnb nŋ- ag tk-consume perceive sound sever‘taste’ ‘interrupt’pwŋy md ay- d am yok-poke stay put take go displace‘fix (by insertion)’ ‘get rid of’Kalam also uses adjunct constructions to a great degree.Kalamwdn nŋ- tmwd nŋ-eye perceive ear perceive‘see’ ‘hear’kwnk g- joŋb tmey g-saliva do mouth bad do‘spit’ ‘whine’ywg ñ- mnm ag ñ-lid give speech sound give‘put a lid on’ ‘confide’7.5. Sentences7.5.1. Simple SentencesAny generalization about word order in Papuan languages would state thatthey tend to be verb-final languages. The order of the core constituents is SVin intransitive clauses and SOV in transitive clauses.2Subject Object VerbBaraiBu bajae fiad-ia.they body pain-they‘They (i.e., their bodies) are in pain.’Papuan Languages: Grammatical Overview 177Fu mave kana-e.he pig hit-PAST‘He hit the pig.’WahgiNa wo-tang-n-al.I come-HABITUAL-CLASS-I:will‘I will always come.’Na mokine no-tang-ind.I food eat-HABITUAL-I:have‘I always ate food.’AnggorSonggo borǝ me-fe-o.fowl:egg broke-change-it:S‘The wildfowl egg broke.’Nindou ai songgo borǝma-r-ea-ndǝ.man he fowl:egg broke-TRANS-it:S-it:O‘The man broke the wildfowl egg.’Grand Valley DaniAp nik-k-e.man eat-REALIS-he‘The man ate.’Ap palu na-sikh-e.man python eat-FAR:PAST-he‘The man ate the python.’While in many languages this is the usual order, in others word order isnot significant for indicating functions like subject or object. Many Papuanlanguages “may be regarded as free word-order languages. Although theverb is usually positioned clause-finally, this rule is rigid only in some lan-guages. In a great many Papuan languages, peripheral nominals such aslocatives or temporals commonly occur after the verb…. The general im-pression of clause structure in Papuan languages in comparison to Englishis its overall looseness” (Foley 1986, 168).Foley illustrates this statement using Yimas. The following sentence fol-lows “standard” Papuan SOV order:178 CHAPTER 7YimasSubject Object VerbPay-um nar-mang na-mpu-tay.man-CLASS:PL woman-CLASS:SG her-they:MASCULINE-see‘The men saw the woman.’Each noun is marked as belonging to a particular noun class, and the verbtakes prefixes corresponding to the noun class of the object and the subject,in that order. In the verb namputay in the sentence above, na- marks a third-person singular object of the human female noun class, and mpu- marks athird-person plural subject of the human male noun class. The verb nam-putay on its own means ‘They (male human) saw her (human).’ Conse-quently, it is clear which noun is subject and which is object without relyingon word order. The following Yimas sentences also mean ‘The men saw thewoman.’YimasNarmang payum na-mpu-tay. (object-subject-verb)Payum na-mpu-tay narmang. (subject-verb-object)Narmang na-mpu-tay payum. (object-verb-subject)Nominal sentences are far less common in Papuan languages than inOceanic languages, as many Papuan languages have existential verbs, oftenmore than one. Kuman, for example, has three: yoŋgwa is used when thesubject is inanimate, paŋgwa with animate and inanimate subjects that arein a specific place, and molkwa with animate or inanimate subjects whoseexistence is being declared.KumanDi ta yoŋgwa.axe a it:be‘There is an axe.’Usi gagl mina paŋgwa.cigarette bag in it:be:in:that:place‘There are cigarettes in the bag.’Togoi ta molkwa.snake a it:exist‘There is a snake.’Many of the languages of the Highlands are similar to Kuman. Huli, forexample, has three existential verbs, Sinasina four, and Enga seven (Piau1981).Papuan Languages: Grammatical Overview 179An extreme case is Anggor in the Sepik, with eighteen verbs roughlytranslating “be.” What is important is the shape of the object, its location,and its posture (Litteral 1981, 128). So before choosing the appropriateverb, one needs to know if the subject is masculine or feminine, elongated orbunched up, inside something else or not, in a horizontal or vertical plane,hanging on something, stuck to something, and so on. Some of the Anggorexistential verbs are:Anggoramar- be sitting on or insideanǝngg- be standing onenggor- be lying, on a low planeanangg- be lying, on a high planeapeningg- be attached flat toapaiyar- be attached and curling aroundapuiyar- used only of liquidsahetar- be hanging from a protrusionThis is not to say that there are absolutely no verbless sentences inPapuan languages. They do occur, in both subject-predicate and predicate-subject orders.Subject PredicateKoitaAta bera yaga-uhu-gera.man a house-in-the‘A man is in the house.’KumanYuŋgu-n awe?house-your where‘Where is your house?’Predicate SubjectDagaNe tata-na ge.I older:sibling-my you‘You are my older sibling.’7.5.2. Peripheral CasesPeripheral cases—relations other than subject and object—are generallymarked by postpositions or suffixes in Papuan languages. More concretespatial notions tend to be expressed by postpositions.180 CHAPTER 7KumanKagl-e mina yoŋgwa.foot-her on it:be‘It is on her foot.’Komboglo pagl siŋga.stone with I:hit‘I hit it with a stone.’KewaAda ru-para pá-lua.house inside-to go-I:FUTURE‘I will go inside the house.’Ada rolo-para pá-lua.house underneath-to go-I:FUTURE‘I will go under the house.’But “the more basic case relations are expressed directly,” usually by suf-fixes (Foley 1986, 93):KumanMokona gagl-e krika.greens bag-in I:pack‘I put the greens in the bag.’Ye nigl-e molkwa.he water-at he:be:there‘He is at the river.’KewaAda-para pá-lua.house-to go-I:FUTURE‘I will go home.’Ní-na méáá-ria.I-for get-he:PAST‘He got it for me.’Many Papuan languages have a very wide range of morphemes markingperipheral case relations. Koita, which uses clitics to mark these relations,is a good example.Koita-γe ‘to (rivers)’-va ‘to (things)’-γasina ‘to (persons)’-he ‘at’Papuan Languages: Grammatical Overview 181-da, -na ‘on, to’-γore ‘with (accompaniment), singular’-ruta ‘with (accompaniment), plural’-γahara ‘for’-ni ‘for’-γa, -ma ‘with (instrument)’-ka partitive-Ce possessive (includes thematic consonant)Some examples:Koitavani be-hetime some-at‘sometimes’di dehiye-heI back-at‘behind me’a-γoreyou-with‘with you’idi umuka-vatree root-to‘near the tree’7.5.3. Complex SentencesI discuss one syntactic feature of complex sentences in Papuan languages,switch reference, briefly here. This feature is typical of most groups ofPapuan languages (and is also found, for example, in a number ofAmerindian language groups), but it is rare in the Pacific.The following examples from Enga illustrate what I am going to talkabout. First, here are some basic verbs.3EngaBaá p-é-á.he go-PAST-he‘He went.’Baa-mé kalái p-i-á.he-ERGATIVE work do-PAST-he‘He worked.’182 CHAPTER 7Nambá p-é-ó.I go-PAST-I‘I went.’In each case the verb takes a suffix marking the tense and another markingthe subject’s person and number.When two or more clauses are put together to form a complex sentence,the last verb in the clause (final verb) retains this subject-tense marking,but the other verbs (medial verbs) do not. Rather, they incorporate a suffixindicating whether the subject of the verb is the same as, or different from,the subject of the following verb. Look now at the following Enga examples:EngaBaa-mé pá-o kalái p-i-á.he-ERGATIVE go-SAME:SUBJ work do-PAST-he‘He went and worked (at the same time).’Nambá p-e-ó-pa baa-mé kalái p-i-á.I go-PAST-I-DIFF:SUBJ he-ERGATIVE work do-PAST-he‘I went and he worked.’In both of these sentences, the final verb, ‘do,’ has the suffix marking subjectand tense, but the verb preceding it does not. In the first example, the verbpá ‘go’ takes the suffix -o, which indicates that the subject of this verb is thesame as the subject of the next one, and the actions happened at the sametime. In the second case, the verb ‘go’ (now with the form p) takes both tenseand subject markers and the suffix -pa, which indicates that the subject ofthe next verb is going to be different from the subject of this verb. This iswhat is meant by switch-reference.Languages with switch-reference systems are generally a little morecomplex than I have shown. For example, in the first sentence we find thesuffix -o, which marked the verb as having the same subject as the next oneand indicated that the actions of the two verbs were roughly simultaneous.If the second action occurred after the first, however, we would have to usethe suffix -(a)la rather than -o. Here are some suffixes found on Enga medialverbs:Enga-o same subject, simultaneous action-(a)la same subject, sequential action-pa different subject, simultaneous or sequential action-nya same subject, next verb expresses purpose or desire-ní-mi same subject, next verb expresses intense desirePapuan Languages: Grammatical Overview 183Some other Papuan languages have even more complex switch-referencesystems.Languages with switch-reference systems generally have no, or few,conjunctions. The information that is carried by conjunctions in most Aus-tronesian languages—and in languages like English—is carried by theswitch-reference verbal suffixes.184 CHAPTER 7CHAPTER8Australian Languages:Grammatical OverviewIn attempting to make generalizations about the structure of the two hun-dred or so languages of the Australian continent, we have to remember thatmany of them have disappeared virtually without trace, while many othersbecame extinct after only a small amount of linguistic work—and that lit-tle usually the effort of linguistically untrained people—was done on them.To some extent any general statement about Australian languages is anextrapolation from the languages for which we have reasonable amounts ofdata and an educated reanalysis of those languages recorded by amateursin the last century.18.1. PronounsAlmost all Australian languages distinguish at least three numbers in pro-nouns—singular, dual, and plural—though a few have a trial or a paucal aswell. About half the languages of Australia have an inclusive/exclusive dis-tinction, like nearly all Oceanic languages, while the rest (like most Papuanlanguages) do not. There appear to be no geographical correlates of thesedifferent systems. They are scattered fairly randomly across the continent.Below are examples of the two most common types of pronoun systems.2Wargamay WajarriSingularI ngayba ngajayou nginba nyintahe/she/it nyunga palu185Dualwe two ngali we two INC ngaliwe two EXC ngalijayou two nyubula nyupalithey two bula pulaPluralwe ngana we INC nganyuwe EXC nganjuyou nyurra nyurrathey jana janaIn many Australian languages, the third person “pronouns” are not reallypronouns at all, especially in the singular, but rather demonstratives, with ameaning something like “this one” or “that one” as opposed to “he/she/it”.Apart from languages with two or four numbers, there are some othervariations in these general patterns. Pitta-Pitta, for example, distinguishesbetween masculine and feminine in the third person singular. In addition, allthird person pronouns have to take a locational suffix, so the full range ofthird person pronouns is:Pitta-PittaSingular Dual Plural‘he ‘she’ ‘they two’ ‘they’Near nhuwayi nhanpayi pulayi thanayiGeneral nhuwaka nhanpaka pulaka thanakaFar nhuwaarri nhanpaarri pulaarri thanaarriLardil is one of a number of languages in which non-singular pronounstake different forms depending on the relationship between the people in-volved. One set is used for people of the same generation or two generationsapart, the other for people who are one or three generations apart. Here arethe dual pronouns:LardilSame generation or twogenerations apartOne or threegenerations apartwe two INC ngakurri ngakuniwe two EXC nyarri nyaankiyou two kirri nyiinkithey two pirri rniinkiPronouns generally vary in form according to case, that is, their functionin the sentence. These case suffixes are usually the same as those for nouns.186 CHAPTER 8As well as the free or independent pronouns discussed above, many Aus-tralian languages also have a set of bound pronouns, which must be attachedto some other constituent in the sentence. Bound pronouns typically marksubject or object, and they are often attached to verbs:Western Desertpu-ngku-rna-ntahit-FUTURE-I-you:OBJECT‘I will hit you.’pu-ngku-rni-nhit-FUTURE-me-you:SUBJECT‘You will hit me.’In some languages bound pronouns are attached to an auxiliary—a specialword in the sentence whose main function is to carry these suffixes—ratherthan to the verb. In the Walmajarri example below, the verb is yi- ‘give,’ butthe bound pronouns are attached to the auxiliary ma-.WalmajarriYi-nya ma-rna-ny-pilangu-lu kakaji.give-PAST AUXILIARY-we:EXC:PL-to:you:two-DUAL:O-PL:S goanna‘We gave the goanna to you two.’8.2. Nouns and Noun PhrasesIn Australian languages, nouns are sometimes reduplicated to mark plural-ity or other features. The major feature of interest in the morphology ofnouns in Australian languages, however, is the marking of case.8.2.1. Case MarkingIn most Australian languages, a noun phrase must take a suffix indicating itsfunction in the sentence. Pronouns also take these case-marking suffixes.Yidiny illustrates the kinds of case-marking systems common in Aus-tralian languages.3 It marks a number of cases, as listed below. (Differentforms of the same case marker occur after different noun-final phonemes.See the discussion of Wargamay on pp. 189–190 below for an example ofthis.)Yidinyabsolutive øergative -nggu, -du, -bu, -juAustralian Languages: Grammatical Overview 187locative, allative, instrumental -la, -da, -ba, -jaablative, causal -mu, -mdative -ndapurposive -gucausal -mu, -maversive -jida, -yidapossessive -niThe absolutive case marks the subject of an intransitive verb and the ob-ject of a transitive verb. The ergative case marks the agent (the subject of atransitive verb).YidinyWagaal-du mujam wawa-l.wife-ERGATIVE mother:ABSOLUTIVE look:at-PRESENT‘(My) wife is looking at Mother.’The locative, allative, and ablative cases have to do with direction and loca-tion. Locative refers to the location, allative marks direction toward, andablative marks direction from.YidinyMujam gali-ng digarra-mu.mother:ABSOLUTIVE go-PRESENT beach-ABLATIVE‘Mother is going from the beach.’Here are some examples of some of the other case suffixes:YidinyYingu gurnga mangga-ng waguja-nda.this:ABSOLUTIVE kookaburra:ABSOLUTIVElaugh-PRESENT man-DATIVE‘This kookaburra is laughing at the man.’Mujam dubuurrji wuna-ng minya-m.mother:ABSOLUTIVE full:up lie-PRESENT meat-CAUSAL‘Mother is lying down satiated with meat.’Yingu waguuja garba-ng bama-yida.this:ABSOLUTIVE man:ABSOLUTIVE hide-PRESENT people-AVERSIVE‘This man is hiding for fear of the people.’The possessive case suffix -ni marks the possessor. A noun with this suf-fix also takes the case suffix of the possessed noun (since it functions like anadjective describing that noun):188 CHAPTER 8YidinyWagal-ni-nggu gudaga-nggu mujam baja-l.wife-POSS-ERGATIVE dog-ERGATIVE mother:ABSOLUTIVEbite-PRESENT‘(My) wife’s dog is biting Mother.’Case markers in Australian languages play the same kind of role asprepositions or postpositions in other languages of the Pacific. They indicatevarious kinds of grammatical relations between a noun phrase and the verbor between the noun phrase and another noun phrase. Because of this, Aus-tralian languages have no prepositions or postpositions.4Nouns in Australian languages may also take other suffixes, referred toas derivational suffixes. Dyirbal illustrates some typical kinds of nominalsuffixes.Dyirbal-jarran plural-garra one of a pair-manggan one of a group-mumbay ‘all’-barra ‘belonging to a place’-bila comitative, ‘with’-ngarru similative, ‘like, as’For example:Dyirbalgambil-barratablelands-belonging:to‘tablelands people’mijiji-garrawhite:woman-one:of:pair‘a white woman and someone else’Morphophonemic changes are common when suffixes are added tonouns and verbs. Two patterns are particularly widespread. First, in manylanguages the initial consonant of some suffixes changes according to the fi-nal phoneme of the root to which it is suffixed. In Wargamay, for example,the ergative suffix has (at least) five forms.Wargamay-nggu after a vowel bari-nggu ‘stone’-ndu after l maal-ndu ‘man’-dyu after ny munyininy-dyu ‘black ant’Australian Languages: Grammatical Overview 189-du after n, rr gururr-du ‘brolga’-bu after m walam-bu ‘tick’Second, in some languages there is vowel copying. The vowel of a suf-fix mimics the final vowel of the root to which the suffix is attached. Forexample, Anguthimri has an ergative suffix on nouns of the form -gV, withthe vowel repeating the final vowel of the root.AnguthimriRoot Ergativekyabara ‘crocodile’ kyabara-gaßüyi ‘ashes’ ßüyi-giku ‘stick’ ku-gu8.2.2. Noun ClassesQuite a number of Australian languages, especially in the northern part ofthe continent, have a gender or noun class system. Nouns belong to one ofa number of classes, determined partly at least on a semantic basis. Theclass membership of a noun may be marked on the noun by an affix (a pre-fix in some languages, a suffix in others) or a particle, and it is often alsomarked on adjectives and other modifiers referring to the noun. In prefix-ing languages, the noun class membership of subjects or objects may also bemarked in the verb.Tiwi has a noun class system rather like that of French. Nouns are eithermasculine or feminine. Inherently masculine or feminine nouns may not beovertly marked as such, but other nouns often take a suffix. (What is inher-ently masculine or feminine is, of course, culturally defined: Crocodiles, forexample, are thought of as masculine, [some] crabs as feminine.)TiwiMasculine Femininetini ‘male person’ tinga ‘female person’matani ‘male friend’ matanga ‘female friend’kirijini ‘boy’ kirijinga ‘girl’In Tiwi, adjectives, demonstratives, and possessives have to agree with theclass membership of the noun they refer to:TiwiMasculine Femininearikula-ni yirrikipayi arikula-nga kiripukabig-MASCULINE crocodile big-FEMININE crab‘a big crocodile’ ‘a big crab’190 CHAPTER 8ngi-nanki kirijini angi-nanki pilimungaMASCULINE-this boy FEMININE-this road‘this boy’ ‘this road’ngini-wutawa alawura angi-wutawa pulagumokaMASCULINE-they boss FEMININE-they female:dog‘their boss’ ‘their bitch’Yanyuwa has sixteen noun classes, each one marked by a prefix that oc-curs also with adjectives and numerals. (The class marker is underlined ineach example below.)Yanyuwarra-muwarda rra-walkurra rra-jakardaFEMININE-canoe FEMININE-big FEMININE-many‘many big dugout canoes’na-lungundu na-walkurra na-jakardaARBOREAL-shelter ARBOREAL-big ARBOREAL-many‘many big bark shelters’ma-murala ma-walkurra ma-jakardaFOOD-wild:cucumber FOOD-big FOOD-many‘many big wild cucumbers’narnu-yabi narnu-arrkulaABSTRACT-good ABSTRACT-one‘one good thing’nya-yabi nya-arrkulaMASCULINE-good MASCULINE-one‘one good man/boy’The last two examples show how noun class prefixes can occur even withoutan accompanying noun. The class marker makes the referent clear.58.2.3. Modifiers to NounsDemonstrativesAustralian languages have no articles, but they do have a number of demon-stratives referring to spatial relations. The complexity of the demonstrativesystem varies from language to language. Here are the demonstratives inthree Australian languages.Australian Languages: Grammatical Overview 191Gumbaynggiryaam ‘this, these, here’yarang ‘that, those, there’Yaygiradyi, ngadyi ‘this, these, here’ila, yila ‘here’dyaadyi ‘there (not too far away)’alaara, yalaara ‘there (a long way off)’Djapudhuwai ‘this, these, here’dhuwali ‘that, those, there (nearby)’ngunha ‘that, those, there (a long way off)’ngunhi anaphoric, ‘the one we are talking about’AdjectivesAdjectives behave like nouns in many ways. They take the same case suffixesand very often occur as the head of a noun phrase. (In these examples fromGumbaynggir, the ergative suffix takes the forms -du and -dyu.)GumbaynggirNiiga-du barway-dyu buwaa-ng giibar dyunuy.man-ERGATIVE big-ERGATIVE hit-PAST child:O small:O‘The big man hit the small child.’Barway-dyu buwaa-ng dyunuy.big-ERGATIVE hit-PAST small:O‘The big one hit the small one.’8.2.4. Noun Phrase StructureThe tendency in Australian languages is for possessives and demonstrativesto precede the head noun in the noun phrase, while adjectives follow it. Thefollowing examples illustrate this tendency. (The head noun is underlined ineach case.)Pitta-Pittanganya-ri murra wimaI-POSS stick big‘my big stick’Guugu Yimidhirrnambal warrga-alstone big-with‘with a big stone’192 CHAPTER 8Yukultartathinta pirwanta ngawu pirtiyathat their dog bad‘that nasty dog of theirs’This is, however, only a tendency. As with other areas of grammar inAustralian languages, word order in the noun phrase is usually relativelyfree. In the Gumbaynggir sentence (repeated from the previous section) theadjectives follow the noun.GumbaynggirNiiga-du barway-dyu buwaa-ng giibar dyunuy.man-ERGATIVE big-ERGATIVE hit-PAST child:O small:O‘The big man hit the small child.’But either or both could precede the noun in a noun phrase, yielding thesepossibilities:GumbaynggirBarway-dyu niiga-du buwaa-ng giibar dyunuy.big-ERGATIVE man-ERGATIVE hit-PAST child:O small:O‘The big man hit the small child.’Barway-dyu niiga-du buwaa-ng dyunuy giibar.big-ERGATIVE man-ERGATIVE hit-PAST small:O child:O‘The big man hit the small child.’This freedom of order sometimes extends beyond the phrase: “Not onlycan words occur in any order in a phrase and phrases in any order in asentence, [but] in addition words from different phrases may be freely scat-tered through a sentence” (Dixon 1980, 442). Look first at the followingsentence:WargamayYibi-yibi ngulmburu-ngguwurrbi-bajun-dubuudi-lganiy malan-gu.child-PL woman-ERGATIVEbig-very-ERGATIVEtake-CONTINUOUS river-to‘The very big woman is taking the children to the creek.’In this sentence, the adjective wurrbi-bajun-du ‘very big’ immediately fol-lows the noun ngulmburu-nggu ‘woman,’ and it also clearly refers to it,because both adjective and noun are marked with the ergative suffix (mor-Australian Languages: Grammatical Overview 193phophonemically-nggu and -du). Because of this, other orders are possible.The same sentence could be said:WargamayNgulmburu-nggu buudi-lganiy malan-gu yibi-yibi wurrbi-bajun-du.woman-ERGATIVEtake-CONTINUOUSriver-to child-PL big-very-ERGATIVE‘The very big woman is taking the children to the creek.’Here the noun subject ngulmburu-nggu ‘woman’ is separated from its mod-ifying adjective wurrbi-bajun-du ‘very big’ by the verb, the allative phrase,and the object.8.3. Possessive ConstructionsOne case suffix added to nouns and pronouns in many Australian languagesis a possessive suffix.Djapudjamarrkurli‘ Milyin-guchildren Milyin-POSS‘Milyin’s children’ngarra-ku-ny dhuway-‘mirringu-nyI-POSS-EMPHATIC ‘my husband’ husband-kinship-EMPHATICMany Australian languages also distinguish between alienable and inalien-able possessive constructions. Alienable possession is marked by thepossessive suffix, as in the examples above, and is used with all possessednouns except parts of wholes. The part-to-whole relationship uses an in-alienable construction in which there is no specific marking. Possessed andpossessor nouns are just put one after the other, in that order.DjapuDharpu-ngal ngarra-n dhandurrung-dhu gatapanga-y.pierce-COMPLETIVEI-OBJECT horn-ERGATIVE buffalo-ERGATIVE‘The buffalo’s horn has pierced me.’Rluku ngarra gara-thi-n.foot I spear-INCHOATIVE-COMPLETIVE‘My foot has been speared.’194 CHAPTER 88.4. Verbs and the Verb ComplexIn the verb system, a major grammatical difference exists between Pama-Nyungan languages and those of the rest of Australia. The Pama-Nyunganlanguages are nonprefixing: They use suffixes exclusively to mark verbalcategories like tense, aspect, and the like. Many of the languages of ArnhemLand and the Kimberleys use both prefixes and suffixes.8.4.1. Verbs in Pama-Nyungan LanguagesThe general structure of the verb in nonprefixing languages is root + (de-rivational suffixes) + inflection. There may be one or more derivationalsuffixes following a root, and there will definitely be an inflectional suffix.Derivational SuffixesSome derivational suffixes convert a transitive verb into an intransitive one,or an intransitive verb into a transitive one. Others mark continuous, habit-ual, and other aspects of the verb, as well as expressing meanings for whichother languages often use adverbs.Below are some examples of a number of derivational suffixes in twolanguages, Pitta-Pitta and Wargamay. In each case, only the verb root (plusderivational suffix) is given; the final hyphen means that a tense-aspect in-flection needs to be added.Pitta-Pittakathi- ‘climb’ kathi-la- ‘put up’mari- ‘get’ mari-la- ‘get for’mirrinta- ‘scratch’ mirrinta-mali- ‘scratch self’ngunytyi- ‘give’ ngunytyi-mali- ‘exchange’thatyi- ‘eat’ thatyi-li- ‘want to eat’thatyi- ‘eat’ thatyi-linga- ‘going to eat’rtinpa- ‘run’ rtinpa-ma ‘run around’thatyi- ‘eat’ thatyi-yarnrta- ‘eat while walking along’Wargamaybaadi- ‘cry’ baadi-ma- ‘cry for’dyinba- ‘spear’ dyinba-ma- ‘spear with’mayngga- ‘tell’ mayngga-ba- ‘tell each other’dyuwara- ‘stand’ dyuwara-bali- ‘be standing’bimbiri- ‘run’ bimbiri-yandi- ‘run away’Australian Languages: Grammatical Overview 195Inflectional SuffixesInflectional suffixes to verbs mark tense (or tense-aspect). They often mark averb as being imperative or as occurring in a subordinate clause. Most Aus-tralian languages, like Latin, have more than one conjugation or conjuga-tional class of verbs. Verbs in the same conjugation take the same suffixes,but verbs in another conjugation take a different set of suffixes, and thereis no semantic explanation for why a particular verb belongs to a particularconjugational class.To illustrate both the idea of conjugations and the kinds of grammaticalfunctions they mark, here are some data from the Atampaya dialect ofUradhi, which has four conjugations (labeled I, II, III, and IV):UradhiI II III IVpast -γal, -kal -n -ñ -npresent -ma -al -ña -øfuture -maŋka -awa -ñaŋka -ŋkaimperative -ði, -ti̪ -ri -yi -γuFor the verb roots wa- ‘burn,’ rima- ‘twirl,’ lapu- ‘blow,’ and ruŋka- ‘cry,’which belong to conjugations I, II, III, and IV, respectively, the verb forms ineach tense are:UradhiI II III IV‘burn’ ‘twirl’ ‘blow’ ‘cry’past wa-γal rima-n lapu-ñ ruŋka-npresent wa-ma rima-al lapu-ña ruŋkafuture wa-maŋka rima-awa lapu-ñaŋka ruŋka-ŋkaimperative wa-ði rima-ri lapu-yi ruŋka-γu8.4.2. Verbs in Prefixing LanguagesVerbs in the prefixing languages of Australia have a quite different, and usu-ally more complex, structure. I take the Wunambal language as an examplehere.In Wunambal, there are two classes of verbs, which I call I and II. Thereappears to be no good semantic explanation as to why any particular verbbelongs to one class rather than the other. In class I verbs, features of thesubject are marked by a prefix, but features of the object are marked by asuffix. In class II verbs, prefixes mark both subject and object.196 CHAPTER 8Class I verbs begin with one of the prefixes marking person of the sub-ject (and, if third person, noun class membership).6Wunambalng- first persong- second personb-, w-, m-, a-, n-, nj- third person, different noun classesThe number of the subject is variously marked: Non-singular is marked by aprefix, but specifically dual and trial subjects take an additional suffix. Forexample:Wunambalgu-r-wanban gu-r-wanban-miyayou-NON:SG-fall you-NON:SG-fall-DUAL‘you (pl.) fall’ ‘you two fall’Some tense-aspects and moods are marked by prefixes, others by suffixes.Wunambalgu-nu-ma gu-ma-yayou-not-come you-come-FUTURE‘you didn’t come’ ‘you will come’For class I verbs, the object’s person and number are indicated by a suffix.Wunambalba-nbun-bun-wuru ba-nbun-bun-nguhe-spear-PRESENT-them he-spear-PRESENT-it‘he spears them’ ‘he spears it’Class II verbs have much the same tense-aspect marking system as classI verbs. The difference lies in the fact that the object’s person and numberare marked by prefixes (underlined in the examples below), which precedethe subject prefixes.Wunambalgu-nga-nbun gu-r-nga-nbunyou:OBJECT-I-hit you:OBJECT-PL-I-hit‘I hit you’ ‘I hit you (pl.)’bu-r-nga-nbun bu-r-nga-ru-nbunhim-PL-I-hit him-PL-I-PL-hit‘I hit them’ ‘we hit them’Both classes of verbs also have a set of derivational suffixes along thelines of those found in nonprefixing languages.Australian Languages: Grammatical Overview 1978.4.3. The Verb ComplexSo much semantic information is contained in the verb itself, especiallybecause of the system of derivational suffixes, that the verb complex in Aus-tralian languages often consists of no more than the fully inflected verb.(Numerous examples of this have been given in preceding sections.) But averb complex may include adverbs or locative demonstratives, as in:GumbaynggirBirmading yilaaming.run:PAST here:PAST‘(She) ran over here.’Mudang giduudaming yaraang yilaa.unable:PAST on:sand:PAST there near:speaker‘(He) was unable to go on the sand here.’8.5. Sentences8.5.1. Nominal SentencesEquational, stative, and locational sentences generally have no verb in Aus-tralian languages. The most common order is subject + predicate.Subject PredicateWajarriPakarli maparnpa.man sorcerer‘The man is a sorcerer.’Warla parnti.egg good‘The egg is good.’Kuwiyari marta-ngka.goanna rock-on‘The goanna is on the rock.’AnguthimriAngu rtalawati.I red‘I am red.’Ma ngu-tyana.man clothes-without‘The man is naked.’198 CHAPTER 88.5.2. Verbal SentencesIn discussing the structure of verbal sentences in Oceanic languages, I intro-duced the distinction between accusative and ergative structures. Most Aus-tralian languages have ergative structures, so that the subject of a transitiveverb (the agent) is marked differently from the subject of an intransitiveverb. The subject of a transitive verb is in the ergative case, that of an intran-sitive verb in the absolutive case. The object of a transitive verb is also in theabsolutive case.Look at the following examples from Wargamay.WargamaySubject/Agent Object VerbMaal gagay.man:ABSOLUTIVE go‘The man is going.’Maal-ndu ganal ngunday.man-ERGATIVE frog:ABSOLUTIVE see‘The man is looking at the frog.’Ganal-ndu maal ngunday.frog-ERGATIVE man:ABSOLUTIVE see‘The frog is looking at the man.’In Wargamay, the absolutive case is unmarked, so the noun maal ‘man’appears as maal when it is the subject of an intransitive verb (as in the firstsentence), and also when it is the object of a transitive verb (as in the thirdone). The ergative case is marked by one of a number of suffixes (cf. 8.2.1,above), one of which is -ndu. When maal ‘man’ or ganal ‘frog’ is the agent(the subject of a transitive verb), as in the last two sentences, it must takethe ergative suffix.In many Australian languages, however, pronouns behave differentlyfrom nouns in marking subjects and objects. Look now at the following set ofsentences:WargamaySubject/Agent Object VerbNgali gagay.we:two go‘We two are going.’Ngali ganal ngunday.we:two frog:ABSOLUTIVE see‘We two are looking at the frog.’Australian Languages: Grammatical Overview 199Ganal-ndu ngali-nya ngunday.frog-ERGATIVE we:two-OBJECT see‘The frog is looking at us two.’These sentences show that, although the noun ganal ‘frog’ behaves erga-tively, the pronoun ngali ‘we two’ behaves accusatively. It has the same form(ngali) when it is subject either of an intransitive or a transitive verb, but adifferent form (ngali-nya) when it is the object of a transitive verb. In thisrespect it behaves exactly like its equivalent we/us in English. Australianlanguages like Wargamay that treat nouns and pronouns differently are re-ferred to as split-ergative languages.7Because Australian languages clearly mark the case or function of nounphrases in a sentence by affixes to the noun phrase (as in Wargamay), byaffixes to the verb, or in both of these ways, it is obvious from looking at anoun phrase what its function in a sentence is. Because of this, “the orderof words and phrases can, in most Australian languages, be extraordinarilyfree; it has little or no grammatical significance. A preferred order can usu-ally be perceived….But there can be unlimited deviation from this preferredorder, dictated partly by discourse considerations (‘topic,’ and the like) andpartly by the whim of the speaker” (Dixon 1980, 441).Where there is a preferred word order, it is usually subject + verb in in-transitive sentences, and agent + object + verb in transitive sentences, asin the Wargamay examples above. Object + agent + verb, however, is just asfrequent. Both versions of this Wargamay sentence are acceptable:WargamayAgent Object VerbGanal-ndu ngali-nya ngunday.frog-ERGATIVE we:two-OBJECT see‘The frog is looking at us two.’Object Agent VerbNgali-nya ganal-ndu ngunday.we:two:OBJECT frog-ERGATIVE see‘The frog is looking at us two.’This is possible because (1) it is clear from the suffix -ndu that ganal-ndu‘frog’ is the agent, and (2) it is also clear from the suffix -nya that ngali-nya‘us two’ is the object.Other phrases are also relatively free as far as their order is concerned,sometimes occurring before the verb and sometimes after it. It is rare,however, for the verb to occur in sentence-initial position. In the followingexamples the verb complex is underlined.200 CHAPTER 8BandjalangMali-yu ngagam-bu yalany-dyu giyay bunybeh-la.the-ERGATIVE dog-ERGATIVE tongue-with salt lick-PRESENT‘The dog is licking salt with its tongue.’YidinyWaguuja-nggu wagal bunja-ng banggaal-da.man-ERGATIVE wife hit-PRESENT axe-with‘The man hit his wife with an axe.’WajarriYamaji-lu kuka marlu ngura-ki kangkarni-manya.man-ERGATIVE meat kangaroo camp-to bring-PRESENT‘A man is bringing kangaroo meat to the camp.’Australian languages do not have a passive construction, but they do havesomething similar. In accusative languages, the original object in an activesentence becomes the subject of the passive sentence, and the original activesubject is either moved to a peripheral phrase (The man chopped down thetree > The tree was chopped down by the man), or deleted altogether (Thetree was chopped down). Some Australian languages have what is called anantipassive. Look first at the following normal ergative Dyirbal sentence:DyirbalObject Agent VerbBala yugu banggul yara-nggu gunba-n.it tree he:ERGATIVE man:ERGATIVE cut-PAST‘The man was cutting the tree.’In the antipassive, the agent (banggul yara-nggu ‘the man’) becomes thesubject of what is now an intransitive verb, and the object (bala yugu ‘thetree’) becomes a peripheral phrase—in this case, a dative phrase. The verbis also marked differently. Here is the antipassive form of the sentenceabove:DyirbalSubject Verb DativeBayi yara gunbal-nga-nyu bagu yugu-gu.he man cut-ANTIPASSIVE-PAST it:DATIVE tree-DATIVE‘The man was cutting the tree.’Note that the translations of the two sentences are the same. Dixon saysthat, in Dyirbal at least, “a regular transitive sentence and its antipassivecorrespondent … have the same basic meaning and differ only in emphasis,Australian Languages: Grammatical Overview 201rather like an active and its corresponding passive in English” (Dixon 1980,449). Like the peripheral agent in a passive sentence, the peripheral dativephrase in an antipassive sentence can be deleted.DyirbalSubject VerbBayi yara gunbal-nga-nyu.he man cut-ANTIPASSIVE-PAST‘The man was cutting.’A small group of languages, mainly in Arnhem Land, the Pilbara region,and the Kimberleys in the northwest of the continent, offer exceptions tothese generalizations. They are accusative, not ergative, in structure; thepreferred order is frequently SVO (though OVS is also common); and somehave a passive. Lardil illustrates these languages’ structure.LardilSubject Verb Object/OtherPirngen rikur.woman cry‘The woman is crying.’Pirngen rnethakun rtang-an.woman hit man-OBJECT‘The woman hit the man.’Rtangka rnethakun pirngen-in.man hit woman-OBJECT‘The man hit the woman.’Rtangka rneyikun pirngen-in.man hit:PASSIVE woman-OBJECT‘The man was hit by the woman.’But these languages are in the minority, and most Australian languages ad-here to the ergative model.202 CHAPTER 8PART THREEThe Socialand Cultural ContextCHAPTER9Languages in ContactLanguages are normally not spoken in totally isolated communities. Peoplespeaking one language usually come into contact, either occasionally or ona more regular basis, with speakers of one or more other languages, and thesmaller the society that speaks a particular language, the greater is the like-lihood of their being in contact with outsiders. This social contact very oftenhas both major and minor linguistic effects.9.1. The Social Context of Language Contact9.1.1. Peaceful Contact between Settled SocietiesOne common kind of social contact between different language communi-ties in the Pacific is that between relatively equal and settled societies.In many parts of the region, for example, marriage regulations require aman to marry a woman from outside his own clan and community. Thispractice of exogamy often means that husband and wife speak differentlanguages. Where a number of men in the same village choose wives fromthe same outside community, a foreign-language enclave will form, at leasttemporarily, in the village. Since women have the primary responsibility forlooking after younger children, those children will often grow up hearingtwo languages spoken in the home. The women may not much influencethe way the men speak, but they do influence how their children speak.These children often end up incorporating some aspects of their mothers’language into their own.A second kind of peaceful contact involves regular trade. There are nu-merous cases in the Pacific where, for example, people of a coastal village205trade with inland villagers—the former supplying fish and other marine pro-duce, the latter vegetables and other non-maritime commodities. Such asituation occurred in Central Papua, where the coastal Motu traded with theinland Koita and Koiari people. Many words for maritime concepts in Koitaare originally Motu words, while the Motu have taken into their languageKoita words for non-maritime things.9.1.2. Peaceful Contact Involving TravelNot all trade takes place between sedentary peoples; it may also involvesome or all of the parties traveling considerable distances. In the westernPacific, for example, anthropologists have documented such large-scaletrading complexes as the hiri of the Gulf of Papua, the kula of the islands ofthe Milne Bay area, and the moka of the highlands of Papua New Guinea. Agreat deal of long-distance trade in all kinds of commodities seems to haveoccurred in nearly every part of Australia and the Pacific.Such trading expeditions, of course, bring people speaking different lan-guages together, at least for short periods, and also often bring new thingsand ideas into at least one of the societies involved. In such cases, borrow-ing or copying often takes place. That is, the society into which somethingnew is introduced often takes the word for that thing from the language ofthose introducing it. This is how English acquired such words as alcohol,curry, tomato, pasta, tapioca, sago, and hundreds of others.Migration—either temporary or permanent—also brings people speak-ing different languages together. Temporary migration, at least in the Pa-cific, generally means that people leave their home area to work in townsor on plantations or ships for a period of time and then return home, oftenbringing with them new things and ideas—along with the words for them insome other language. Permanent migration involves long-term settlementin a new area, often because of overcrowding or sociopolitical problems athome, or because of natural disasters like volcanic eruptions. A smallishcommunity speaking one language may live in the middle of a larger com-munity speaking a different language, and the potential exists for each lan-guage to influence the other.The whole of the Pacific region was settled from its western extremes,and Australia was probably settled from the north. Some of these migrantswould have been the first people to settle a particular area, while otherswould have come into contact with descendants of the original settlers.In more recent times, not only have rural people moved into urban areas,but whole communities have been relocated: Mission stations all over theregion, government settlements in Australia, and the resettlement of the Ba-206 CHAPTER 9nabans on Rabi Island in Fiji represent three such cases. There have alsobeen significant movements of populations from Micronesia and Polynesiainto the United States and New Zealand (see chapter 2). All of these situa-tions bring languages into contact, with various degrees of closeness.9.1.3. Conquest, Colonization, and ConversionPolitico-military takeovers by one society of another represent a less peace-ful kind of social and linguistic contact. Once again, the Pacific aboundsin examples, of which the Tongan domination of the Lau group in Fiji andthe warlike Orokaiva and Mailu in Papua New Guinea, who enslaved con-quered peoples, are three. As with the Norman conquest of England athousand years ago, these takeovers produced dramatic changes in lan-guage, as the conquered peoples were forced to learn their conquerors’language to survive.European and Asian colonization of Australia and the Pacific rep-resents a more recent, but thoroughgoing, example of politico-militaryconquest. The Spanish, Dutch, Germans, French, and Japanese, as well asEnglish speakers from a number of nations, have all made incursions intothe region over the last four centuries, French and English currently beingthe dominant metropolitan languages in the Pacific. These outsiders intro-duced new forms of government and education, brought in a vast numberof new technological items and social customs, and were responsible forthe establishment of plantations and urban centers. English and Frenchhave been the major languages of government, education, and inter- andintraregional communication, and are looked on in many parts of the Pa-cific as the prestige languages. Because of both the attitudes toward thesetwo European languages and the new concepts introduced by Europeans,English and French have had a considerable influence on most Pacific lan-guages.The founding of missions preceded colonization in some cases, and fol-lowed it in others. This process could be viewed as a conquest of a differentkind—the displacement of traditional religious systems in favor of westernChristian beliefs and religious practices, as missionaries aimed for a con-quest of the souls and minds of aboriginal Australians and Pacific Islanders.The establishment of churches and schools, as well as the more or less suc-cessful abolition of some traditional customs, resulted in the introduction ofnew words for new concepts—in some cases even new ways of speaking, asformal prayers and hymns were developed.In multilingual Melanesia particularly, missions were responsible forsetting up certain vernaculars as church languages, for example, Tolai,Languages in Contact 207Gedaged, Yabêm, Kâte, Dobuan, Suau, and Wedau in Papua New Guinea,Roviana in Solomon Islands, and Mota in Vanuatu. Faced with a multiplicityof languages in a relatively small area, missionaries often chose one lan-guage as the language of the mission, requiring speakers of neighboringand usually related languages to use the chosen language in religious con-texts. This practice has helped create a complex situation in which bothEuropean and Pacific church languages influence other languages in theregion.9.2. The Linguistic Effects of Contact9.2.1. Lexical ChangeVirtually all languages borrow or copy words from other languages. Englishis an excellent example, as it has taken in thousands of words from verydiverse sources. In the Pacific, the influence of both local and intrusive lan-guages on other Pacific languages has led to the incorporation of new wordsinto those languages.Speakers of the non-Polynesian languages of Southern Vanuatu, whohave probably been in the area for well over two thousand years, came intocontact with speakers of the Polynesian language West Futuna about a thou-sand years ago. These immigrant Polynesians introduced their neighbors tokava-drinking and refined their maritime skills, especially those involvingdeep-sea fishing. The words below are West Futuna loans into Kwamera, aTanna language, suitably adapted to Kwamera’s phonological and grammat-ical structure (Lynch 1994, 1996):Kwamera Loans from West FutunaKava terminologyKwamera West Futunanɨkava ‘kava’ kavatapuga ‘chief’s kava’ tapugatamafa ‘ritual spitting of kava’ taumafanafunu ‘food eaten after drinking kava’ fonoakona ‘drunk’ konataporoka ‘kind of canoe-shapedkava bowl’ta poruku ‘kind of canoe’nafáu ‘kava strainer’ fao ‘coconut branchused as a kavastrainer’208 CHAPTER 9Maritime terminologyKwamera West Futunatira ‘mast’ shiranɨkiatu ‘outrigger boom’ kiatokwan-metau ‘fishhook’ metaotakwarau ‘prevailing wind’ tokorautafra ‘whale’ taforatataua ‘barracuda’ tataotagarua ‘sea snake’ tagaroaTrukese provides a good example of the influence of succeeding colonialpowers. Much of western and central Micronesia was under Spanish controlfrom the late seventeenth century until the Spanish-American War in 1898,when Guam was ceded to the United States, and the rest of Spain’s posses-sions went to Germany, which had already colonized the Marshall Islands tothe east. Japan succeeded Germany at the outbreak of World War I, and theUnited States succeeded Japan at the end of World War II. The influence ofeach of these colonial languages can be seen in borrowed words in Trukese(Goodenough and Sugita 1980):Trukeseantiyos ‘fishing goggles’ < Spanish anteojoskoopwure ‘corrugated iron’ < Spanish cobre ‘copper’paatere ‘priest’ < Spanish padrekiiwúfer ‘suitcase’ < German Kofferkkumi ‘rubber’ < German Gummimaak ‘money’ < German Mark (monetary unit)kooyeng ‘playground’ < Japanese kōen ‘park’osiroy ‘baby powder’ < Japanese oshiroiramúne ‘marbles’ < Japanese ramuneminiyon ‘million’ < English millionpinakpwoot ‘blackboard’ < English blackboardsekit ‘jacket’ < English jacketSamoan is a good example of missionary influence on a language. Manynew words came into it from the biblical languages Greek, Latin, and He-brew:Samoanperitome ‘circumcise’ < Greek peritomeagelu ‘angel’ < Greek angelosLanguages in Contact 209ti‘āpolo ‘devil’ < Greek diabolossātauro ‘cross’ < Greek stauros‘aila ‘deer, gazelle’ < Hebrew ‘ayyal‘oreva ‘vulture’ < Hebrew ‘orebh ‘raven’‘urosa ‘bear’ < Latin ursus9.2.2. Semantic ChangeContact may also bring about changes in the meanings of existing wordsin a language. This may involve expanding the meaning of a word to referto something newly introduced. For example, Fijian dakai originally meant‘bow (for shooting),’ and Lenakel kopwiel means ‘stone,’ but both have takenon the additional meaning ‘gun, rifle.’ In Ponapean, sakau originally referredonly to kava, but now it refers to any intoxicating beverage. Nting meant ‘totattoo’ in Ponapean but now also means ‘to write.’Semantic change may also involve narrowing the meaning of a word.Lenakel niko originally meant both ‘canoe’ and ‘moiety’ (since it was be-lieved that the first members of the two moieties arrived on the island in twodifferent canoes). But the form kenu (from English via Bislama) is now thecommon word for ‘canoe’ and for most Lenakel speakers, niko now meansonly ‘moiety.’9.2.3. Phonological ChangeWhen a language takes in words from another language, it often adaptsthem to its own phonology. The English words restaurant, miracle, prince,royal, and court, for example, all derive from French, but they are notpronounced as the French pronounce them: They have been adapted toEnglish phonological patterns. Sometimes, however, the copying of wordsfrom one language into another may bring about a change in the phonolog-ical system of the borrowing language, either through the introduction of atotally new sound, or through the reorganization of the existing sounds ina language.Dyirbal, for example, is typical of many Australian languages, in thatthe phoneme /l/ is not permitted at the beginning of words. However, theintroduction of words like lada ‘ladder’ and laymun ‘lemon’ from English hasbrought about a change in the phonological structure of Dyirbal, which nowpermits word-initial /l/.Motu originally had no contrast between the sounds [t] and [s]: [s] oc-curred before [i] and [e], while [t] occurred before other vowels. Englishwords copied into Motu originally fit this pattern.1210 CHAPTER 9Motu[sesi] ‘shirt’[makesi] ‘market’[sini] ‘tin’[tupu] ‘soup’[topu] ‘soap’Due to the persistent influence of English, however, younger generationsnow pronounce these words as follows:Motu[seti] ‘shirt’[maketi] ‘market’[tini] ‘tin’[supu] ‘soup’[sopu] ‘soap’What has happened here is that the distribution of [s] and [t] has changed,and there is now contrast between them.In addition to changing the distribution of existing sounds in a language,contact may also lead to the introduction of a new sound. Samoan, for exam-ple, originally had an l but no r. As the result of contact with other languages,however a number of words with r have been introduced:Samoan‘Aperila ‘April’ < English‘areto ‘bread’ < Greek artos‘ario ‘silver’ < Tahitian ariofaresaio ‘pharisee’ < Greek farisaiosmisionare ‘missionary’ < English‘oreva ‘vulture’ < Hebrew ‘orebh ‘raven’rosa ‘rose’ < Englishteropika ‘tropics’ < English‘urosa ‘bear’ < Latin ursus9.2.4. Grammatical ChangeFinally, contact between languages may also bring about changes in gram-matical structure. Polynesian Triangle languages are normally verb-initial(see chapter 6):Languages in Contact 211TahitianVerb Subject Object‘Ua tāpū te vahine ‘i te vahie.PAST cut the woman OBJECT the wood‘The woman cut the wood.’Polynesian Outlier languages, however, are much more flexible, allowingboth VSO and SVO orders, with SVO probably being more common:NukuoroVerb Subject ObjectNe kake ia te nui.PAST climb he the coconut‘He climbed the coconut.’Subject Verb ObjectIa ne kake te nui.he PAST climb the coconut‘He climbed the coconut.’This has almost certainly come about at least in part from contact withneighboring non-Polynesian languages, which are almost exclusively SVO.A similar change seems to have occurred on the mainland of NewGuinea. The original Oceanic languages spoken there almost certainly hadverb + object order (whether SVO or VOS is a matter of some discussion,but is irrelevant here). Then they came into contact with Papuan speakers,for whom SOV was the basic order, and this contact led to a change in theOceanic languages’ word order, from SVO (or VOS) to SOV. (Some examplesof languages with this order were given in chapter 6.)Let us look at one more example, this time from the Papuan language Yi-mas:The formation of a negative verb from a positive one in Yimas is acomplicated affair, involving alteration of the form and the positionof certain verbal affixes. Many younger speakers do not know thismethod of negation, but negate a verb by merely placing a particle inabefore it. This is clearly a borrowing from Tok Pisin i no [= PREDICATEMARKER + NEGATIVE], but these speakers were totally unaware of its ori-gin, regarding it as a native Yimas word until I pointed out its similarityto the Tok Pisin negative. (Foley 1986, 40)212 CHAPTER 99.3. Three Case StudiesDirect and indirect inheritance of vocabulary in Rotuman, borrowing as aresult of word taboo in Australia, and contact between Austronesian andPapuan languages in northwest New Britain are three cases illustrating theeffects of language contact.9.3.1. RotumanThe Rotuman vowel system has undergone some interesting developments(chapter 5). But Rotuman is also a language where contact has led to a com-plex situation for the historical-comparative linguist.Rotuman words exhibit two sets of correspondences with proto-forms…. I propose to speak of directly [set I] and indirectly inheritedwords [set II] rather than inherited and loan words in order to em-phasize that all of the words with etymologies were once part of alanguage ancestral to Rotuman in the comparativist’s sense. Some ofthem however re-entered Rotuman from a collateral related languageafter undergoing changes other than those which affected forms whichhad remained continuously in the Rotuman line. (Biggs 1965,389–390)I am concerned here exclusively with the development of some of the conso-nants in Rotuman.What appears to have happened in Rotuman is this. The original settlerswould have brought with them a version of Proto Central Pacific (PCP). Overtime, some of the consonants changed their pronunciation, with the resultthat the following regular developments can be identified (Biggs’ directly in-herited, or Set I, correspondences).2PCP *v *p,*b *t *d *r *dr *l *k *g *ʔRotuman (Set I) h p f t r t l ʔ k øSome examples of this set of sound correspondences are given below:Proto Central Pacific Rotuman (SetI)*vitu ‘seven’ hifu*kuli ‘skin’ ʔuli*ʔatu ‘line, row’ afu*viri ‘plait’ hiriSubsequent to the original settlement of Rotuma, there seem to havebeen at least two later “invasions” by people speaking languages differentLanguages in Contact 213from but related to pre-Rotuman. These invasions resulted in fairly large-scale borrowings of vocabulary. Biggs (1965, 411) sums up the situation asfollows: “It is clear that Rotuman has borrowed extensively from a relatedlanguage or languages…. Rotuman traditions are definite in associating atleast two occupations of their island with the Samoa-Tonga area, particu-larly the islands of Savaiʔi [in Samoa] and Niuafoʔou [in Tonga].” The lan-guages of the invaders had made somewhat different changes to the ProtoCentral Papuan consonant inventory. Of Biggs’ corpus of Rotuman wordswith known etymologies, 38 percent belong to Set I (as above), but 29 per-cent belong rather to the set of indirectly inherited correspondences (Set II),which are given below along with Set I for comparison.3PCP *v *p,*b *t *d *r *dr *l *k *g *ʔRotuman (Set I) h p f t r t l ʔ k øRotuman (Set II) f p t t r,ø r r k k ʔHere are some examples of words containing Set II correspondences;in each case, the expected, but non-occurring, Set I form is given as well(marked with a double asterisk).Proto Central Pacific Rotuman (Set II)*viti ‘spring up’ fiti (expected Set I **hifi)*tuki ‘pound’ tuki (expected Set I **fuʔi)*kolo ‘desire’ koro (expected Set I **ʔolo)*robe ‘overhang’ ope (expected Set I **rope)In some cases the same word has come into the language twice, first di-rectly (Set I) and later indirectly (Set II), though with slight differences inmeaning. For example:PCP RotumanSet I Set II*kuli ‘skin’ ʔuli ‘skin’ kiria ‘leprosy’*vidi ‘jump, spring’ hiti ‘start with surprise’ fiti ‘jump’*toka ‘come ashore’ foʔa ‘come ashore’ toka ‘settle down’9.3.2. Word Taboo in AustraliaAustralian languages—as well as many others in the Pacific—are character-ized by a system of word taboo. This can take a number of forms: One verycommon one is that “a person’s name cannot be spoken for some time af-ter his death. What is more, any normal vocabulary item—noun, adjective,verb etc.—that is similar in form to the banned name must also be tabooed”(Dixon 1980, 28). Imagine if this were to apply in English: When someone214 CHAPTER 9called Bill dies, we could not use the word bill (meaning either ‘account’ or‘beak of a bird’), nor probably could we use phonologically similar words likebuild, billet, billy, and perhaps pill. We would have to find new words… atleast for a time.In Australia, the tabooed word is sometimes replaced by a synonym ornear synonym from within the language. In our imaginary example above,bill could then be replaced by (1) check or account and (2) beak. “But moreoften a new word will be borrowed from the language of a neighboring tribe”(Dixon 1980, 28). Examples:1. “In 1975 a man named Djäyila died at Yirrkala and as a result thecommon verb djäl- ‘to want, to be desirous of was proscribed andreplaced by d̪uktu̪k-, probably a verb from another Yolŋu dialectthat did have this set of meanings” (Dixon 1980, 28).2. “In 1977 a Djapu man named Djewiny died and the loanword dhe‘tea’ was at once tabooed at Yirrkala; another loanword gopi ‘cof-fee’ had its meaning extended also to cover ‘tea’ (little coffee is infact drunk at Yirrkala; if disambiguation is necessary it can be re-ferred to as gopi yuwalk ‘real coffee’)” (Dixon 1980, 122).9.3.3. Northwest New BritainIn a series of studies, Thurston (1982, 1987, 1992) has documented the ef-fects of language contact among a number of languages spoken in the north-west of New Britain. The area Thurston discusses is currently occupied by anumber of Oceanic languages (important to this discussion are the coastallanguages Kabana, Amara, Kove, and Lusi), and the Papuan language Anêm.“The Anêm are now completely surrounded by speakers of Austronesian lan-guages…. Evidence suggests that Anêm is the sole surviving member of anon-Austronesian language family that once extended over much of whatis now West New Britain Province. West of the Willaumez Peninsula, all ofthese languages, except Anêm, have been replaced by Austronesian lan-guages which retain features of a non-Austronesian substratum” (Thurston1992, 125).Contact in this area between speakers of different languages, related andunrelated, has been going on for a long time, with quite far-reaching effects:Generations of marriage and trade across linguistic boundaries, thelongstanding tradition of regional multilingualism, and the spread oflanguages by way of language shift have all conspired to produceregional similarity in phonology, syntax, semantics, social structure,economy, cosmology and values…. Aside from lexical form, the speak-Languages in Contact 215ers of Austronesian languages in northwestern New Britain sharemuch more with the Anêm than they do with speakers of distant Aus-tronesian languages that are lexically more similar. (Thurston 1992,125)There has been a large amount of lexical copying in both directions be-tween the Oceanic languages and Anêm, but of more interest are changesin grammar as a result of this prolonged contact. Some of the grammaticalfeatures of Lusi (and some of the other Oceanic languages in the area) thatseem to have been introduced from Anêm or its extinct relatives are de-scribed below.1. The reciprocal is marked by a suffix to the verb, rather than by a pre-fix, as is widespread in Oceanic languages (see 6.4.6 above).LusiTi-rau-nga-ri.they-hit-RECIPROCAL-them‘They fought each other.’AnêmI-pəl-ak.they-hit-RECIPROCAL‘They fought each other.’2. Tense/aspect, negation, and similar categories are marked at the endof the verb phrase, rather than by prefixes or preverbal particles, asis common in Oceanic languages (see 6.4.2 above).LusiI-rau γaea mao.he-hit pig not‘He didn’t kill a pig.’I-la pa Rabaul γasili.he-go to Rabaul COMPLETIVE‘He has (already) gone to Rabaul.’AnêmU-b-ɨ aba mantu.he-kill-it Pig not‘He didn’t kill a pig.’U-k axɨ Rabaul bizang.he-go to Rabaul COMPLETIVE‘He has (already) gone to Rabaul.’216 CHAPTER 93. Lusi has two postpositions, aea purposive and iai locative, as wellas a handful of prepositions. Oceanic languages with postpositionstend to be restricted to the New Guinea mainland. Although Anêmdoes not have postpositions, Thurston suggests that Lusi probablyacquired its postpositions as a result of contact with one of the nowextinct Papuan languages of the area.The contact has not been one way, however. An inclusive/exclusive dis-tinction in the first person is almost universal in Oceanic languages, but isexceedingly rare among Papuan languages (see 7.1 above). Anêm shows thisdistinction in possessive suffixes (though not in other pronominal forms),and it also has the inalienable/edible/neutral contrast in possessive con-structions, typical of western Oceanic languages, but nonexistent in Papuanlanguages (Thurston 1987, 91). The long-term intimate contact between lan-guages in this area has clearly produced major changes in the structure ofthese languages.9.3.4. “Mixed” Languages?The Anêm-Lusi situation just described gives rise to the following question:How much can Language A be influenced by Language B and still remainLanguage A? Or in different words, can a language be truly “mixed,” notderiving from just one ancestor, but in a sense from two? There are numer-ous theoretical and philosophical questions involved here, and they havegenerated considerable debate—not to mention heat and acrimony—in thediscussion of certain languages in the Pacific, especially in Melanesia.4I do not wish to go into these philosophical and theoretical questionshere. There are, however, a number of cases where the influence of one ormore languages on another has led different reputable linguists to classifylanguages differently. To take some extreme examples, the following havebeen classified as Papuan by some linguists and as Austronesian by others:Maisin in the Oro Province of Papua New Guinea; Magori and its neighbor-ing moribund relatives on the south coast of Papua; the languages of SantaCruz and the Reef Islands in Solomon Islands; and the languages of Ane-ityum, New Caledonia, and the Loyalty Islands.In all except the Reefs-Santa Cruz situation, the general view today is thatthe languages involved are originally Austronesian. Maisin and Magori havebeen very heavily influenced by Papuan languages, whereas Aneityum andthe New Caledonian languages are probably so aberrant in their phonologi-cal and grammatical histories that they happen not to look very Austronesian.The Reefs-Santa Cruz languages, however, were probably originally Papuanlanguages that have been very heavily influenced by Austronesian languages.Languages in Contact 217These decisions have been reached by ignoring vocabulary for the most partand looking instead at the core of the languages’ grammatical systems.Even languages like these are not truly mixed, in the sense of having twoco-equal ancestors. They are, however, cases where the influence of anotherlanguage has been so strong as to make genetic affiliation very difficult todetermine.9.4. Historical ImplicationsIn chapter 1, I discussed the way in which historical inferences can be drawnfrom an examination of the relationships between languages. Borrowing ofvocabulary, phonology, and grammar does not constitute genetic relation-ship: The fact that the Fijian words sitoa and sitaba have been copied fromEnglish “store” and “stamp” does not mean that Fijian is related to English.But although the relationship between Fijian and English is not a ge-netic one, there is still a historical connection between them. An examina-tion of English words copied into Fijian, for example, provides us with in-formation of a cultural-historical nature. They indicate what kinds of thingswere introduced to Fijian society and culture by English colonials, mission-aries, and settlers, and what kinds of changes took place in Fijian societyand culture as a result of external influence.Let us go back to the example of Kwamera loans from West Futuna toillustrate this in a bit more detail. (Recall that this copying took place longbefore Europeans came to the area.) The following words relating to kavaand kava-drinking were borrowed by Kwamera:Kwameranɨkava ‘kava’tapuga ‘chief’s kava’tamafa ‘ritual spitting of kava’nafunu ‘food eaten after drinking kava’akona ‘drunk’taporoka ‘kind of canoe-shaped kava bowl’nafáu ‘kava strainer’Clearly, this indicates a significant change in Kwamera culture. This list ofwords represents not just the random borrowing of a few items, but the tak-ing over of a whole cultural complex—the preparation and drinking of kava,with its attendant rituals and behaviors (Lynch 1996).Nor is this the end of the story of cultural contact between the Polyne-sian and non-Polynesian societies of southern Vanuatu. The non-Polynesian218 CHAPTER 9languages have also borrowed heavily from Futuna maritime vocabulary,especially where long-distance voyaging or deep-sea fishing is concerned(Lynch 1994). Futuna, on the other hand, has borrowed a number of wordsfor varieties of yam, taro, and breadfruit from their more horticulturallyinclined non-Polynesian neighbors. And perhaps most interesting of all, Fu-tuna speakers appear to have been responsible for introducing a moietysystem to neighboring Tanna. This system fell into desuetude on Futuna, butwas reintroduced … by the Tannese (Lynch and Fakamuria 1994)! An exam-ination of borrowed items in a language can give us significant informationabout the nature of contact-induced cultural change. The influence of non-Pacific languages on those of the Pacific has been considerable over the pastcouple of centuries or so, but Pacific Islanders have been moving around theregion for thousands of years, and contact between languages has been partof the linguistic scene in the Pacific for the whole period.Languages in Contact 219CHAPTER10Pidgins, Creoles, and KoinesContact may have quite drastic effects on a language. But it may also lead tothe creation of totally new languages, which in some senses at least qualifyas “mixed” languages. Three of these new languages are, in terms of num-ber of speakers, among the largest languages spoken in the Pacific today(although not all speakers of any of these languages speak them as theirmother tongue). I use the term Melanesian Pidgin as a cover term for thethree languages/dialects known as Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea, Pijin inSolomon Islands, and Bislama in Vanuatu, spoken in all by perhaps three mil-lion people.1 Hiri Motu is spoken in Papua New Guinea by about a quarter ofa million people. And Fiji Hindi, one of the two major languages of Fiji, hasmore than 300,000 speakers. This chapter looks at these three languagesand at similar languages in various parts of the Pacific.10.1. Pidginization, Creolization, and KoineizationHow do languages like Melanesian Pidgin develop? What is it about certainkinds of contact situations that gives rise to new languages?The term pidgin or pidgin language refers to a language that developsin a multilingual contact situation, where the contact between the differentgroups is prolonged but relatively restricted. Trade relationships, planta-tions, and ships’ companies are typical breeding grounds for such lan-guages, and in situations like these the process of pidginization begins totake place. All speakers of a pidgin language use it as a second language, tocommunicate with speakers of other languages when there is no other com-mon language. In comparison with the first languages of its speakers, a pid-220gin is usually simplified in pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary. In manycases, especially in colonial situations, the vocabulary of the pidgin is drawnmainly from the politically dominant (i.e., colonial) language, whereas thegrammar is often based on the language(s) of the colonized people.Urbanization and marriage between people from different linguisticbackgrounds can turn a pidgin into people’s first language, especially whenthose people are the children of such mixed marriages growing up in towns.In these cases, the pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary of the originalpidgin language tends to expand rapidly and considerably. The languagebecomes more complex because it is being used for all the communicativepurposes of a “normal” language. This process of expansion is referred toas creolization. A creole, or a creole language, is a language that has de-veloped from a pidgin, but which is now the first language of many of itsspeakers.A different kind of mixing—what is known as dialect mixing—producesa different kind of language. When people speaking different geographicaldialects of a language are relocated and thrown together in a new commu-nity, what is known as a koine often develops, through a process known askoineization. Each dialect contributes some elements, and the resultantkoine is a blend of the original dialects. While Melanesian Pidgin and HiriMotu are the result of the processes of pidginization and creolization, FijiHindi is a koine.210.2. Melanesian PidginMelanesian Pidgin and various Australian creoles are referred to as“English-based” or “English-lexifier” creoles. This means simply that thebulk of their vocabulary is derived from English, though some vocabulary,and much of the grammar, may have different origins. (This does not meanthat these languages are “broken English” or “baby-talk” languages; afterall, although a very significant proportion of the vocabulary of Englishcomes from Romance languages like Latin and French, we don’t considerEnglish to be “broken Romance”!)10.2.1. Historical BackgroundThe late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw the first prolongedand continuous contact between people living in the Pacific and outsiders. Inthe Pacific Islands, European explorers and missionaries were followed bywhalers, sandalwooders, pearlers, bêche-de-mer3 fishermen, and traders,all of whom had regular, if sporadic, contact with at least some people inPidgins, Creoles, and Koines 221some Pacific islands. In Australia and New Zealand, of course, contact wasmore intense in many areas as a result of European settlement. This contactintensified during the nineteenth century as labor recruiters began recruit-ing Pacific Islanders to work on plantations in various parts of the region,especially Samoa, Fiji, and Queensland. In Queensland there was also somecontact between Pacific Islanders and aboriginal Australians, who them-selves were often moved from their tribal homelands into situations wherethey lived and worked with speakers of other languages.In all of these situations, numerous fairly unstable pidgins developed.In Melanesia and parts of Australia, these unstable pidgins developed intorelatively stable languages as people who had learned different varietiesin different parts of the Pacific came into contact. The contact betweenEuropeans, mainly English speakers, Pacific Islanders (almost exclusivelyspeakers of Oceanic languages), and aboriginal Australians was responsiblefor the very significant English input into the vocabulary of these creoles.But it was not just this contact that was significant in the development ofMelanesian Pidgin. The contact between Pacific Islanders from different lin-guistic backgrounds was important from the beginning, became even moreso later on, and was probably responsible for the Austronesian contributionto the grammar of Melanesian Pidgin.By the latter part of the nineteenth century, English-based pidgins werespoken, in various forms and with various levels of sophistication, in almostthe whole of the Pacific Basin: from New Guinea to Pitcairn Island, and fromthe Marshalls and Hawai‘i to New Caledonia and New Zealand. In most ofthese places, however, the pidgins died out.4 In some places, like New Cale-donia and the British colony of Papua (the southern half of what is now PapuaNew Guinea), this was as a result of government policy. The governmentswere strongly opposed to a “bastard” form of English being used, thoughpossibly for different reasons (the British in Papua because they saw it as a“bastard” language, the French probably because they saw it as a form ofEnglish!). In other places, like most of the countries of Polynesia, the pidginsimply became unnecessary as people from other parts of the Pacific stoppedbeing recruited to work on plantations in these countries, and as educationallevels improved. In Samoa, for example, the cessation of labor recruiting andthe establishment of schools meant that pidgin English was no longer needed.Samoan was the language of communication between Samoans, while firstGerman and then English were used for communicating with foreigners.The situation in Melanesia and Australia was very different. First, thecountries are geographically larger and linguistically more diverse thanthose of Polynesia and Micronesia, and it was more difficult for governmentsto exercise strong control over language use. Second, although recruitment222 CHAPTER 10of Melanesian laborers to overseas plantations stopped soon after 1900, thissimply meant that laborers began moving around their own country work-ing on newly established plantations, frequently outside their own languagecommunities. Any plantation might have a labor force drawn from a largenumber of different language groups. Third, as a result of this internal mo-bility, men often married women who spoke a different language, and thepidgin would have been the only language used in the home. Finally, theestablishment of urban centers attracted people speaking a multiplicity oflanguages from far and wide.Social conditions in Melanesia and in parts of Australia, therefore, wereripe not just for the preservation and retention of the pidgin but also forits development into a creole. Children grew up speaking it as their firstlanguage; adults who had not returned to their traditional homes for manyyears found that they were using the pidgin/creole more and more, and theirown language less and less. As the twentieth century progressed, Melane-sian Pidgin became the language of the people in what were to become theindependent states of Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu.Australian creoles and varieties of English spoken by Aboriginal people ac-quired similar importance.10.2.2. Different HistoriesThe Melanesian Pidgin spoken by Papua New Guineans, Solomon Islanders,and ni-Vanuatu is recognizably the same language—with recognizable dif-ferences between how it is spoken in each of these three countries. Thefollowing examples show both the similarities and the differences betweenthese three varieties:Tok PisinDispela pikinini i sindaun i stap na kaikai kiau wantaim kek.PijinDesfala pikinini i sidaon an kaekae eg weitim kek.BislamaPikinini ya i stap staon mo kakae eg wetem gato.‘This child is sitting down and eating eggs and cake.’Where do these kinds of differences come from? To answer this question, weneed to look more closely at the historical development of this language.Men from Vanuatu were first recruited to work on plantations inQueensland and Fiji in the 1860s, and a little later men from the Solomon Is-Pidgins, Creoles, and Koines 223lands were recruited for the same work, so there was considerable contactbetween ni-Vanuatu and Solomon Islanders at this time. Only a few peoplefrom this part of the Pacific, however, were recruited to work in Samoa, andthen only for a short time.Men from the German colony of New Guinea, however, did not go toQueensland or to Fiji, which were British colonies. Rather, starting in the1880s, they went to work on the plantations in Samoa, then a Germancolony. For a few years they were in contact with ni-Vanuatu and SolomonIslanders, from whom they would have learned the basics of Melanesian Pid-gin, but for the next few decades, the New Guinea version of MelanesianPidgin, known today as Tok Pisin, developed in isolation both from othervarieties of the language and from English. The German and Samoan lan-guages contributed some words to early Tok Pisin, although many of thesehave disappeared. The major contributing languages (other than English)have been Tolai (cf. kiau ‘egg’ in the example above) and other Austronesianlanguages of New Britain and New Ireland, since Rabaul (where Tolai is spo-ken) was the headquarters of German New Guinea, and the place wheremost of the laborers were recruited from or returned to.Pijin and Bislama did not undergo any of these influences. However, be-cause the French jointly ruled the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) with theBritish for most of the twentieth century, Bislama has incorporated a num-ber of words of French origin (like gato ‘cake’ in the example above). It hasalso taken in quite a few words from local languages. Neither French (forobvious reasons) nor local languages (for less obvious reasons) have madeany significant contribution to Pijin in Solomon Islands, however. The differ-ent colonial histories of each country, along with different labor-recruitmentpatterns, meant that there were significant differences in the contact situa-tions while each version of the language was developing.10.2.3. The Structure of Melanesian PidginIn recent years, the influence of English on Melanesian Pidgin has becomeeven more dominant than in the past, not only in terms of vocabulary, but tosome extent also in pronunciation and grammar as well. At the same time,there is considerably more contact today between Melanesians from differ-ent countries, and interdialectal influence is also beginning to be seen. Oneof the features of a language undergoing creolization is that different peo-ple speak it with different degrees of fluency. For some people, it is theirfirst language. For others, it is very much a second language, and the waythey speak it is often influenced by their first language. Those who havebeen educated in English often incorporate words and other linguistic fea-224 CHAPTER 10tures from English into their Pidgin, while less educated speakers do thismuch less frequently. And although all languages are changing, languageslike Melanesian Pidgin are changing much faster than others.Hence, it is often difficult to say exactly what is or is not “in” a languagelike Melanesian Pidgin. I try to describe the variety spoken by fluent but nothighly educated speakers, but comment from time to time on common vari-ations from these patterns.Sound SystemMelanesian Pidgin has the same five-vowel system as is found in the major-ity of the languages of the Pacific:i ue oaEducated speakers, however, sometimes incorporate English vowels intotheir speech. An educated Papua New Guinean might say /bæŋ/ or /bæŋk/for ‘bank,’ whereas someone less educated will say /beŋ/.The basic consonant system is also similar to that found in many of theOceanic languages of Melanesia:P t kb d gf s hv ʤm n ŋlrw yNotable omissions, as a result of the pidginization process, are the commonMelanesian fricatives /x/ and /γ/, which don’t occur in English, and the Eng-lish fricatives /θ ð z ʃ ʒ/, which are rare in Melanesian languages. Both openand closed syllables may occur, and consonant clusters are common.Variation in the pronunciation of consonants is of two kinds. Pidginspeakers who also speak English often introduce phonemic distinctions fromthat language that are not made by less educated speakers. So an educatedspeaker might say /ʃu/ ‘shoe’ and /tʃetʃ/ or /tʃətʃ/ ‘church’ whereas an unedu-cated speaker would be more likely to say /su/ and /sios/.Pidgins, Creoles, and Koines 225The other kind of variation is probably related to first-language interfer-ence. Many speakers “confuse” similar sounds, probably because thesesounds are not phonemically distinct in their own languages. Among thepairs of sounds commonly confused by some speakers of Melanesian Pidginare /p/ and /b/; /t/ and /d/; /k/ and /g/; /p/ and /f/; /t/ and /s/; /h/ and absenceof a consonant; /b/ and /v/; /s/ and /ʤ/; /f/ and /v/; /l/ and /r/; /v/ and /w/;and /n/ and /ŋ/. For example, some speakers of Tok Pisin say /pis/ ‘fish,’ andothers /fis/; /tasol/ ‘only’ is often heard as /tatol/; and while some speakerssay/haumas/ ‘how much?’ others would say /aumas/ or /aumat/.The orthography is fairly straightforward, with ng being used to repre-sent /ŋ/ (and j for /ʤ/ in Pijin and Bislama). For most speakers, voiced stopsdo not occur word-finally, but etymological spellings are used in Pijin andBislama: /pik/ ‘pig’ and /gut/ ‘good’ are written pig and gud in Pijin and Bis-lama, but pik and gut in Tok Pisin. The diphthongs /ai/, /oi/ and /au/ arewritten ai, oi, and au in Tok Pisin, but ae, oe, and ao in Pijin and Bislama, sothe words for ‘right,’ ‘boy,’ and ‘house’ are rait, boi, haus in Tok Pisin, butraet, boe, haos in Bislama.Sentence StructureMelanesian Pidgin is a subject-predicate language and has both verbal andverbless sentences. In verbal sentences, the phrase order is SV in intransi-tive sentences and SVO in transitive sentences.Tok PisinSubject Verb ObjectWanpela man i kam. 0one man PREDICATE come 0‘A man came/is coming.’Maria i kilim pik bilong mi.Maria PREDICATE kill TRANS pig POSS me‘Maria killed/is killing my pig.’Although there is no passive, attention can be focused on the object of atransitive clause by moving it to the front of the sentence, where it can be fol-lowed by the particle ia and a pause. This often translates a passive Englishsentence. Here is the object-focused version of the second sentence above:Tok PisinObject Subject VerbPik bilong mi ia, Maria i kilim.pig POSS me FOCUS, Maria PREDICATEkill:TRANS226 CHAPTER 10‘As for my pig, Maria killed/is killing it.’‘My pig was killed/is being killed by Maria.’Verbless sentences follow a pattern similar to verbal sentences, withsubject preceding predicate.PijinSubject PredicateHem i man blong mi.he PREDICATE man POSS me‘He is my husband.’PronounsPronouns in Melanesian Pidgin follow the Austronesian pattern: They distin-guish at least three numbers and also show the inclusive/exclusive distinc-tion in the first person non-singular. While the dual is common, the trial isconsiderably rarer. Here are the pronouns of Bislama:BislamaSingularI miyou yuhe/she/it hemDualwe two INC yumituwe two EXC mitufalayou two yutufalathey two tufalaTrialwe three INC yumitrifalawe three EXC mitrifalayou three yutrifalathey three trifalaPluralwe INC yumiwe EXC mifalayou yufalathey olgetaThere is virtually no morphophonemic variation in the pronouns.5 Thesame form is used as an independent pronoun, as subject or object, or aftera preposition:Pidgins, Creoles, and Koines 227BislamaMi hang-em ol klos blong mi long laen.I hang-TRANS PL clothes POSS me on line“I hung my clothes on the line.”Hem i givim gato ya long yufala fromhe PREDICATE give:TRANS cake this to you:PL becausehem i laekem yufala tumas.he PREDICATE like:TRANS you:PL very‘He/she gave the cake to you (pl.) because he/she likes you a lot.’Nouns, Noun Phrases, and PrepositionsNouns are almost universally invariable in form. There are no articles andonly a small number of demonstratives. Tok Pisin has dispela and Pijin des-fala ‘this’ (sometimes ‘that’), both of which precede the noun. Bislama ya‘this, that’ follows the noun. The following sentences all mean much thesame thing.Tok PisinDispela man i laik-im dispela meri.this man PREDICATE like-TRANS this womanPijinDesfala man i laek-em desfala woman.this man PREDICATE like-TRANS this womanBislamaMan ya i laekem woman ya.Man this PREDICATE like:TRANS woman this‘This man likes this/that woman.’Adjectives, numerals, and other quantifiers normally precede the nounin a noun phrase,6 although there are some modifiers that follow the head.In Tok Pisin, all monosyllabic adjectives and numerals, as well as some thathave two or more syllables, must occur with the suffix -pela in this context.In Pijin and Bislama, the corresponding suffix -fala is less frequently used,often occurring only when the adjective is emphasized. Here are some ex-amples of noun phrases. The head noun is underlined.Tok Pisintupela liklik meritwo small girl‘two little girls’228 CHAPTER 10ol gutpela pikininiPL good child‘the good children’dispela tripela bikpela popo tasolthis three big pawpaw only‘just these three big pawpaws’Pijintufala boe nomoatwo boy only‘only two boys’wanfala pua womanone poor woman‘a poor woman’Bislamatu big haos yatwo big house this‘these two big houses’tu big-fala haos yatwo big-EMPHATIC house this‘these two particularly big houses’wan smol blu trak nomoone small blue car only‘just a small blue car’There is only a small number of prepositions (but not so small a numberas some writers would have us believe). The following are the commonestprepositions in Bislama:Bislamalong location, direction, source, instrument, timeblong possession, purpose, beneficiaryolsem ‘like, aswetem accompaniment, instrumentfrom causeExamples:BislamaMi kam long Vila from wan kos.I come to Vila because:of one course‘I came to Vila for a course.’Pidgins, Creoles, and Koines 229Papa blong yu i stap wok wetem huia?father POSS you PREDICATE CONTINUOUS work with who‘Who is your father working with?’Fis olsem hemia, yu mas kat-em hem longfish like this:one, you must cut-TRANS it withsap-fala naef.sharp-EMPHATIC knife‘For a fish like this one, you have to cut it with a sharp knife’The other two dialects are slightly different. From does not occur inTok Pisin, which uses the compound form bilong wanem ‘for what?’ to markcause instead. Pijin has the same prepositions as Bislama plus fo, which isused to indicate purpose or tendency:PijinMifala laek fo go.we:EXC want for go‘We want to go.’Hem i man fo dring.he PREDICATE man for drink‘He is a drunkard.’There are no special possessive pronouns in Melanesian Pidgin. Thepossessive preposition (Tok Pisin bilong, Pijin and Bislama blong) may be fol-lowed by either a noun or a pronoun possessor:Pijinnem blong yu belo blong siosname POSS you bell POSS church‘your name’ ‘the church bell’Verbs and the Verb ComplexVerbs are morphologically quite simple in Melanesian Pidgin. The only com-mon affix is the transitive suffix.Tok PisinEm i rit i stap.he PREDICATE read PREDICATE be‘He/she is reading.’Em i rit-im dispela buk i stap.he PREDICATE read-TRANS this book PREDICATE be‘He/she is reading this book.’230 CHAPTER 10With certain verbs, while the transitive form takes the suffix, the intran-sitive form is often reduplicated.Tok PisinMama i was-im ol pikinini.mother PREDICATE wash-TRANS PL child‘Mom washed the children.’Ol pikinini i was-was.PL child PREDICATE INTRANSITIVE-wash‘The children washed/swam.’The verb complex does, however, contain a number of particles markingtense-aspect and other functions. Verbs (and nonverbal predicates) take apreverbal particle i, which marks what follows as a predicate. This use of ican be seen in almost every example above.7 In recent years, however, theuse of this predicate marker has become more and more optional, especiallyin Tok Pisin and Pijin. Thus the two Tok Pisin sentences above are just as of-ten heard as Mama wasim ol pikinini and Ol pikinini waswas.The verb is very often unmarked for tense, and lack of marking canindicate either present or past. Other tenses and aspects are marked byparticles, some preverbal, others postverbal.Tok PisinPREVERBAL POSTVERBALbai future pinis completedbin incomplete past i stap continuousken optative, potentialinap abilitylaik intentionsave habitualThree of these particles are, or derive from, verbs: laik, from laikim, ‘like,want,’ save, which as a verb means ‘know, know how to,’ and i stap, which asa verb means ‘to be (in a place).’ Some examples of these tense-aspect par-ticles (plus the negative preverbal particle no) follow.Tok PisinEm i no save kaikai mit.he PREDICATE not HABITUAL eat meat‘He/she doesn’t eat meat.’Yu bai wok-im pinis.you FUTURE do-TRANS COMPLETIVE‘You will have done it.’Pidgins, Creoles, and Koines 231Pita i inap karim ol kago bilong yu.Peter PREDICATE able carry:TRANS PL cargo POSS you‘Peter can carry your things.’Mamok i no bin kam.Mamok PREDICATE not PAST come‘Mamok didn’t come.’Reduplication of the verb for other purposes than to indicate intransitiv-ity is relatively common, especially in Bislama. There reduplication can havethe following functions: reciprocal action, random action, repeated action,plurality, intensity, and the distributive.BislamaLeg blong hem i solap.leg POSS he PREDICATE swell‘His/her leg is swollen.’Leg blong hem i sol-solap.leg POSS he PREDICATE INTENSITY-swell‘His/her leg is really swollen.’Ol lif oli foldaon.PL leaf PL:PREDICATE fall‘The leaves fell down.’Ol lif oli fol-foldaon long hariken.PL leaf PL: PREDICATE RANDOM-fall in cyclone‘The leaves fell all over the place in the cyclone.’10.3. The Pidgins of the Motu TradersThe Motu people, who live around Port Moresby, speak an Oceanic lan-guage. The western Motu particularly, “at the time of European contact(and for an unknown number of years before) … were involved in a complexnetwork of trading relationships with linguistically related and unrelatedgroups east, west and inland of their present position. The most spectac-ular and important part of this trade … was the hiri, or annual tradingvoyage to the Gulf of Papua some 300 kilometres away to the west” (Dut-ton 1985, 20).In the course of the hiri expedition, two separate (and apparently un-named) pidgins developed. One was based mainly on the Koriki language ofthe western Gulf of Papua, the other on the Eleman languages of the east-ern part of the Gulf. Dutton (1985) calls these the Hiri Trading Language232 CHAPTER 10(Koriki variety) and the Hiri Trading Language (Eleman variety), respec-tively.That, however, is by no means the end of the story. The Motu also used apidginized version of their own language (Dutton calls this Simplified Motu)with other foreigners—originally probably in trade with their Oceanic-speaking neighbors, and later with newcomers to the area. After Europeancontact in the late nineteenth century, they also used a variety of MelanesianPidgin with early colonial officials and other outsiders.The two Hiri Trading Languages were restricted to use on the hiri, andwhen that trading expedition finally ceased toward the middle of the twen-tieth century, the languages also died a natural death. The English-basedpidgin died a less natural death: it was proscribed by the British govern-ment, which adopted instead the pidginized version of Motu as the languageof contact.The first British police force in Papua consisted of Fijians, Solomon Is-landers, and Kiwais from the Daru area of western Papua. By the time thepolice force was being established, there were a number of other foreignersof various origins settling in the Port Moresby area. Simplified Motu soonbecame the lingua franca of this motley collection of people. It was spreadoutside Port Moresby mainly by the police on their patrols along the coastand into the interior, but also by released prisoners who were given posi-tions of authority as village constables. The language acquired the namePolice Motu, but in the 1970s, as the connotations of the word “police” weredeemed pejorative, the name Hiri Motu was chosen—in the mistaken beliefthat Police Motu was a continuation of the language(s) spoken on the hiri.The differences between the Hiri Trading Languages and Hiri (or Po-lice) Motu can be seen in the following sentences (from Dutton 1985,33–34).Hiri Trading Language (Koriki Variety)Enane pu miai anea! Na okuai!go sago get come me give‘Go and bring some sago!’ ‘Give it to me!’Hiri Trading Language (Eleman Variety)Abuari pai avaia abusi! Ara porohalaia!go sago get come me give‘Go and bring some sago!’ ‘Give it to me!’Hiri (Police) MotuOi lao rabia oi mailaia! Lau oi henia!you go sago you bring me you give‘Go and bring some sago!’ ‘Give it to me!’Pidgins, Creoles, and Koines 233Two features give an idea of the simplified nature of Hiri Motu incomparison with Motu itself. First, Motu has the normal Oceanic contrastbetween direct and indirect possessive constructions and, in indirect pos-session, contrasts food (marked with a-) and other possessions (markedwith e-):Motu(lau) tama-gu(I) father-my‘my father’(lau) a-gu aniani(I) POSS:FOOD-my food‘my food’(lau) e-gu ruma(I) POSS:GENERAL-my house‘my house’Hiri Motu simply uses the general possessive form for all nouns: lauegutamana8 ‘my father,’ lauegu aniani ‘my food,’ lauegu ruma ‘my house.’Second, Motu has independent pronouns, as well as subject prefixes andobject suffixes to verbs. Hiri Motu uses free pronouns in all of these environ-ments:Motu Hiri MotuIndependent Subject Object All environmentsSingularI lau na- -gu lauyou oi o- -mu oihe/she/it ia e- -(i)a iaPluralwe INC ita ta- -da itawe EXC ai a- -mai aiyou umui o- -mui umuithey idia e- -dia idiaHiri Motu was once widely spoken in Papua (although virtually not atall in New Guinea, the northern half of Papua New Guinea), and it is oneof the three official languages of Papua New Guinea (alongside English andTok Pisin). In recent years, however, the number of its speakers, and conse-quently its status, have tended to decline, partly as a result of inroads intoPapua by Tok Pisin, and partly because people who have been educated tendto use English in preference to Hiri Motu.234 CHAPTER 1010.4. Fiji HindiBeginning in the late nineteenth century, more than sixty thousand in-dentured laborers were recruited from India to work on plantations in Fiji.Initially, these recruits came mainly from northern India, where languagesof the Indo-European family are spoken. Many laborers spoke various di-alects of Hindi, but many also spoke what was probably a pidgin, knownas Bazaar Hindustani. By the early part of the twentieth century, however,almost half the laborers were being recruited from South India. These work-ers spoke the quite unrelated languages of the Dravidian family. The plan-tation environment brought into contact Hindi speakers from different di-alects (numerically the largest group of Indians), speakers of Hindi andother Indian languages (related and unrelated), speakers of Indian lan-guages, Fijian, and English, and finally, Indians and some of the twenty-seven thousand Pacific Islanders who were also recruited to work on Fijianplantations.A number of languages developed or were used on the Fiji plantations,an early variety of Melanesian Pidgin, a pidginized variety of Fijian, and apidginized variety of Hindi among them. The first of these has died out inFiji, but the other two are still used to some extent between people of differ-ent ethnic groups who have no other common language.In addition, however, another language also developed among Indians inFiji. Through koineization, Fiji Hindi, or Fiji Bāt (= ‘language’) evolved, espe-cially among ethnic Indians born in Fiji. Fiji Hindi incorporates elements froma number of Hindi dialects. Some examples of the mixture of dialects involvedin the development of Fiji Hindi can be seen in the pronoun system.Fiji Hindi Hindi dialect sourceI ham Bhojpuri hamyou (intimate) tum Awadhi, Braj tumyou (formal) āp Awadhi āp(u)he/she/it (near) ī Bhojpuri, Awadhi īhe/she/it (remote) ū Awadhi, Bhojpuri ūThe formation of plural pronouns by the addition of log ‘people’ to the singu-lar, as in ham log ‘we,’ is characteristic of Magahi.There were other contributors to Fiji Hindi as well: Bazaar Hindustani,the Pidgin Hindi spoken on the plantations, English (as one might expect),and also Fijian. Some examples from Fijian follow.Fiji Hindi Fijian sourcedakāu ‘reef’ cakaukūmāla ‘sweet potato’ kumalanangonā ‘kava’ na yaqonaPidgins, Creoles, and Koines 235tabāle ‘wife’s brother’ tavale ‘brother-in-law’tāmabūā ‘whale’s tooth’ tabuaThe result of this koineization process is a new form of Hindi different fromany spoken in India.A final complicating factor in the Hindi situation in Fiji has been thefact that, although Fiji Hindi is the first language of virtually all Fiji In-dians, who speak it in informal contexts, it is not the language of formalsituations. Standard (Indian) Hindi is used in schools, on radio, in print,and in other formal contexts. A situation of diglossia has developed inwhich people use one variety (Standard Hindi) in public meetings, for reli-gious occasions, and in other formal situations, and the other variety (FijiHindi) in informal situations.236 CHAPTER 10CHAPTER11Language, Society, and Cul-ture in the Pacific Context11.1. The Vocabulary of Pacific LanguagesWesterners often evaluate people and their societies on the basis of theirtechnology. People without advanced technology are considered primitivenot just technologically, but intellectually as well.Linguists studying Australian and Pacific languages are often asked howmany words there are in those languages. Underlying such a question is theassumption that such “primitive” people must speak simple languages: “Byand large, the white population of present-day Australia has little knowledgeof the structure or nature of Aboriginal Australian languages. Moreover,they have serious misconceptions about them. If you strike up a conversa-tion with even well-educated white Australians you may hear that … ‘[Abo-riginal languages] have only a few score words—names for common ob-jects’” (Dixon 1980, 4).Nothing could, as we have seen, be further from the truth. The gram-mars of Pacific languages are by no means simple or primitive. How doPacific languages stand in terms of lexicon?11.1.1. How Many Words?When linguists are asked how many words there are in a particular language,the idea seems to be that the more words a language has, the more sophisti-cated it is. By implication, Pacific languages probably have many fewer wordsthan English does, and so are less sophisticated or more primitive.Even trying to compare dictionaries of two languages for this purpose isfraught with difficulties:237How do we measure the number of words in a language? First, what isa word? For instance, should the compound ‘firehose’ be treated as asingle word different from ‘fire’ and ‘hose’? Languages differ widely asto what is considered a word. Second, are we talking about all wordsever used by any speakers of that language? Or about all words usedcurrently? Or about all the words used by an individual speaker and,presumably, stored somehow in that speaker’s mind? Or about all thewords ever recorded of the language? These questions show how hardit is to compare languages with respect to the number of words inthem. (Simpson 1993, 123)The other aspect of this problem relates to what forms the basis of ourcomparison. The simplest way to compare languages in this way is to countthe entries in a dictionary (ignoring for the moment all the other problemsSimpson has pointed out). But some languages (like English) have a muchlonger and more intensive history of dictionary compilation than do others(like those of the Pacific). So even if this were a valid way of making com-parisons, it would not be a particularly productive one.Let us pursue this a little further. Crystal (1987, 108) notes that the 1987edition of the Random House Dictionary of the English Language, for ex-ample, contains some 260,000 headwords (“the bold-face items that occurat the beginning of each entry”). No dictionary of a Pacific language comesanywhere near that figure: The monolingual Fijian dictionary currently inpreparation has considerably fewer than twenty thousand entries (Paul Ger-aghty, personal communication), and this will probably be one of the largestPacific dictionaries when it is published. Does this mean that Pacific lan-guage vocabularies are considerably more limited than those of Europeanlanguages?In a sheer numerical sense, of course, it does. But we need to look a littlemore deeply into this question. Let us do a quick experiment. Below are thirtyconsecutive words beginning with the letter q, as listed on pages 1415–1416of the 1981 edition of the Macquarie Dictionary. How many of these do youthink are in common use? How many could you give the meaning of?1quincuncial quinoline quinquepartitequincunx quinone quinqueremequindecagon quinonoid quinquevalentquindecennial quinoxaline quinsyquinella quinquagenerian quintquinic acid Quinquagesima quintainquinidine quinque- quintalquinine quinquefoliate quintan238 CHAPTER 11quinoid quinquennial quintequinol quinquennium quintessenceDictionaries of languages like English include a vast number of highly tech-nical, obsolete, or obscure words (like many of those listed above), nearly allof which are not known to the ordinary speaker of the language.The average speaker of any language probably knows and uses some-where between five and ten thousand words in everyday life, and mayvaguely recognize a few thousand more.2 People in a particular profession,or people who have a particular hobby or interest, will have another set ofvocabulary related to that profession or interest, but other speakers of thelanguage may probably not know those words—or at least not know how touse them accurately. Most of the 260,000 words in the Random House dictio-nary, for example, are probably unknown to almost all speakers of English.When we take all of this into account, Pacific languages are not so differ-ent from English as might at first be assumed. The average speaker of aPacific language also probably knows and uses between five and ten thou-sand words. People who specialize in fishing, weaving, or other professionsand crafts will, of course, know additional technical terms not familiar toother people. The difference with European languages lies in the fact thatmost Australian and Pacific societies are relatively small-scale ones. Therange of specialization of professions, crafts, and hobbies is much smaller,and hence the size of the technical or specialized vocabulary in those lan-guages tends to be much smaller as well.11.1.2. Specialization, Classification, and AbstractionA second common misconception about Australian and Pacific languagesconcerns the degrees of abstraction they are capable of. I quote Dixon(1980, 5) again: “Some missionaries and amateur linguists who attempted tostudy an Australian language have contributed to the misconceptions [aboutthem]. They have put it about that although there may be a superfluity ofterms for particular objects, the languages are totally lacking in genericterms such as ‘fish’ or ‘fowl’; this is, of course, taken as a lack of mentalsophistication. The fact is that Australian languages do have quite as manygeneric terms as European languages.”Specific TermsThings of cultural importance are usually obvious from a language’s lexicon.The motor vehicle, for example, is of vital importance to western society, andin English we have a large number of words referring to kinds of motor ve-hicles (car, truck, lorry, van, bus), to brands of vehicles (Toyota, Cadillac,Language, Society, and Culture in the Pacific Context 239Mercedes-Benz, Rolls-Royce), to models (Toyota Corolla, Toyota Cressida,Toyota Camry), as well as many hundreds of words referring to componentsof motor vehicles. In many Pacific languages, in contrast, there is often justone word, meaning ‘motor vehicle (of any kind).’But in English we have just the one word yam to describe a particularroot-crop,3 and we have had to borrow the word taro to describe anotherroot-crop. Because these are not important food crops in English-speakingsociety, one word for each is probably adequate. In the Anejom̃ language ofVanuatu, where these are important sources of food, there are, accordingto my count so far, names for forty different varieties of yam, and words forover sixty named varieties of taro.A language’s vocabulary reflects what is important to its speakers.Where fine degrees of specialization are necessary or desirable, they willshow up in the lexicon. Stages of growth are one common area of specializa-tion in these languages. The coconut, of course, is perhaps the prototypicalPacific plant, and one should not be surprised to find lexical specialization inthis area. In Kwamera, for example, the generic term for coconut is napuei;the fruit itself goes through the following named stages of development:Kwameraiapwas small coconut, coconut fruit budkwanapuirahákw larger coconut fruit budkwatigɨs small coconut (about four inches in diameter)kapkapeki (intermediate stage between kwatig ɨs and tafa)tafa young coconut before meat has begun to formnafweruk nut with soft meat and effervescent waterkahimaregi nut with hard, well-developed meatnapuei mhia ripe nut with developed flesh, which falls fromthe treekwarumahákw fallen nut which has begun to sproutnuvera sprouted nutIn addition to these terms, there are terms for different parts of the nut, ofthe tree, and of the fronds, as well as for different varieties of coconuts anddifferent coconut products.The existence of areas of lexical specialization like this is not surprising.We would expect coastal people to have numerous words for different kindsof fish and fishing equipment, horticulturalists to have specialist terms forplants and their parts and growth stages, warriors to have detailed vocabu-lary relating to weapons, and so on. But there are also a few less expectedareas of lexical specialization, like the following set of names for differentkinds of noises in Yidiny:240 CHAPTER 11Yidinydalmba sound of cuttingmida the noise of a person clicking his tongue against theroof of his mouth, or the noise of an eel hitting the wa-termaral the noise of hands being clapped togethernyurrugu the noise of talking heard a long way off when thewords cannot quite be made outyuyurunggul the noise of a snake sliding through the grassgangga the noise of some person approaching, for example,the sound of his feet on leaves or through thegrass—or even the sound of a walking stick beingdragged across the groundGeneric TermsWhy have even the more charitably disposed observers held the view thatPacific languages have no generic terms? There are a few possible explana-tions. One is that “when objects are being named one is generally expectedto be as specific as possible. If, say, a snake is seen it should be describedby its species name; the generic term ‘snake’ would only be employed if justthe tail were noticed and the species could not be identified, or in similarcircumstances” (Dixon 1980, 5). A second factor is that certain abstractconcepts grounded in western philosophy and culture are foreign to Pacificcultures. In a society without money, for example, terms like money, poverty,interest, devaluation, and so on are rare or nonexistent.A third point is that, while abstractions do occur in Pacific languages, theirnature, or the concepts they represent, may be quite different from similar con-cepts in European languages, because the way people look at and classify theworld is different. Kinship terms are a good example of this (see 11.3).Pacific languages also classify the natural world taxonomically (al-though, as we should by now expect, this classification might not necessarilyexactly match a classification of the same items in a European language). Ataxonomy is a way of classifying things or concepts in a hierarchical orga-nization. At the “top” is a general term; the further down the hierarchy onegoes, the more specific the terms become; and each lower term is includedin the meaning of a higher term. If we take the generic term fish, then tuna,mackerel, snapper, mullet, and so on are all kinds of fish; skipjack, bluefin,yellow-fin, and so on are all kinds of tuna (which is a kind of fish); and so on.Figure 8 shows a very partial classification of terms for marine life in Ane-jom̃. The generic term numu refers to all fish, crustaceans, sea-urchins, seasnakes, shellfish, etc. (though in common speech numu often means simplyLanguage, Society, and Culture in the Pacific Context 241nepcevsharknepcev-apeñnepcev-awarajinepcev-legeñhapnepcev-umudejnowodouyacinharstingrayfarfaroainher-edejinher-mejcap̃inmatin-namtednerenaranerenhaunedum̃triggerfishnedm̃-alisnedm̃-asin-nomñacnedum̃-hocounedum̃-huocnumu-sgan(sea) fishinmokomparrotfishinmokm-arakeiinmokm-ilcaiinmokm-odidinmokom-manumu-ñwaifreshwaterfish(numerous) (numerous)nijvañcrayfish,lobsterinhaklin-najisnahnajis-alpãsnalawoñnap-mehenijvañ-decnum̃anhermit crabnum̃an-amidaenum̃an-holnumu-taregitcrustaceansledceicoconutcrabnesgaamushellfish(numerous) (numerous)numumarinelife(numerous)Figure 8. Partial Classification of Anejom̃ Terms for Marine Life242 CHAPTER 11‘fish’). There are a number of first-order specific terms, among them numu-sgan ‘fish in the sea, including sharks, whales, stingrays, etc.,’ numuñwai‘freshwater fish,’ numu-taregit ‘crustaceans,’ nesgaamu ‘shellfish,’ nahau‘turtles,’ and so on. Each of these has a number of subvarieties. In addition tothe words given in the third column as subvarieties of sea fish (nepcev ‘shark,’inhar ‘stingray,’ etc.), there are hundreds more: inhet ‘needlefish,’ inhos ‘sil-verside,’ necna ‘sea mullet,’ najaj ‘flatfish,’ nilcam ‘wrasse,’ and so on. Manyof these third-order terms are further divided into more specific terms still, aspartially illustrated in figure 8. Similar taxonomies could be presented in allPacific languages for flora and fauna, especially those of economic or ritual im-portance to the people who speak that language.These taxonomies reflect people’s perceptions of nature, and they donot always correspond with the perceptions held by speakers of other lan-guages. In parts of the highlands of New Guinea, for example, the cassowaryis classified as an animal, not as a bird, because it does not fly. In manycultures, bats and flying foxes are classified as birds, because they do fly.Indeed, “the criteria for defining a generic term will [often] vary betweenneighbouring languages; in Dyirbal yugu ‘tree’ does not include within itsscope stinging trees … or trees like pandanus which are less than a certainheight, whereas the [cognate] Yidiny noun jugi … does include pandanusand stinging trees and in fact appears to be roughly coextensive with theEnglish lexeme tree” (Dixon 1980, 113).Let us look briefly at the noun classes of an Australian language,Murrinh-Patha (M. Walsh 1993). Murrinh-Patha has ten noun classes, eachmarked with a particle preceding the noun. These are:Murrinh-Pathakardu- Aboriginal people and spiritsku- Non-Aboriginal people, animals, birds, fish, insects,and their products (like nests, meat, eggs, and honey)kura- fresh watermi- food and food plants, including their products (like fe-ces!)thamul- spearsthu- things used for striking: offensive weapons (other thanspears), along with thunder, lightning, and playingcards (which are thrown into the center of a group)thungku- fire, firewood, matches, etc.da- times and placesmurrinh- speech and languagenanthi- everything elseLanguage, Society, and Culture in the Pacific Context 243There are a number of features of interest in this system. Let us look atthe first two classes first: “As in English, the category of ‘higher animates’is culturally conceived. In Murrinh-Patha the category of ‘higher animates’is often thought of as just involving Aboriginal people while non-Aboriginalpeople are classified along with other animates like snakes, birds and fish”(M. Walsh 1993, 114). The ku-class of other animates includes the word ku:this means ‘meat’ (the product of animals), but it also has come to mean‘money’ (the product of non-Aboriginal people).Each of the next five Murrinh-Patha classes—those marked by kura,mi, thamul, thu, and thungku—includes things with a prominent place inMurrinh-Patha culture: fresh water and its sources, fire and fire-making,spears, boomerangs and clubs, and so on. The da-class groups togetherplaces and times (seasons and the like), while the murrinh-class also sug-gests that speech and language are important to the culture. The final class,marked by nanthi, is a residual class, and includes nouns that do not fit intoany of the other classes.11.2. Counting SystemsSome Oceanic languages have an elaborate system of numeral classifiers (seechapter 6). Other aspects of counting systems in Pacific languages providean example of the variety of semantic systems within this region. As Laycock(1975a, 219) says, “Number systems can be studied as philosophical systemsin their own right, or as guides to ethnic thinking on number concepts.”11.2.1. Decimal SystemsI will begin with the system with which English speakers are most familiar,the true decimal system, in which there are separate individual words forthe numbers one to ten, each composed of only a single morpheme,4 andwhich may also have separate individual words for hundred and thousand(and perhaps higher multiples of ten as well).The majority of the Oceanic languages have this system, although noAustralian language does (at least natively),5 and “decimal systems do notappear to exist at all in the non-Austronesian languages of the New Guineaarea” (Laycock 1975a, 224). True decimal systems are found throughoutPolynesia and Micronesia, in the majority of southeastern Solomons andnorthern Vanuatu languages, and in a minority of mainland New GuineaOceanic languages. Some examples of decimal systems are given below(the Kiribati numerals one through nine incorporating the general classi-fier ua):244 CHAPTER 11Tongan Fijian Kiribati Arosi Nakanai1 taha dua te-ua-na ta‘ai isasa2 ua rua uo-ua rua ilua3 tolu tolu teni-ua oru itolu4 fā vā a-ua hai ivaa5 nima lima nima-ua rima ilima6 ono ono ono-ua ono iuolo7 fitu vitu iti-ua biu ivitu8 valu walu wani-ua waru iualu9 hiva ciwa ruai-ua siwa ualasiu10 hongofulu tini tabuina tangahuru savulu-sa100 teau drau tebubua tangarau salatu-sasa1000 afe udolu tengaa meru salatu-savuluMicronesian languages are unusual in the world context in having dis-tinct numerals for ten-power bases, in some cases as high as 109 (Harrisonand Jackson 1984). For example:Kiribati Ponapean Woleaian100 tebubua epwiki sebiugiuw1000 tengaa kid songeras10,000 terebu nen sen100,000 tekuri lopw selob1,000,000 teea rar sepiy10,000,000 tetano dep sengit100,000,000 tetoki sapw sangerai1,000,000,000 likIn many languages with decimal systems, there are special ways ofcounting certain things, especially food produce and other things of value.For example:Fijianbola ‘ten fish,’ ‘a hundred canoes’bewa ‘ten bunches of bananas’vulo ‘ten tabua (whale’s teeth)’uduudu ‘ten canoes’koro ‘a hundred coconuts’selavo ‘a thousand coconuts’Rotumanasoa ‘two coconuts’sava‘a ‘ten pigs, cows, fowls, eggs, cuttlefish’Language, Society, and Culture in the Pacific Context 245sͻiga ‘ten fish’poa ‘twenty ͻlili (kind of shellfish)’kato‘a ‘a hundred fish’Motu and its close relatives show a system that might be referred to asan imperfect decimal system, in which some numerals represent multiplica-tions. Here are the numerals from one through ten in Motu:Motu1 ta 6 taura-toi2 rua 7 hitu3 toi 8 taura-hani4 hani 9 taura-hani-ta5 ima 10 gwautaAlthough there are separate words for seven and ten, six and eight appear tobe ‘(one) two-threes’ and ‘(one) two-fours,’ and nine is ‘(one) two-fours-one.’There are also imperfect decimal systems that involve subtraction. Hereare the numerals one through ten in Titan (Oceanic) and Buin (Papuan). (TheBuin numerals are those used with the noun class referring to things.)Titan Buin1 si nonumoi2 luo kiitako3 talo paigami4 ea korigami5 lima upugami6 wono tugigami7 ada-talo paigami tuo8 ada-lua kiitako tuo9 ada-si kampuro10 akou kiipuroIn Titan and Buin, there are normal numerals from one through six and ten.In Titan, seven is ada-3, 8 is ada-2, and 9 is ada-1. Clearly subtraction is in-volved, although ada is not the word for ten. In Buin, seven is ‘three less’ andeight is ‘two less’; nine, however, means something like ‘completed.’11.2.2. Quinary SystemsThe other common numeral system in Pacific languages is a quinary sys-tem—one based on five. These systems have individual morphemes for thefirst five numerals (five may be the same word as hand). The numerals six tonine, however, are compounds whose underlying meaning is five-plus-one,246 CHAPTER 11five-plus-two, and so on. The numerals ten and twenty may be compoundsas well, or may be separate morphemes. Such systems are found in muchof New Guinea (among both Oceanic and Papuan languages), as well as inparts of Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and New Caledonia. The examples beloware from Oceanic languages, with the exception of Daga, which is Papuan.Lenakel Tigak Jawe Daga1 karena sakai siic daiton2 kiu pauak seluk dere3 kɨsil potul seen yampo4 kuvɨr poiat phoec bayabayapa5 katilum palmit nim nani yamunaet6 katilum-karena palmit sakai ni-siic nani yamu daiton7 katilum-kiu palmit pauak ni-seluk nani yamu dere8 katilum-kɨsil palmit potul ni-seen nani yamu yampo9 katilum-kuvɨr palmit poiat ni-phoec nani yamu10 katilum-katilum sangaulung paidu aonagaetLenakel and Tigak form numerals above five by compounding on the actualnumeral five, while Jawe and Daga use a modified version of the form forfive. Tigak, Jawe, and Daga have independent morphemes for ten, but theLenakel form involves addition.Expansions of these systems are interesting. Lenakel simply continuesbuilding on the base katilum until nineteen (which is katilum-katilum-katilum-kuvɨr= 5–5–5–4 = 19).6 Twenty is expressed as:Lenakelieramím karena r-ɨkaperson one he-is:not‘twenty’which is similar to the system in Jawe, where the word for twenty is siic kac‘one man.’ Both of these derive from counting all fingers and toes—“com-pleting” a single person.Daga is different: Here the form given above for five is nani yamu-naet‘hand other-nothing’; so seven is nani yamu dere ‘two on the other hand.’Ten is ao-na-gaet ‘up-my-INTENSIFIER’—i.e., ‘only my upper appendages,’ or,in other words, ‘my two hands.’ Counting from one to ten proceeds on thefingers, counting from eleven to nineteen on the toes, and twenty representsa complete person.Dagaaonagaet pusinawan daitonten my:foot one‘eleven’Language, Society, and Culture in the Pacific Context 247aonagaet pusin yamunaetten my:foot five‘fifteen’aonagaet pusin yamunaet pusin yamu daitonten my:foot five my:foot other one‘sixteen’apane daitonman one‘twenty’Drehu shows an interesting variation on the standard quinary systems.The Drehu numerals one through twenty are given below:Drehu1 caa 6 caa-ngömen 11 caa-ko 16 caa-hwaihano2 lue 7 lue-ngömen 12 lue-ko 17 lue-hwaihano3 köni 8 köni-ngömen 13 köni-ko 18 köni-hwaihano4 eke 9 eke-ngömen 14 eke-ko 19 eke-hwaihano5 trii-pi 10 lue-pi 15 köni-pi 20 caatrIn Drehu, the numerals five, ten, and fifteen are trii-pi, lue-pi, and köni-pi.There seems to be a unit of five, based on a form pi, and these numerals areThere seems to be a unit of five, based on a form pi, and these numerals areeffectively 1-pi, 2-pi, and 3-pi. Between these units, the numerals one to fourtake suffixes: -ngömen is used between six and nine, -ko between eleven andfifteen, and -hwaihano between sixteen and nineteen. The Drehu word fortwenty, caatr, is actually caa atr ‘one man.’11.2.3. Other SystemsHuli (Cheetham 1978), spoken in the Southern Highlands Province ofPapua New Guinea, is quite unusual in having a base of 15, although “thelast three numerals of the series, 13, 14 and 15, are also the words for bodyparts, even though these body parts are not referred to when counting, andthe words now appear to be true numerals” (Smith 1988, 13). The Kapauku(Ekagi) of Irian Jaya (Price and Pospisil 1966) have an even more com-plex system—a decimal system as far as the base of 60, with higher unitsof 600 and 3,600, similar to the system of the ancient Babylonians (Smith1988, 12). But most other systems that are neither decimal nor quinaryhave bases smaller than five.Oceanic languages are almost exclusively decimal or quinary. The ma-jor exceptions to this generalization are some of the Oceanic languages ofthe Morobe Province of Papua New Guinea, which have presumably been248 CHAPTER 11influenced by their Papuan-speaking neighbors (Smith 1988). Adzera, forexample, has only two numerals. Counting above two proceeds by additionto the base ‘two.’ Mapos has numerals for only one, two, and three, withfour being a compound (2 + 2) and five involving the word orund ‘hand.’Examples:Adzera Mapos1 bits ti2 iruc lu3 iruc da bits lal4 iruc da iruc lu-mba-lu5 iruc da iruc da bits orund vandu6 iruc da iruc da iruc, etc. orund vandu mb-ti, etc.Australian languages tend to have quite simple numeral systems. “Theone obvious gap in Australian vocabularies is the lack of any system of num-bers. It is usually said that there are only numbers ‘one’, ‘two’, ‘several’and ‘many’; some languages appear also to have ‘three’ although this is fre-quently a compound form…. No special significance attaches to the absenceof numeral systems in Australian languages; it is simply a reflection of theabsence of any need for them in traditional culture” (Dixon 1980, 107–108).Here are some examples from three widely separated Australian languages:Margany Wajarri Wargamay1 wakanyu kurriya yunggul2 ura kujarra yaga3 — marnkurr garbumany dhiwala yalypa dyaginyAs in so many other ways, the Tiwi language is an exception to general-izations about Australian languages, having a quinary system.7Tiwi1 yati 6 kiringarra (yati)2 yirrara 7 kiringarra yirrara3 yirrajirrima 8 kiringarra yirrajirrima4 yatapinti 9 kiringarra yatapinti5 punginingita 10 wamutirraraPapuan languages exhibit a great variety of numeral systems. There arequite a few languages with a binary system, with numerals greater than twoformed by compounding. Wantoat exemplifies the classical type, while Nu-manggang uses the word for hand to express five; Salt-Yui allows both waysof representing five—ana holulu meaning roughly ‘one fist,’ while sui sui taidire = ‘two two one together.’Language, Society, and Culture in the Pacific Context 249Wantoat Numanggang Salt-Yui1 tapatu kutnung taniga2 tapaya lufom sutani3 tapaya tapatu lufom kutnung sui tai dire4 tapaya tapaya lufom lufom sui sui dire5 tapaya tapayatapatukafong ko ana holulu, sui suitai dire6 tapaya tapayatapayakafong ko kutnung sui sui sui direOther Papuan languages have a ternary system, with three basic numer-als. In Som the system simply involves addition (so seven is 3–3–1, etc.), whilein Guhu-Samane the word for boto ‘hand’ occurs in the numeral five.Som Guhu-Samane1 koweran tena2 yarə eseri3 kabmə tapari4 oyarə oyarə eseri sa eseri5 oyarə oyarə kowe boto tena6 okabmə okabmə boto tena ma tenaKewa is one of the few Papuan languages with a base-four system:Kewa1 pameda2 laapo3 repo4 ki (= ‘hand’)5 (kina) kode (= ‘[hand’s] thumb’)6 kode laapo (= ‘thumb + two’)7 kode repo (= ‘thumb + three’)8 ki laapo (= ‘two hands’)9 ki laapona kode (pameda) (= ‘two hands, one thumb’)10 ki laapona kode laapo, etc. (= ‘two hands, two thumbs’)Laycock (1975a, 224) reports that there are also a few languages with abase-six system.11.2.4. Tally SystemsOne other type of counting system needs mentioning here. This is a tallysystem. Based on body parts, it counts the fingers of one hand, up the arm,250 CHAPTER 11across the face or the chest, and down to the fingers of the other hand; theseare often used for counting valuables—pigs, shell-money, or other thingsgiven—and also calendrical events, such as the preparations needed for afestival. Tally systems “are used only for direct counting, or ‘mapping’ of aset of objects against some other measuring code. There are no ‘numerals’in a tally system, so that one may not receive a reply to the question ‘howmany?’ or find the points of the tally-system qualifying nouns, as do true nu-merals” (Laycock 1975a, 219).As well as having a base-four numeral system, Kewa also has a tally sys-tem, involving a counting cycle called a paapu. Counting begins with thelittle finger on the left hand, goes through the other fingers (1–5), from theheel of the thumb up to the upper arm (6–14), the shoulder and neck (15–18),the jaw (19), the left ear (20), cheek (21), eye (22), the inside of the left eye(23) until the mid point is reached: rikaa ‘between the eyes’ = 24. Countingthen proceeds in the reverse order, ending with the little finger on the righthand, which is 47.11.3. KinshipKinship systems are intricately bound up with the system of social relationsof a particular society. They show very clearly how language is tied in withsocial life and social behavior.11.3.1. Njamal Kinship TermsIn Njamal society of northwestern Australia (Burling 1970, 21–27), as in mostAustralian societies, every person belongs to a moiety, one of two units intowhich a society is divided on the basis of descent. In Njamal, moieties are pa-trilineal: A person belongs to the same moiety as his or her father. In addition,they are exogamous—a person must marry someone from the opposite moi-ety. Figure 9 shows the implications in relation to a man (labeled “Ego,” fromthe Latin word meaning ‘I’), his grandparents, his parents and their siblings,his siblings and their spouses, his wife, and his children and their spouses. Inthis figure and the next, triangles represent males, circles represent females,and the equals sign indicates marriage. Members of Ego’s moiety are shadedblack, while members of the other moiety are unshaded.Now let us see how a system of social organization like a moiety system,which is quite different from the system English speakers are used to, re-lates to the kinship terminology of a society. Figure 10 is the same set ofrelatives as in figure 9, but with a few additions. It shows the terms a maleNjamal speaker uses to refer to each of those relatives.Language, Society, and Culture in the Pacific Context 251Figure 9. A Moiety SystemThere are a number of very significant differences between the Njamalsystem and that of English. Some examples follow.1. In Ego’s parents’ generation, four terms are used:mama all males in this generation of the same moiety—Ego’s fa-ther, father’s brother, and mother’s sister’s husbandkarna all males in this generation of the other moiety—Ego’smother’s brother and father’s sister’s husbandmidari all females in this generation of the same moiety—Ego’s fa-ther’s sister and mother’s brother’s wifengardi all females in this generation of the opposite moiety—Ego’smother and her sister, and his father’s brother’s wife2. The moiety system is reflected again in kinship terms for Ego’sgrandparents’ generation. The paternal grandfather (maili), for ex-ample, is called by a different term from the maternal grandfather(mabidi), since they belong to different moieties.3. For Ego’s grandchildren’s generation, the terms maili and mabidiare used again. Maili refers to any grandchild or any grandchild’s252 CHAPTER 11Figure 10. Njamal Kinship Termsspouse, irrespective of sex, who is of the same moiety as Ego.Mabidi applies to any grandchild or grandchild’s spouse, again ir-respective of sex, who is of the other moiety.Moiety membership is one of the major criteria in classifying kin. “A Nja-mal can apply one of these kinship terms to any Njamal however distantlyhe may be related. They recognize no boundary beyond which people are nolonger counted as kinsmen” (Burling 1970, 23). The term maili, for example,not only applies in the grandparental generation to one’s father’s father, butalso to one’s father’s father’s brother, mother’s mother’s brother, mother’sfather’s wife’s brother, father’s mother’s husband, father’s mother’s sister’shusband, father’s mother’s wife’s brother, that is, to any male of this gener-ation belonging to the same moiety.Language, Society, and Culture in the Pacific Context 253One other feature of Njamal kinship terms is widespread in the Pacific:the reciprocal use of terms between kin two generations apart. In Njamal,for example, a man and his father’s father call each other maili. There isoften both a close bond and a fairly relaxed relationship between grandpar-ents and grandchildren in Pacific societies, whereas the relationship be-tween one’s own generation and one’s parents’ (or children’s) is often char-acterized by greater social tension. Hence the use of nonreciprocal terms,which imply more of a relationship of domination and subordination. Njamalalso presents additional complications.1. Figure 10 shows the terms for ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ as kurda andturda, respectively. These terms are used to refer only to brothers orsisters who are older than the speaker. Younger brothers and sistersare both referred to by the term maraga. Relative age is a factor in de-termining which term should be used within Ego’s generation.2. Differences in the referent of some terms may depend on the sex ofthe speaker.8Male speaker Female speakernjuba wife, brother’s wife husband, sister’s husbandngarbari wife’s brother, sister’shusband[not used]julburu [not used] husband’s sister, brother’s wifengaraija sister’s daughter brother’s daughtertjilja brother’s daughter sister’s daughterThe social facts of moiety membership, relative age, and the sex of thespeaker are all important in Njamal society, as the system of kinship termi-nology indicates.11.3.2. Kinship and Marriage in Anejom̃The regulation of marriage often has a great effect on the system of kinshipterminology. This short case study deals with Aneityum society and the Ane-jom̃ language (Tepahae and Lynch 1998).Figure 11 shows some kinship terms in Anejom̃.9 A man calls his wifeegak, and this term also applies to his mother’s brother’s daughter and hismother’s sister’s daughter. The reason for this is that, in traditional Ane-jom̃ society, a man was supposed to marry one of these cross-cousins. Theterm egak is probably better translated as ‘marriageable female relativeof the same generation.’ The father of egak is called matak, meaning notonly ‘maternal uncle’ but also ‘father-in-law,’ since one of one’s maternal un-254 CHAPTER 11cles would also be one’s father-in-law. The kinship terminology of Anejom̃ isvery intricately involved with the regulation of marriage in traditional Ane-ityumese society.There is a further interesting twist to this system. No system works theway it should a hundred percent of the time. A young man becomes smittenwith a young woman who is not one of his prescribed marriage partners, andthe elders reluctantly agree for them to marry. Suppose, for example, thatone of the boys in my grandchildren’s generation marries my daughter. Be-cause he is of that generation, I should call him m̃apõk ‘my grandchild.’ Butbecause he is now my son-in-law, I should also call him nohowanig uñak ‘myson-in-law.’ Neither of these sits well with me, the grandfather and father-in-law. How can the dilemma be resolved?Figure 11. Anejom̃ Kinship TermsLanguage, Society, and Culture in the Pacific Context 255The Aneityumese have resolved it by developing a new term, numulai.This term comes from numu ‘a living person’ + lai ‘to grow or develop in anunexpected way.’10 By referring to my grandson and son-in-law as numulai,I am very specifically recognizing the fact that our relationship has changeddue to an “irregular” marriage.Kinship systems have fascinated anthropologists and linguists for overa century. There is a finite number of possible kinship systems. Each system,however, has developed the way it has in order to express a complex networkof social relations and a complex system of social organization. Although Ihave looked at just two systems here, these demonstrate how wholly lan-guage is bound up with other aspects of the life of a society.11.4. Languages in UseSince most Pacific languages are spoken by a few thousand people at most,one might expect them to be used in a fairly simple and uncomplicated man-ner—no frills, no special styles, just straightforward, down-to-earth, face-to-face communication. This view, however, is a gross oversimplification.11.4.1. Language and GenderIn the discussion of Njamal kinship terms in 11.3.1 above, we saw that someterms are used differently depending on whether a man or a woman is speak-ing. The same is true of Anejom̃ (see 11.3.2). For example, the term etwakmeans ‘my same-sex sibling’—my brother if I am a man, but my sister if Iam a woman. There are two other Anejom̃ terms for siblings, and each is re-stricted to one sex: Nataheñ erak ‘my sister’ can be used only by men, whilenatam̃añ erak ‘my brother’ can be used only by women. Most Pacific lan-guages probably express some distinctions in kin terms based on the sex ofthe speaker.Men and women in all societies use language differently. Some differ-ences are based on sex differences like those of the glottis and vocal folds,which result in men’s generally having a lower-pitched voice than women.I am not interested in these differences here. Of much greater interest aredifferences based on gender, or the social roles of men and women.The traditional division of labor between men and women leads, in most so-cieties, to a difference in the vocabulary with which a speaker is familiar. In amaritime Pacific society, for example, men probably know and use more wordsrelated to house building, deep-sea fishing, hunting, warfare, and kava prepa-ration; women tend to have a wider (active or passive) vocabulary than men inareas like basket-making and mat-weaving, shellfish, and food preparation.256 CHAPTER 11Often, however, differences go deeper than this. On the island of Ngatik(near Pohnpei in Micronesia) there is reported to be a special “men’s lan-guage” that incorporates quite a number of words from an early variety ofPacific Pidgin English (Clark 1979–1980, 35).11 Among the Big Nambas in Van-uatu, on the other hand, there is a special “women’s language.” Women couldnot traditionally say the name of the chief or any senior male relative, and hadto substitute other words for these names or for any word that sounded likethem. If a chief or other senior male had a name that sounded like tau or nauei,then the verb tau ‘put’ would be replaced by uln ‘let go of,’ and the word nauei‘water’ by the special replacement term tarah (H. Fox 1997).Many Australian societies have special secret languages taught by oldermen to boys during their initiation and used only by men in certain ceremonies.Because of their ritual importance, such secret registers are not supposed to beused in front of women or uninitiated boys. “Of these registers it can in generalbe said that they are brilliant creations in which a very small stock of specialwords is made to do all the work of framing any proposition that a speaker wantsto express” (Alpher 1993, 102). These secret male registers use either totallydifferent words, or else operate on a kind of “pig Latin” basis, turning a normalword into something quite different. In some cases, the secret register involvessounds that do not occur in the standard language (Dixon 1980, 66–67).11.4.2. The Language of RespectIn all Pacific languages, there is a right way to speak, depending on the partic-ular context in which one is speaking. There are obscene words, which can usu-ally only be used in the most informal—or insulting—contexts. There are eu-phemisms, which are used in more public circumstances or in mixed company.And there are oratorical styles, in which the underlying meanings of what is saidare often obscured (at least to the uninitiated) by a series of metaphors.In the chiefly societies of western Polynesia, there are rather more dra-matically distinct speech styles, depending on whom one is talking to orabout. Tongan, for example, has three styles—one for commoners, anotherfor nobles, and the third for the king—distinguished by different vocabularyitems for the same thing (Philips 1991). For example:TonganCommoners Nobles Kingkai ‘ilo taumafa ‘eat’mate pekia hala ‘die’fa ‘itoka mala ‘e mo‘unga ‘cemetery’kaukau tākele fakamālū ‘bathe’‘alu me‘a hā‘ele ‘go’Language, Society, and Culture in the Pacific Context 257These words are supposed to be used to and about a member of the socialcategory concerned: “Thus [Tongan] people will say that when using Tonganwords for ‘go’, ‘alu is used to and about Commoners, me‘a is used to andabout Nobles, and hā‘ele is used to and about the King” (Philips 1991, 374).This is what Tongans say should happen. In practice, however, thingsare a little different. Philips notes, for example, that kingly terms are alsoused when addressing God in prayers. Noble terms are used not only to andabout nobles, but also to and about people in nontraditional positions of au-thority. She documents one case, for example, where a magistrate and thepublic prosecutor use noble terms to each other, but commoner terms to wit-nesses. Noble terms are, however, used “to raise the level of formality andpoliteness in public discourse generally” (378), and also in poetry “to en-hance the beauty and persuasiveness of what is said” (379). The system isnot rigid: It can be manipulated.Samoan is similar to Tongan in that there are different registers, thoughonly two, used depending on whether one is talking to or about a matai (achief, an orator, or some other titled person) or a commoner. It is also sim-ilar in the way in which one can manipulate these registers: “When we testthe accuracy of status/rank features to account for the actual use of RWs [re-spectful words] in everyday interaction, we realize that such features of thecontext are good predictors of performance only in some contexts” (Du-ranti 1992, 83; emphasis in the original). Formality and politeness can besignaled by the use of the respect register even when those involved do notmerit this by virtue of their status. On the other hand, intimacy or commonpurpose can be conveyed by using the ordinary register even if one or moreof the participants is matai.In addition to this lexical marking, all Samoan words that contain t or nhave two quite different pronunciations, depending on whether one is talk-ing in a formal or an informal context. Formal Samoan t and n become k andg (=/ŋ/) in informal or colloquial speech. The word meaning ‘bury’ is tanu inmore formal contexts, but kagu in informal contexts.The fairly widespread Australian and Pacific practice of word taboo, orreplacement by some other term of a word that is or sounds like the nameof a recently dead person or of a chief, is one example of an avoidancestyle. There are other kinds of avoidance styles in the Pacific as well. Twosuch styles relate to the way one behaves linguistically (1) in the presence ofcertain relatives, usually in-laws, and (2) during certain kinds of food gath-ering and preparation. For example, “In every Australian community thereare certain kin relations that demand special behaviour; typically, two peo-ple in mother-in-law/son-in-law relationship should avoid close contact andsometimes may not address one another directly. Most (perhaps all) Aus-258 CHAPTER 11tralian tribes have or had a special ‘avoidance’ speech style which must beused in the presence of a taboo relative” (Dixon 1980, 58–59). In Dyirbal,perhaps the most extreme case of this kind in Australia, there are two wordsfor almost every concept, one in the Guwal (everyday) style and another inthe Jalnguy (avoidance) style (Dixon 1980, 61). Thus, for example, buynyjulmeans ‘red-bellied lizard,’ but in the presence of a taboo relative one has touse the term jijan instead; for midin ‘ring-tail possum’ one must substitutejiburray; and so on.The Maisin of Papua New Guinea have a similar avoidance style. There,it is not just the presence of the in-law that is important. In Maisin, one is notallowed to use the name of an in-law in any circumstances, nor can one useany word that sounds like that in-law’s name. One must substitute anotherword instead. This necessitates the generation of many pairs of words refer-ring to the same thing. Speakers choose the one that is not like the name ofan in-law. For example,Maisinisu gungguti ‘nose’ikosi dobong ‘coconut’mimisi jenje ‘sandfly’wo iriri ‘fire’gaiti sisari ‘dirty’borung ombi ‘rain’kimi damana ‘star’If one has an in-law whose name is, or is like, kimi, one cannot use this word,but must use damana to mean ‘star’ instead.The Kalam of Papua New Guinea have a similar in-law avoidance style.In addition, however, they have what has come to be called “Pandanus Lan-guage” in the literature.Pandanus Language is used in two ritually restricted contexts, bothconnected with the forest and with the preparation and consumptionthere of a special category of food. When people go to the forest tocollect and cook alxaw [pandanus] nuts it is essential that they avoidOrdinary Language—otherwise, the Kalam say, the nuts will turn out tobe rotten, watery or empty or the skins too hard to eat. Pandanus Lan-guage must be used throughout such expeditions, which, at least untilvery recently, often lasted for about three weeks. Ordinary Languagemust also be avoided when cassowaries, which were once fairly com-mon in the forest, are being cut up, cooked and eaten. (Pawley 1992,315–316)Language, Society, and Culture in the Pacific Context 259Some examples of the differences between Ordinary Language and Pan-danus Language are given below.12KalamOrdinary Language Pandanus LanguageYakt magi ki-p. Wjblp mdup yok-p.bird egg excrete-it bird egg put-it‘The bird has laid eggs.’Kañm ñb-sp-un. Sml ñab g-sp-un.banana consume-PRESENT-webanana consuming do-PRESENT-we‘We are eating bananas.’The Kalam are not unusual in this. Many Pacific languages have specialvarieties that must be used in collecting forest produce, in hunting or fish-ing, in initiations and other rituals, and so on. In many of these cases,people believe that if they use ordinary language, the spirits guardingtheir prey will be alerted, and the hunting or fishing expedition will beunsuccessful. They disguise their intentions from these protective spiritsby speaking in a special language in order to ensure the success of theirexpeditions.11.4.3. Language and SocializationChildren learn their first language from the people around them—parents,siblings, and other members of the extended family. As Edith Bavin pointsout in her discussion of language and socialization among the Warlpiri ofcentral Australia, however:Not all cultures have the same expectations of children. For example,in white middle-class society, preverbal children are generally consid-ered to be potential conversation partners and a care-giver carries on‘conversations’ with a child. When the child starts producing words,the care-giver often points to things and asks the child to name theobject or picture. Or the care-giver helps the child to develop com-municative skills by telling the child what to say to a third person.However, in other cultures, children are not necessarily encouragedto speak until they have some knowledge to give, and question-answerroutines are not part of the adult-child interaction. (Bavin 1993, 86–87)The Taiap-speakers of Gapun village in the East Sepik Province of PapuaNew Guinea evidence similar behavior and attitudes. In discussing Taiap260 CHAPTER 11views of social behavior, Kulick (1992) says that they distinguish betweenhed and save. Hed (Tok Pisin for ‘head’) refers to personal will and auton-omy, but often has the negative connotations of unacceptable individualismor selfishness; save (Tok Pisin ‘know, knowledge’), on the other hand, refersto the ability to behave appropriately and to fulfill one’s roles in society. Chil-dren are born with hed. Save, so the people of Gapun say, “breaks open”in a child somewhere in the second or third year. “Teaching and learningare two distinct processes and … one can occur independently without theother. Parents consider that they can tell their children to ‘call the names ofthings,’ but that the children will only ‘start to learn’ once their save breaksopen inside of them” (Kulick 1992, 120). Much of the talk Taiap villagersdirect toward young children is what Kulick calls a “distraction routine.”Parents do not have conversations with children; they seem simply to wantto stop them from crying.Like adults in most societies, Taiap adults have a set of baby-talk wordsthey use to children, because the proper words are “too hard.” Among themare the following (Kulick 1992, 197):TaiapAdult form Baby-talk formmambrag mamak ‘spirit’kakamatɨk kakam ‘millipede’min mimi ‘breast’yewɨr pipi ‘excrement’nok soso ‘urine’min atukun mimi naka ‘drink the breast!’atɨtɨŋgarana puparəŋgarana ‘you’d better not fall!’This concept of proper words being too hard, however, is taken muchfurther in Gapun village. Adults believe that the Taiap language is hard.Because children have no save, they will not be able to learn it well. Theytherefore very often use Tok Pisin in talking to children, since it is a much“easier” language. Children learn Taiap from older siblings rather thanfrom adults.1311.5. Language Use in Pacific NationsEuropean colonization of the Pacific brought new religions, new social andpolitical institutions, new fashions, foods, and recreational pursuits. It alsobrought new languages and new ways of using language, widening the lin-guistic repertoires of Pacific Islanders and aboriginal Australians (and beingwidened by them).Language, Society, and Culture in the Pacific Context 26111.5.1. Colonial and Other Intrusive LanguagesThe major colonial powers in the Pacific in recent times have been theBritish, Americans, Australians, New Zealanders (all of whom speak Eng-lish), and the French. English and French are the two most important in-trusive languages in the Pacific today. French is the official language inthe French overseas territories of New Caledonia, Wallis and Futuna, andFrench Polynesia, and is one of the official languages (alongside Bislama andEnglish) in Vanuatu. In almost all other Pacific countries or territories, Eng-lish is the major language of external—and often internal—communication.It is also the major language of regional organizations in the Pacific (thoughFrench is sometimes used as well).In all of these countries, some or all formal education is carried on in Englishor French. Educated Pacific Islanders have a reasonable knowledge of one orboth of these languages, and they use them in official and often also informalsituations. In many Pacific countries, a dialect of English (or French) is devel-oping that differs from the varieties of that language spoken in metropolitancountries. These Pacific dialects often incorporate vocabulary items from ver-nacular languages or from languages like Melanesian Pidgin (e.g., Papua NewGuinea English bilum ‘string bag’ or Vanuatu English nakamal ‘meeting place,kava bar’), and they also show phonological differences, often as a result of theeffects of the first languages of their speakers. More interesting, however, is thedevelopment of grammatical differences from neighboring first-language vari-eties of English, used in a highly consistent manner by virtually all well-educatedand fluent speakers of English in these countries. For example:Papua New Guinea English Metropolitan EnglishDid he come or? Did he come?I read it on the newspaper. I read it in the newspaper.He can’t cope up with it. He can’t cope with it.Let’s discuss about it. Let’s discuss it.Do it sometimes tomorrow. Do it some time tomorrow.Where’s the book which you readit?Where’s the book which youread?In the region I have been dealing with, there are now only two other intru-sive or colonial languages in use at the national level: Spanish is the officiallanguage of Easter Island, which is a territory of Chile, while Bahasa Indone-sia is the official language of the Indonesian province of Irian Jaya. Othercolonial powers used their own languages in their Pacific colonies before theywere displaced. Spanish, German, and Japanese were used in parts of Mi-cronesia, German also in New Guinea and Samoa, and Dutch in Irian Jaya.262 CHAPTER 11In addition to the languages of colonial powers, other languages haveentered the area. Indian laborers coming to Fiji, for example, spoke not onlyvarieties of Hindi, but a wide range of other Indian languages, many of which(like Gujarati, Tamil, and Telugu) are still spoken there. Various Chinese lan-guages are spoken by the small Chinese populations of almost all Pacificcountries. There are immigrant communities speaking Vietnamese in Vanu-atu and New Caledonia, Javanese in New Caledonia, and Japanese, Korean,Portuguese, Lao, Vietnamese, and various Philippine languages in Hawai‘i.And the large numbers of European and, more recently, Asian immigrantsinto Australia and New Zealand have brought numerous ethnic languages tothose two countries.There have also been substantial movements of people within the Pa-cific. One can hear Kiribati being spoken in Solomon Islands, Tuvaluan inNauru, East Uvea (Wallisian) and Tahitian in Vanuatu, Samoan and Tonganin Hawai‘i, and most Polynesian languages in New Zealand. In a sense, thesePacific languages are also intrusive, in that they have come from somewhereelse.From the point of view of speakers of Pacific languages, languages likeMelanesian Pidgin, Australian creoles, and so on could also be classed asintrusive. These languages are often used between speakers of different Pa-cific languages, and they are probably the primary source of borrowingsinto those languages. In urban areas particularly, their intrusions have pro-gressed so far that they have become the first (and often only) language ofmany people.11.5.2. MultilingualismThe arrival of these intrusive languages, and the increased social mobility ofpeople in recent times, has led to quite complex sociolinguistic situations inthe Pacific. Most people in the Pacific are at least bilingual; they use two lan-guages on a fairly regular basis. Many people are in fact multilingual, usingthree or more languages regularly.Bilingualism and multilingualism are not new in the Pacific. Particularlyin Melanesia, but also to some extent in Australia, people—especially,though not exclusively, men—have always been exposed to languages otherthan their own, and have often used foreign languages in certain contexts.There was often considerable kudos to be gained by being multilingual. Sal-isbury’s (1962) classic study of the Siane of the Eastern Highlands Provincein Papua New Guinea, for example, showed that the overt use of a foreignlanguage, Chuave, on formal and even informal occasions was a way ofachieving and maintaining high social status.Language, Society, and Culture in the Pacific Context 263In modern times the use of two or more languages has become more com-mon and is no longer a male preserve. In general terms, we can differentiatebetween Australia, Polynesia, and Micronesia, where people tend to be bilin-gual, and Melanesia, where they tend to be multilingual. On most Polynesianand Micronesian islands, only one language is spoken. People speak this astheir vernacular; it is the language they use within their own community, butnormally not outside it. These people speak some other language as their lin-gua franca, the language used when dealing with (at least certain types of)outsiders. The lingua franca throughout almost all of Polynesia and Microne-sia is English, except in French Polynesia and Wallis and Futuna, where it isFrench. Similarly, many aboriginal Australians know one Australian vernacu-lar and use a creole or some variety of English as a lingua franca.By contrast, most islands in Melanesia contain more than one language,and each country or territory contains a large number. Many Melanesians,therefore, speak their own vernacular, and often one or more neighboringvernaculars as well (particularly if there is a vernacular that has acquiredsome prestige as the result of missionary activity). Except in Irian Jaya andNew Caledonia, they can usually also speak the national variety of Melane-sian Pidgin (or Hiri Motu) to communicate with people from other parts ofthe country. And if they have been educated, they speak Bahasa Indonesia(in Irian Jaya), English (in Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, and Vanu-atu), or French (in Vanuatu and New Caledonia), both to other citizens oftheir country and to outsiders. (Some educated ni-Vanuatu, in fact, speakboth English and French, as well as Bislama and one or more vernaculars.)Fiji falls somewhere between. Most Fijians speak their own dialect ofFijian plus the standard dialect; many also speak English. Similarly, mostIndians speak Fiji Hindi and Standard Hindi, and many speak English. Notmany Fijians speak Hindi, and not many Indians speak Fijian. English, or insome contexts Pidgin Fijian or Pidgin Hindi, is the language of interethniccommunication.In these kinds of multilingual situations, various aspects of the context de-termine the appropriate language to use. In the market in Vila, for example,a ni-Vanuatu would use the vernacular if the person selling vegetables camefrom the same language community (or possibly a nearby one), but Bislama ifshe didn’t. During a coffee break in a Honiara office, the staff would probablytalk in Pijin if they were all Solomon Islanders, but would most likely use Eng-lish if some expatriates were taking part in the conversation.Another feature of these multilingual situations is what is known ascode-switching. Very often, even in the same conversation, people switchfrom one language to another. This may be because certain topics are easierto talk about in one of the languages all the participants know rather than in264 CHAPTER 11another, or it may be because something just sounds better in one languagethan in another. Whatever the reason, code-switching is a very common fea-ture of social interaction in the multilingual Pacific.Conversations are often carried out in two languages when the partici-pants understand both languages fairly well, but each speaks only one ofthem fluently. In a Port Moresby office, for example, a Papuan worker (forwhom Hiri Motu rather than Tok Pisin would be the lingua franca) might welllisten to a conversation in Tok Pisin, but make his or her contribution to it inEnglish.11.5.3. Language in the National ContextVery few Pacific constitutions make specific reference to which language isthe national language and which is the official language. Generally, the clos-est one gets to such a statement are sections in the constitution definingwhich language is authoritative, or which one(s) may be used in parliament.Constitutional provisions like the two below (from the constitutions of Kiri-bati and Fiji) are common.127. The provisions of this constitution shall be published in a Kiribatitext as well as this English text, but in the event of any inconsistencybetween the two texts, this English text shall prevail. (Kiribati)56. The official language of Parliament shall be English, but any mem-ber of either house may address the chair in the House of which he is amember in Fijian or Hindustani [i.e., Hindi]. (Fiji)The only reference to language in the Constitution of Papua New Guineais the following statement in “National Goals and Directive Principles”:“2(11). All persons and governmental bodies to endeavour to achieve univer-sal literacy in [Tok] Pisin, Hiri Motu or English, and in tok ples or ita eda tanogado [i.e., vernaculars].”In most Pacific countries, the metropolitan language (usually English)functions as the official language, although there may be no constitutionalprovision for this. It is the language of government, of the law and the highercourts, of higher education, and of sections of the media. The vernacular lan-guage functions as a de facto national language. It is used by the people indaily communication, in stores and offices, on public transport and in sec-tions of the media, and often in early education and the lower courts.This is even more true of Australia, where aboriginal vernaculars andthe languages of immigrants have no official constitutional status. English isthe official and national language, though there have recently been some ef-forts to give minority languages some limited status.Language, Society, and Culture in the Pacific Context 265In Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands, vernaculars also have noofficial place in the national life of the country. English is the official lan-guage, and it is very much also a de facto national language, as it is often thelanguage people use to talk to each other. English is the language of govern-ment, of the law and the courts, of the media, and of all levels of education.Melanesian Pidgin has some status as an additional national language, as itis commonly used in daily communication and gets some exposure in the me-dia, but its status is not comparable with that of, say, Tongan or Samoan inTonga and Samoa.Vanuatu is different. It is one of the few Pacific states where the nationaland official languages are spelled out in the constitution:3 (1) The national language of the Republic is Bislama. The officiallanguages are Bislama, English and French. The principal lan-guages of education are English and French.(2) The Republic shall protect the different local languages whichare part of the national heritage, and may declare one of them as anational language.Pre-independence Vanuatu (then known as the New Hebrides) was in therather unusual position of having two colonial masters, the British and theFrench, who ruled jointly. Some ni-Vanuatu were educated in French, othersin English, and the political lines were drawn as much on the basis of lan-guage as anything else at the time of independence. Bislama was the neutrallanguage in this situation, and it still remains the only common language,even among educated ni-Vanuatu. Although Bislama is not used in the edu-cational system, and although laws and official government correspondenceare in English and French, Bislama is used in parliament, in churches, in themedia, and in other areas of daily communication.11.5.4. Formal EducationMelanesia differs from the rest of the Pacific in terms of the languages usedin the educational system. In Melanesia, schools start from the first grade inthe official language, and students begin learning a totally foreign language,French or English, as soon as they enter school.14 One major reason for thisis the multiplicity of languages in these countries. Christian missions usedvernaculars to some extent in primary education in the past, but now thateducation is a governmental concern, this no longer happens. And althoughthere are some vernacular preschools and primary schools in some areas ofPapua New Guinea, they are still in the early stages of being set up.266 CHAPTER 11One interesting consequence of these policies is that almost no speakersof the largest nonmetropolitan language in the Pacific, Melanesian Pidgin,have learned to read and write their language through any formal educa-tional system! A few have learned it through adult literacy classes; manyothers have taught themselves, having first learned to read and write insome other language. But the Pacific language with the largest number ofspeakers continues to have no place in formal education.The Australian situation is slightly different. Some use is made of Aus-tralian languages in some areas, often through bilingual programs, whereEnglish and an Australian language are used side-by-side. For two centuries,however, there have been only negative attitudes toward aboriginal Aus-tralians and their languages. As a result, many people of aboriginal ancestryknow only a variety of English, and teaching them in an Australian languageis not of much help to their education.Much more use is made of vernaculars in Polynesia and Micronesia. Inmany of these countries, students begin their schooling in the vernacular,not in English. English is only one subject until the middle (in Samoa or ruralFiji) or the end (in Tonga) of the primary curriculum, and vernaculars oftenremain subjects after the switch to English-language instruction has beenmade. In these countries, since the educational system has to deal with onlyone, or at most just a few, vernaculars, taking such an approach is relativelyeasy. The status of vernaculars in different parts of the Pacific relates verymuch to this issue of education.11.5.5. LiteracyLiteracy is often achieved through the formal educational system. In Polyne-sia and Micronesia, literacy rates are generally quite high, and people haveusually learned to read and write their own language, often adding Englishlater. In Melanesia, by contrast, literacy rates tend to be much lower, andthose who have learned to read and write through formal education do so inEnglish or French.The Christian missions and the Summer Institute of Linguistics havesponsored literacy training in vernacular languages in at least some parts ofMelanesia and Australia. More recently, however, there has been a burgeon-ing interest in vernacular literacy. Preschool programs have been estab-lished in many parts of Papua New Guinea to teach children basic literacy intheir own language before they go to school. In many cases, these have op-erated totally or almost totally outside government education agencies.Adult vernacular literacy has also undergone a major expansion, espe-cially in the last few years. There are, for example, over fifteen hundredLanguage, Society, and Culture in the Pacific Context 267community-based literacy programs operating in Papua New Guinea, anda number of similar programs have begun in Solomon Islands and Vanuatu(Faraclas 1994). The success of these programs has caused the governmentof Papua New Guinea to subject its English-only policy for formal educationto a critical review.11.5.6. The MediaAlmost all Pacific countries make some use of vernaculars in the media,although metropolitan languages also get considerable exposure. The bal-ance depends on a number of factors, including how much foreign newsand other material is printed or broadcast, and whether there are enoughtrained translators to translate foreign material into local languages. Evenin Australia, where English dominates the media, minority languages stillget some exposure.The Papua New Guinea media show an interesting mixture of languagesfrom all levels. While television is almost exclusively in English (apart froma few commercials in Tok Pisin), radio is different. National radio stationsmainly use English, but have some programs in Tok Pisin and Hiri Motu.Provincial stations use mainly Tok Pisin or Hiri Motu (depending on whichpart of the country the station is in), but also make some use of the larger ormore prominent vernaculars in the province. The two national daily newspa-pers are in English, and there are two weeklies, one in English and one inTok Pisin. In the provinces, some attempt is made to use both Tok Pisin anda vernacular in provincial newsletters.11.6. Shift, Survival, Death, RevivalThe fourteen hundred languages of Australia and the Pacific are spoken bytiny populations in world terms. In addition, they have been subjected to in-vasion—from without, by such languages as English and French, and fromwithin, by such languages as Melanesian Pidgin and Kriol. Australians andPacific Islanders have incorporated these new languages into their tradi-tional communication systems. There are, of course, a number of indigenousPacific people who do not speak an Oceanic, Papuan, or Australian language.But for most people in the Pacific, the vernacular language exists side byside with widespread lingua francas like English or Melanesian Pidgin. Atthe same time, some languages have already died out as a result of depop-ulation, population movements, and pressure from other languages. At thebeginning of the last century, for example, there were five languages spo-ken on the island of Erromango in Vanuatu: Today there is only one, with a268 CHAPTER 11few remnants of another. The situation in Australia is even more dramatic:Most of the languages spoken there two hundred years ago will not survivethe next fifty years, as people of Aboriginal descent shift to English for theirmain, or sole, means of communication.Linguists and other outside observers generally view such situationswith alarm. The loss of a language is seen as a bad thing, and efforts shouldbe made to preserve these languages—to the extent of running languagemaintenance programs, teaching children to speak their mother’s tongue(which is not their mother tongue), and so on. This attitude may be an al-truistic one or a paternalistic one, depending on one’s point of view. But itis very much an outsider’s view. What do speakers of these threatened lan-guages themselves think of the imminent loss of their languages?Up until the Second World War, New Zealand Māori was a dynamic lan-guage, even though it was mainly spoken in rural areas. But the war, andthe movement of rural Māori to towns after it, changed all that. Englishcame to be seen as the language with which one could get things—educa-tion, jobs, better living conditions—and the urban Māori began to abandontheir language. There is evidence that this was a fairly conscious anddeliberate act: Parents chose to speak English rather than Māori to theirchildren, to give them as much of a head start as possible. A fairly recentsurvey by the New Zealand Department of Statistics showed that therewere about 270,000 New Zealanders who claimed at least 50 percentMāori ancestry, and almost 100,000 more who claimed some Māori an-cestry. Of those 370,000 people, only about 70,000 said they were fluentspeakers of the Māori language, although another 45,000 said they couldunderstand but not speak it.Although the number of Māori speakers looks large from a Melanesianpoint of view, there was very serious concern in the Māori community, notleast because very few of those fluent speakers of Māori were children oryoung people. It seemed likely that the number of speakers would dimin-ish rapidly in the next couple of generations. So a number of Māori-lan-guage kindergartens called Kōhanga Reo (‘language nests’) were estab-lished. Preschool children in these did just what other preschoolers do, butthrough the medium of Māori rather than English. This step, combined witha resurgence of pride and interest in the language among the Māori commu-nity more generally, has probably arrested the decline, and the language willprobably survive.Similar revival programs have taken place in other parts of the Pacific.The Hawaiian language was, and probably still is, in far greater danger thanMāori of totally disappearing, but intensive efforts there are also beginningto see the decline arrested.Language, Society, and Culture in the Pacific Context 269The interesting point about these two cases—and similar cases else-where in the region—is that the languages involved are spoken by peoplewho were the traditional sole occupiers of their territory, who have beeninvaded and colonized, but who are now reasserting their rights and identi-ties. Following a century or more of not particularly successful assimilation,the Māori and the Hawaiians are becoming increasingly vocal on the po-litical stage in their own country. The emblematic function of language, towhich I referred in part 1, is perhaps operative here. To be a Māori, ratherthan just a New Zealander, involves a number of things, and one of these isthe ability to speak the Māori language.These are cases where there are active programs to revive dying lan-guages. Some areas of Melanesia show the opposite trend. Many of thelanguages concerned have very small populations. In Papua New Guinea,Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu, there are over 160 languages spoken by twohundred people or fewer, and many of these are under threat of extinction.As people from these societies intermarry, as children go to school outsidetheir home areas, and as young men and women drift to the towns lookingfor paid employment, the chances that they and their children will continueto speak their language are fairly remote. But the attitudes of these peo-ple toward the impending death of their languages seem to be somewhatdifferent. Speaking of parts of the Sepik area of Papua New Guinea, forexample, Foley (1986; 27–28) says: “Tok Pisin … is seen as an avenue bywhich to acquire the goods of this [Western] culture … with the result thatin certain areas the vernacular indigenous languages are being abandonedin favour of Tok Pisin, which is being acquired as a first language. This isoccurring not just in urban areas, but also in rural areas. Murik, a languageof the lake country west of the mouth of the Sepik river … is dying, and isnot spoken by younger people in the villages. It is being replaced by TokPisin.”I have already referred to Kulick’s (1992) important study of the Taiapspeakers of Gapun village in the Sepik. Tok Pisin was introduced into the vil-lage by men returning from working on plantations, and for some years itwas a men’s language only. Christianization and other social changes afterthe Second World War exposed women to Tok Pisin, with the result that alladults now know both Taiap and Tok Pisin.But this in itself is no explanation for the fact that children in Gapun vil-lage, as in some other parts of Papua New Guinea, are learning Tok Pisinrather than (in this case) Taiap as their first language. In many parts of thePacific, people retain their own vernacular even though they use another lan-guage on a daily basis. Why are Gapun children growing up speaking TokPisin rather than Taiap as their first language? “The reasons for the enthusi-270 CHAPTER 11asm toward and the spread of Tok Pisin throughout the verbal repertoires ofall villagers, eventually even those who rarely if ever left Gapun, were notso much ‘pragmatic’ or ‘socioeconomic,’ as those terms are commonly usedin the sociolinguistic literature, as they were ‘cosmological,’ in the broadestanthropological sense of that word” (Kulick 1992, 249). That is, the arrivalof Europeans, or new conditions, and of a new religion was seen as “theharbinger of a new way of life. Their presence in New Guinea came to be un-derstood in terms of an impending metamorphosis that would transform everyaspect of the villagers’ lives, including their physical beings…. In their ea-gerness for the metamorphosis to occur, villagers immediately seized uponlanguage as a ‘road,’ a way of making it happen” (Kulick 1992, 249).To some extent, of course, these attitudes are similar to those of thepostwar urban Māori. The new language is seen as the key to change, to ad-vancement, to success, however measured and perceived. The difference isthat the people Foley and Kulick are talking about see themselves as PapuaNew Guineans, as citizens of a country with the same rights as other citi-zens. A shift from one language to another does not really threaten thisidentity. In contrast, the Māori and the Hawaiians view language as a marknot only of cultural but also of ethnic identity, and they manipulate languageas a political tool.Language, Society, and Culture in the Pacific Context 271CONCLUSIONIdeas about Pacific LanguagesWhen I first went to see the man who has become our family doctor in PortVila, he asked what I did, and then said that he had visited the universitylibrary here and had seen rows and rows of dictionaries and grammars oflanguages spoken by just a few hundred speakers. “Fascinating”, he said,“fascinating … but bloody useless!”Attitudes like these are held by both westerners and many Pacific Is-landers, though perhaps for different reasons. Many westerners see PacificIsland languages as not being really serious subjects of study: They do nothave a “literature,” they are not used in education, they have no real place inthe national—let alone the international—domain. Linguists who study theselanguages are seen as dilettantes who should be doing something more “se-rious.” Many Pacific Islanders have slightly different views. For example,they often look on a dictionary as an important archive or museum piecerecording “old” words that are dropping out of the language. But they feelthat their language really does not have much of a future when faced withcompetition from international languages.Most Pacific languages have neither been vilified to the extent thatMelanesian Pidgin or Fiji Hindi have nor subjected to the extreme pressuresof survival that Māori, Hawaiian, Murik, or Taiap have felt. Virtually all ofthem, however, have well and truly entered the twentieth century, and arespoken side-by-side with introduced languages or other recently developedlingua francas.Rapid social changes in the Pacific have affected Pacific languages noless rapidly. This is perhaps most evident in the area of lexical borrowing,as discussed in chapter 9. Grandparents shudder when their grandchildreninterlard their vernacular with English-derived terms—and are sure thattheir language will not survive another generation!272To a large extent, this could be construed as just the typical conser-vatism of the elderly: “Things were better in our time, these modern fadsand fashions are no good.” But there are some cases where the grandpar-ents may have a point. Clark (1982), in studying words of English originborrowed into Ifira-Mele,1 distinguishes between necessary and unneces-sary’ borrowings. A necessary borrowing is one where the thing or conceptto which the word refers is new to the culture and, even though the possi-bility of a compound using existing words, a monomorphemic loan is usuallysimpler. Some examples of necessary borrowings are:Ifira-Meleaeani ‘iron’ fooko ‘fork’marseni ‘medicine’ laemu ‘lemon, lime’nakitae ‘necktie’ peelo ‘bell’Unnecessary borrowings are those that replace an already existing word inthe language. This has happened in Ifira-Mele with most of the numerals,possibly because of the constant use of English/Bislama numerals in count-ing money, telling time, and in mathematics classes, and partly also becausethe higher numerals in Ifira-Mele are longer than their English/Bislamaequivalents. But there are other cases, like the following:Ifira-MeleBorrowing Original wordtaemu ‘time’ malostaaji ‘start’ tuulakeinsaiji ‘inside’ irotoauji ‘go out’ tavepuroomu ‘broom’ niisarawooka ‘work’ wesiwesiIn discussing the replacement of wesiwesi ‘work’ by wooka, Clark (1982,139) says that his middle-aged informants “condemned wooka as an abusiveborrowing, when a perfectly good indigenous synonym existed.” In a sense,older speakers of the language have, in many cases, come reluctantly to ac-cept necessary change. But they often also see the unnecessary incorporationof foreign words into their language as a sure sign that the language is not go-ing to survive. As one elderly ni-Vanuatu man said to me, “My grandchildrenthink they’re speaking our language, but they’re really speaking Bislama.”Change has, of course, been taking place for millennia. The Pacific regionhas had a long and complex history. When the first settlers came, and wherethey came from, we don’t really know—but we can be fairly sure that it wasat least fifty thousand years ago. By the time the Anglo-Saxons were subduingIdeas about Pacific Languages 273the Celtic people of Britain, virtually all the islands of the Pacific had been set-tled, many by successive waves of people speaking different languages.Many westerners—and indeed many Pacific Islanders as well—hold theview that, once a particular island or area was settled, the inhabitants re-mained in place. Only with the coming of Europeans were their eyes openedto the outside world. But of course the Pacific region was not like this at all.Contact of various kinds—warfare, invasion, trade, intermarriage, ceremo-nial exchange, and so on—took place between near neighbors or betweenpeoples whose homes were thousands of kilometers apart, between peoplewho spoke similar or at least related languages and between those whoselanguages were unrelated. The European intruders who entered this regionin the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were really just the latest of a se-ries of “foreigners” who contacted Pacific peoples. Pacific languages havebeen changing throughout this whole period as a result of external pres-sures and internal processes. They have survived these changes and willcontinue to survive others.When the first Fiji Hindi dictionary ever published appeared some yearsago (Hobbs 1985), it was greeted with howls of protest and derision from theFiji Hindi-speaking community. “There is no such language as Fiji Hindi!”said one writer to a newspaper. “Hindi in Fiji is a sub-standard Bhojpuriwhich has been corrupted,” said another.Attitudes like these toward creoles and similar languages are commonthroughout the world. Such languages are often seen by outsiders as “bro-ken,” “bastardized,” or “baby-talk” versions of proper languages. Speakingof what is now known as Tok Pisin, for example, Sir Hubert Murray (1924,10), an Australian colonial administrator, said, “It is a vile gibberish … andshould be discouraged.” Major Eustace Sanders, a British colonial official whoserved on Malaita in Solomon Islands, had similar views about Pijin: “The onlylingua franca [is] pigeon English which consists of the English word in theMelanesian context. It is a queer sounding garbled business and not in anyway satisfactory” (quoted in Keesing 1990, 156). Even the names of these lan-guages—Pidgin, Pijin, Broken, and so on—have negative connotations.2This could all be simply dismissed as another example of western ethno-centrism if many speakers of these languages did not share the sameviews—as the case of Fiji Hindi illustrates. Speaking of Solomon Islands,Keesing (1990, 162) says:It is perhaps surprising … that so many Solomon Islanders have ac-cepted uncritically an ideology depicting Pijin as a bastardized formof English…. Many well educated Solomon Islanders echo the colonial274 Ideas about Pacific Languagesview that Pijin has ‘no grammar,’ even though in speaking and under-standing Pijin, those who express this view use (unconsciously) agrammar so complex and intricate and powerful that (like the gram-mars of all languages) it defies formal description.The attitude of many speakers of Melanesian Pidgin toward their languagecould be described as schizophrenic. On the one hand, they use it frequently,in all kinds of situations; on the other, they see it as not a “real” language.This schizophrenia is perhaps most pronounced in Vanuatu. Bislama hashigher constitutional status in Vanuatu than any nonmetropolitan languagein any other Pacific country. It is the language of parliament, of churches, ofgovernment offices, and of social functions. Because half the educated pop-ulation is English-educated and the other half French-educated, Bislama isthe linguistic cement holding the nation of Vanuatu together. Highly edu-cated ni-Vanuatu from different islands prefer to speak to each other inBislama rather than in English,3 and there is a distinct feeling of nationalpride in the public use of Bislama.But Bislama is not used in the school system, either as a medium of in-struction or as a subject, and attempts to introduce it have met with the kindof attitudes expressed in Keesing’s description of the Solomon Islands situ-ation: “it’s not a real language,” “it has no grammar,” “it’s only a languagefor casual conversation.” Vanuatu may be unique among the countries of theworld in allowing a child to be punished for speaking the constitutionallyrecognized national language on school grounds!Yet another aspect of this complex issue concerns the replacement ofvernaculars by Melanesian Pidgin in parts of Melanesia. People in someparts of Papua New Guinea are abandoning their vernacular in favor of TokPisin. They see Tok Pisin as the key to the future, rather than as a “rubbish”language to be used only where no other can serve.The situation in Fiji is somewhat different. Fiji Indians grow up speakingFiji Hindi at home. At school, they are exposed to two prestige languages,Standard Hindi and English. Unlike Melanesian Pidgin, Fiji Hindi is neverwritten. Literacy is taught in Standard Hindi, and the association of thestandard language with the sacred books of Hinduism gives Standard Hindigreat prestige. English too is obviously a prestigious language in Fiji—thelanguage of higher education, the international language, the language ofbusiness, and, increasingly, the language Fiji Indians need to know to emi-grate from post-coup Fiji. The result has been that Fiji Hindi has very lowstatus in Fiji, especially among its native speakers.Pacific Islands languages, whether indigenous or more recently devel-oped, are worthy subjects of study in their own right. A language representsIdeas about Pacific Languages 275a culture of a people. Even if that people is numerically small and does notplay an important part on the world stage, its culture and, by implication, itslanguage, are no less worthy of study than the languages of larger or moreinfluential peoples. It is true that the usefulness in a global sense of even lan-guages like Fijian or Samoan pales into insignificance beside the usefulnessof English or French. But that does not mean that these languages should bediscounted altogether.Change in the languages of Pacific Islanders, as in all languages, isinevitable, natural, and not something to be universally deplored. Certainchanges may be undesirable for all sorts of reasons, but it is in the nature oflanguage to change, and resisting change is counterproductive.What of the future? Dixon (1990, 230–231), in suggesting that every lan-guage with fewer than ten thousand speakers is at risk of extinction, rathergloomily predicts that 80 percent of the languages in the Pacific and Asiamay have died out by the end of the twenty-first century. Even languages likeMelanesian Pidgin are seen by some as being under threat from English: “Itwould seem that in the future Tok Pisin has nowhere to go but down…. Thisdoes not mean that Tok Pisin will die a rapid, or even an easy, death…. Butit does mean that, in perhaps 50 years’ time, Tok Pisin will most likely bebeing studied by scholars among a small community of old men” (Laycock1985, 667). Although the potential for language death is a serious one forsome Pacific languages, I feel that Dixon and Laycock are unnecessarily pes-simistic. The vast majority of Pacific languages are not, or not yet, moribund.As long as a community is sufficiently viable to remain a community (irre-spective of absolute size), and as long as such a community has pride in itslanguage as part of its overall cultural heritage, the language will survive. Itwill change, as internal and external mechanisms cause it to develop differ-ent words, pronunciations, and expressions, and these changes will be ruedby the older generation—as they always are. But change is endemic to lan-guage and is an element of its vitality.There are, of course, languages that have died out or are currently underserious threat. For some threatened languages, there are programs of reinvig-oration and resurgence: Hawaiian and Māori are probably the best known ofthese. Both involve serious attempts to teach young children the language in astructured or semistructured environment, in the hope that, unlike their par-ents, they will become fluent in the language of their ancestors.Arguments rage, of course, about the worth of such programs. At oneend of the spectrum are those who feel that all languages should be pre-served and, if possible, used more widely than they are now, and who pro-pose programs to encourage—and even almost to force—young people, andoften adults, to learn their “own” language. At the other end are those who276 Ideas about Pacific Languagessay that languages should be left alone. If people want to shift to another lan-guage that they think is more useful, it is their right to do so. Very often thisdebate is held in the rarefied circles of academe, without much input fromthe speakers of the languages themselves. Those speakers will, of course,have the final say (and perhaps the last laugh) by choosing the course of ac-tion that seems most sensible and practical from their perspective.The Pacific area has probably seen more change taking place in its lan-guages than any other part of the world—certainly than any other regionwith a comparable population. The multiplicity of different languages andlanguage types, with different histories, has always been one of the intrigu-ing features of this region for both Pacific Islanders and outsiders alike. Aslong as Pacific Islanders continue to recognize that their languages are boththeir past and their future, the unity in diversity so characteristic of the Pa-cific will continue to make this region unique.Ideas about Pacific Languages 277Suggestions for Further ReadingChapter 1Crystal’s Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (1987, 2d ed. 1998) pro-vides a wealth of information on many of the topics covered in this chapterin a very readable and accessible format.There are hundreds of general introductions to descriptive linguis-tics. Aitchison (1978) provides a good, readable general introduction. Fine-gan and Besnier (1979) and Crowley, Lynch, Siegel, and Piau (1995) go intorather more technical detail; these are useful because many of their exam-ples are from Pacific languages.Aitchison (1981) is a very readable discussion of language change,while Crowley (1992, 3d ed. 1997) not only provides perhaps the clearest in-troduction to historical and comparative linguistics currently availablebut also uses Pacific examples to illustrate many technical concepts.Chapter 2Sebeok (1971) and Wurm (1975, 1976) contain a number of articles relevantto the distribution of and history of research into Pacific languages. Schütz(1972, 1994) provides thorough and sensitive treatments on the history ofresearch into Fijian and Hawaiian, respectively. Schütz (1994) is a particu-larly fine piece of scholarship. The language atlas of the Pacific region editedby Wurm and Hattori (1981) is worth detailed examination.Chapter 3Various aspects of the establishment of the Austronesian family and its sub-groups are covered by Blust (1978a, 1984a, 1984b), Clark (1979), Dem-279pwolff (1934–1938), Geraghty (1983), Grace (1955, 1959, 1968), Jackson(1983), Lynch, Ross, and Crowley (1998), Lynch and Tryon (1985), Pawley(1972), Pawley and Ross (1995), Ross (1988), Tryon (1976, 1995), Tryon andHackman (1983), and Wurm (1976). (References to some of the classics ofthe nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth can be found inthe bibliography of Ross 1988.)Readers interested in cultural reconstruction should consult Blust(1980), Chowning (1991), Pawley and Ross (1995), and a number of papersin Geraghty (1998), Lynch and Pat (1996), and Pawley and Ross (1994),Chapter 4The major general comprehensive works on the history of Papuan lan-guages are Foley (1986) and Wurm (1975, 1982). McElhanon and Voorhoeve(1970) provides an illustration of the kinds of techniques used in estab-lishing a Papuan phylum, while Pawley (1995) shows how the comparativemethod can be applied to these languages.Good general works on Australian languages include Dixon (1980) andYallop (1981). O’Grady and Tryon (1990) is a collection of articles in whichthe comparative method is applied to a number of Australian languagegroups.Chapter 5There is no single volume dealing with the sound systems of the Austrone-sian languages, such descriptions generally being incorporated in largercomparative or grammatical studies. Haudricourt et al. (1979) provides con-siderable information on New Caledonian phonologies, as does Krupa(1982) for Polynesian. Tryon (1994) and Lynch, Ross, and Crowley (1998)give briefer outlines of the phonologies of a wide range of Austronesian lan-guages.Foley (1986, chap. 3) and Dixon (1980, chaps. 6 and 7) provide generaloverviews of the phonology of Papuan and Australian languages, respec-tively. A fairly representative sample of Australian phonologies can be foundin the handbooks edited by Dixon and Blake (1979, 1981, 1983).Chapter 6Lynch, Ross, and Crowley (1998) provides a general coverage of Oceanicgrammar, as well as sketch grammars of almost four dozen Oceanic lan-guages. Ross (1988) contains general information on the grammars of West-ern Oceanic languages, while Blust (1978b), Tryon (1973), and Haudricourt(1971) contain general grammatical information on the languages of the Ad-280 Suggestions for Further Readingmiralties, Vanuatu, and New Caledonia, respectively. Bender (1971, 1984)provide general information on Micronesian languages, as does Krupa(1982) for Polynesian languages. For further details on any specific Oceaniclanguage, consult appendix 1, below.Chapter 7The best general introduction to the structure of Papuan languages is Foley(1986). Wurm (1975, 1982) also provide useful general information on arange of Papuan languages. Collections of articles on a number of languagesinclude Dutton (1975) and Franklin (1973, 1981). More detailed informationon individual languages can be found in the bibliographies to these works orin appendix 1, below.Chapter 8Dixon (1980) is a very good general survey of Australian languages, andit contains as well quite a detailed description of grammatical structure.Sketch grammars of particular languages, or treatments of particular gram-matical categories across a range of Australian languages, may be found inDixon (1976) and in Dixon and Blake (1979, 1981, 1983). Appendix 1, below,gives sources for a number of individual languages.Chapter 9Apart from the studies by Biggs on Rotuman and Thurston in northwestNew Britain, mentioned in this chapter, there are a number of other usefulworks about this topic. Collections of articles include Dutton (1992), Duttonand Tryon (1994), and Pawley and Ross (1994). Implications for prehistoriccontact on the classification of modern languages are discussed by Lynch(1981a, 1981b) and Pawley (1981). Among case studies of individual lan-guages or language communities, those by Siegel (1987) on Fiji and J. Lee(1987) on the Tiwi of Australia are of considerable interest.Chapter 10Verhaar (1990) is a collection of articles on Melanesian Pidgin. For specificvarieties of Melanesian Pidgin, the following should be consulted:1. Tok Pisin: Dutton with Thomas (1985), Mihalic (1971), Mühlhäusler(1979), Verhaar (1995), and Wurm and Mühlhäusler (1985).2. Pijin: Simons and Young (1978).3. Bislama: Crowley (1990a, 1990b), Tryon (1987).Suggestions for Further Reading 281On Hiri Motu and the Hiri Trading Languages, Dutton (1985) is thebest historical source. Grammatical treatments may be found in Wurm andHarris (1963) and Dutton and Voorhoeve (1974).For Fiji Hindi and other contact languages in Fiji, Siegel (1987) is theauthoritative source. Siegel (1977) is a brief introduction to the grammar ofFiji Hindi, and Hobbs (1985) is a dictionary of the language.Among discussions of Australian creoles, the following are of interest:for Broken (Torres Strait Creole), see Schnukal (1988); for Kriol (NorthernTerritory Creole), see Harris (1986) and Sandefur (1986).Chapter 11General coverages of the relationship between language, culture, andsocial organization, and the nature of the lexicons of Pacific languages,can be found in Dixon (1980), Foley (1986), Walsh and Yallop (1993), andWurm (1975, 1976, 1977). Smith (1988) provides a good discussion of therange of numeral and counting systems found in parts of the region.There is a growing literature on languages in use in both traditionaland modern societies. Important studies on socialization include Kulick(1992) and Schieffelin (1990) on New Guinea societies and Ochs (1988) onSamoa. There are a number of Pacific-oriented studies in Duranti and Good-win (1992) dealing with various aspects of the context of language use.As far as language and education are concerned, Baldauf and Luke(1990), Benton (1981), Brumby and Vászolyi (1977), and Mugler and Lynch(1996) provide a fairly wide coverage.ConclusionMost of the general surveys I have referred to above contain some referenceto attitudes toward and ideas about Pacific languages. There are a numberof articles specifically on this topic in the Handbook of Tok Pisin (Wurm andMühlhäusler 1985).282 Suggestions for Further ReadingAppendicesAPPENDIX 1Data SourcesBelow is a list of all languages from which data have been quoted in thebook, arranged on a broad genetic basis, together with their general loca-tions (see the maps in chapter 2) and the sources from which the data weretaken. JL indicates that some or all of the data are from my own knowledgeor unpublished research; PNG = Papua New Guinea.Location SourcesAustronesian LanguagesNon-OceanicChamorro Micronesia Topping (1973)Palauan Micronesia Josephs (1975)OceanicAdzera PNG Holzknecht (1989),Smith (1988)A‘jië New Caledonia Fontinelle (1976), Lichtenberk(1978)Anejom̃ Vanuatu Lynch (1982a, 1998), JLAroma PNG Crowley (1992), JLArosi Solomon Is. Capell (1971), Lynch and Horoi(1998)Banoni PNG Lincoln (1976)Big Nambas Vanuatu G. Fox (1979)Carolinian Micronesia Jackson and Marck (1991)Cèmuhî New Caledonia Rivierre (1980)285Drehu New Caledonia Moyse-Faurie (1983), Tryon(1968a)Fijian Fiji Geraghty (1983),Milner (1972),Schütz (1985), Schütz andKomaitai (1971), JLHawaiian Polynesia Elbert and Pukui (1979)Hula PNG Crowley (1992)Iaai New Caledonia Ozanne-Rivierre (1976), Tryon(1968b)Ifira-Mele Vanuatu Clark (1982)Jawe New Caledonia Haudricourt and Ozanne-Rivierre(1982)Kilivila PNG Senft (1986)Kiribati Micronesia Groves, Groves, and Jacobs(1985)Kosraean Micronesia K. Lee (1975)Kwamera Vanuatu Lindstrom (1986), Lindstrom andLynch (1994)Labu PNG Siegel (1984)Lagoon Trukese Micronesia Dyen (1965), Goodenough and Sugita(1980)Lenakel Vanuatu Lynch (1978), JLLewo Vanuatu Early (1994)Lusi PNG Thurston (1982, 1987, 1992)Maisin PNG Ross (1984), JLManam PNG Lichtenberk (1983)Māori Polynesia Bauer (1993), Biggs (1969), Ho-hepa (1967)Mapos PNG Smith (1988)Mari PNG Holzknecht (1989)Maringe Solomon Is. Ross (1988), White (1988)Marshallese Micronesia Bender (1969)Mekeo PNG Jones (1992)Mokilese Micronesia Harrison (1976)Mono-Alu Solomon Is. Fagan (1986), Ross (1988)Motu PNG Lister-Turner and Clark (n.d.),Crowley (1992), JLNadrau Fijian Fiji Geraghty (1983)Nakanai PNG Johnston (1980)Nakanamanga Vanuatu Schütz (1969)286 APPENDIX 1Nauruan Micronesia Kayser (1936), Rensch (1993)Nehan PNG Ross (1988), Todd (1978)Niuean Polynesia McEwen (1970)Nukuoro Micronesia Carroll (1965)Paamese Vanuatu Crowley (1982)Pije New Caledonia Haudricourt and Ozanne-Rivierre(1982)Ponapean Micronesia Rehg (1981)Port Sandwich Vanuatu Charpentier (1979)Puluwat Micronesia Elbert (1974)Raga Vanuatu D. Walsh (1966)Rapanui Polynesia Krupa (1982), Langdon andTryon (1983)Rarotongan Polynesia Savage (1980)Ririo Solomon Is. Laycock (1982b)Rotuman Fiji Churchward (1940),Biggs (1965)Roviana Solomon Is. Ross (1988), Corston (1998)Samoan Polynesia Duranti (1992),Marsack (1962),Milner (1966),Pawley (1966b)Sinagoro PNG Crowley (1992), Kolia (1975)Sissano PNG Laycock (1973)Southwest Tanna Vanuatu Lynch (1982b)Sye Vanuatu Crowley (1995), Lynch (1983)Tahitian Polynesia Tryon (1970)Tigak PNG Beaumont (1979)Titan PNG Ross (1988)To‘aba‘ita Solomon Is. Lichtenberk (1984)Tolai PNG Mosel (1980, 1984),Ross (1988)Tongan Polynesia Churchward (1953), Philips(1991)Trukese (see Lagoon Trukese)Ulithian Micronesia Sohn and Bender (1973)Vinmavis Vanuatu Crowley (1998)Wayan Fijian Fiji Pawley and Sayaba (1990)West Futuna Vanuatu Dougherty (1983)Woleaian Micronesia Harrison and Jackson (1984)Xârâcùù New Caledonia Haudricourt et al. (1979)Data Sources 287Yabêm PNG Bradshaw (1979), Ross (1993)Yapese Micronesia Jensen (1977)Papuan LanguagesAbelam PNG Laycock (1965)Abu‘ PNG Nekitel (1986)Alamblak PNG Bruce (1984), Foley (1986)Anêm PNG Thurston (1982, 1987, 1992)Anggor PNG Litteral (1981)Awa PNG Loving and Loving (1975)Baniata Solomon Is. Todd (1975)Barai PNG Olson (1975)Bilua Solomon Is. Todd (1975)Buin PNG Laycock (1975b, 1982a)Daga PNG Murane (1974)Enga PNG Lang (1973)Fore PNG Scott (1978)Grand ValleyDani Irian Jaya Foley (1986)Guhu-Samane PNG Smith (1988)Huli PNG Cheetham (1978)Iatmul PNG Foley (1986)Kalam PNG Pawley (1966a, 1992), Foley(1986)Kamasau PNG Sanders and Sanders (1980)Kapauku (Ekagi) Irian Jaya Price and Pospisil (1966), Smith(1988)Kâte PNG Foley (1986)Kewa PNG Franklin (1971), Franklin andFranklin (1978)Kobon PNG Davies (1980)Koita PNG Dutton (1975)Korafe PNG Farr and Farr (1975)Kuman PNG Piau (1981, 1985), JLMagi PNG Thomson (1975)Manem Irian Jaya Foley (1986)Melpa PNG Cochran (1977)Mountain Koiari PNG Garland and Garland (1975)Nimboran Irian Jaya Foley (1986)Numanggang PNG Smith (1988)Pawaian PNG Trefry (1969)Rotokas PNG Firchow and Firchow (1969)288 APPENDIX 1Salt-Yui PNG Irwin (1974)Selepet PNG Kulick (1992)Som PNG Smith (1988)Taiap PNG Kulick (1992)Toaripi PNG Franklin (1973)Vanimo PNG Ross (1980)Wahgi PNG Phillips (1976)Wantoat PNG Smith (1988)Waskia PNG Ross and Paol (1978)Wiru PNG Foley (1986)Yeletnye PNG Henderson (1975)Yimas PNG Foley (1986)Australian LanguagesAlawa Sharpe (1972)Anguthimri Crowley (1981)Bandjalang Crowley (1978, 1992)Diyari Dixon (1980)Djapu Morphy (1983)Dyirbal Dixon (1980)Gooniyandi McGregor (1994)Gumbaynggir Eades (1979)Guugu Yimidhirr Haviland (1979)Kaitij Dixon (1980)Kalkatungu Dixon (1980)Kunjen Sommer (1969)Lardil Dixon (1980)Margany Breen (1981)Murrinh-Patha M. Walsh (1993)Njamal Burling (1970)Pitta-Pitta Blake (1979)Tiwi J. Lee (1987)Uradhi Crowley (1983)Wajarri Douglas (1981)Walmajarri Dixon (1980)Wargamay Dixon (1981)Warlpiri Bavin (1993)Western Desert Dixon (1980)Wunambal Vászolyi (1976)Yanyuwa Bradley (1992)Yaygir Crowley (1979)Data Sources 289Yidiny Dixon (1980)Yukulta Keen (1983)Creoles, Pidgins, and KoinesBislama Vanuatu Crowley (1990a, 1990b),Tryon (1987), JLFiji Hindi Fiji Siegel (1977, 1987)Hiri TradingLanguagesPNG Dutton (1985)Hiri Motu PNG Dutton (1985)Melanesian Pidgin (see Bislama, Pijin, Tok Pisin)Pijin Solomon Is. Simons and Young(1978)Police Motu (see Hiri Motu)Tok Pisin PNG Dutton with Thomas(1985), Mihalic(1971), JL290 APPENDIX 1APPENDIX 2Phonetic SymbolsAs much as is possible in this book, I use the standard orthographies of thelanguages I describe. In discussing the sound systems of these languages,however, phonetic symbols representing the sounds are used. In addition,some Pacific languages do not have a standard—or any—orthography, sophonetic symbols are used in quoting data from these languages.The symbols I use are given in the following charts, with a brief descrip-tion of some of the sounds they represent. Different linguists occasionallyuse different symbols to represent the same sound. I have tried to be asconsistent as possible with the use of phonetic symbols in this book, oftenchanging the orthography of some of the original sources for this purpose.The system used here is based on the International Phonetic Alphabet, butdeviates from it in a number of respects.Symbols not on these charts, usually representing sounds referred toonly once in this book, are explained when they are used.Vowel SymbolsFront Central BackUnrounded Rounded Unrounded RoundedHIGHClose i ü ɨ uOpen I UMIDClose e ö ə oOpen ɛ ɔ291LOWClose æ œ ʌOpen a ɒLength is marked by a colon following the vowel: /a/ is a vowel of normallength, whereas /a:/ is a long vowel. Nasalization is marked by a tilde abovea vowel: /ã/ is the nasalized version of /a/.The technical terms used in describing consonants and vowels may befound in the glossary at the end of the book. A very brief guide to the pro-nunciation of the sounds symbolized above, especially the vowels and someof the unfamiliar consonant symbols, follows.VowelsApproximate pronunciations of some of these vowels are as follows.(Pronunciation is in educated Australian English unless otherwise indi-cated.)Front Vowels[i] as in heed [ü] as in French rue ‘street’[I] as in hit[e] as in French été ‘summer’ [ö] as in French feu ‘fire’[ɛ] as in bet [æ] as in French peur ‘fear’[æ] as in batCentral Vowels Back Vowels[ɨ] as in New Zealand English this [u] as in pool[U] as in pull[ə] as in ago, father [o] as in saw[ɔ] as in pot[Λ] as in but[a] as in bard [ɒ] as in BBC English partyConsonantsSymbols that look like, and are pronounced roughly like, thecorresponding English letter are not discussed here. Less familiar symbolsare briefly explained below.292 APPENDIX 2ConsonantSymbols velarizedbilabialbilabiallabiodentaldentalalveo-larretro-flexalveopalatalpalatalvelarlabiovelarglottalvoicelessstops:oralPwPt̪tṭtyckkwɁprenasalizedmpwmPn t̪n tn ṭn tyñ cŋ kŋ kwŋ Ɂvoicedstops:oralbwbd̪dḍdyjggwprenasalizedmbwmbn d̪n dn ḍn dyn̄ jŋ gŋ gwvoicelessaffricatests̪̪tstʃvoicedaffricatesd̪z̪dzdʒvoicelessfricativesfwΦfθsṣʃxxwhvoicedfricativesvwβvðzẓʒγγwvoicednasalsmwmn̪nṇñŋŋwvoicedlateralsl̪lḷλɫvoicedflaprvoicedtrill:oralr̃prenasalizedn r̃voicedsemivowelswryPhonetic Symbols 293English Sounds with Unfamiliar SymbolsThe following are English sounds, though the symbols are not always fa-miliar.[tʃ] as in church [dʒ] as judge[θ] as in think [ð] as in they[ʃ] as in shirt [ʒ] as in rouge[ŋ] as in singing [ṛ] as in runNon-English SoundsStops. Prenasalized stops are made with a nasal sound at the same time asthe stop: [mb], for example, is a bit like the mb in timber, but is a singlesound rather than two. Dental stops have the tongue tip touching the teeth,retroflex stops have the tongue tip curled back to the roof of the mouth,and palatal stops are made with the blade of the tongue on the roof of themouth.Fricatives. The bilabial fricatives [β ϕ] are very similar to English [f v], ex-cept that both lips are used, and the teeth are not. The velar fricatives [x γ]parallel the stops [k g], except that a little air is allowed to escape.Nasals. [ñ] is pronounced as in Spanish señor.Laterals. [λ] is pronounced like ly run quickly together, while [ɫ] is pro-nounced like gl run together.Flaps and trills. [r] is a single flap, as in Spanish pero ‘but,’ while [r]̃ is a trillor roll, as in Spanish perro ‘dog.’294 APPENDIX 2APPENDIX3Sample Phoneme SystemsVowel SystemsMicronesiaKosraean Mokilesei ɨ u i ue ǝ o e oɛ Λ ɛ ɔæ a ɒ aMelanesia: AustronesianPort Sandwich Labui ü u i ue ö o e oɛ ɔa aIaai Xârâcùùi ü u i ĩ ɨ ɨ ̃ u ũe ö ǝ o e ǝ oɛ œ ɔ ɛ ɛ̃ ɔ ɔ̃a a ã295AustraliaAnguthimrii i: ĩ ü u u:e e: ẽ ö oæ æ: æ̃a a: ãConsonant SystemsMicronesiaNote: The symbol /R/ is used here to refer to a Nauruan consonant describedas “a kind of r whose exact nature is unknown. It may be palatalized…. Itsounds partially devoiced and appears to be quite fortis” (Nathan 1973, 482).Nauruanpw p t k kwbw b d g gwmw m n ŋ ŋwmw: m: n: ŋ: ŋw:r̃Rw yKosraeanpw p tw t kw kfw f s ʃw ʃmw m nw n nw ŋlw lrYapesep p̕ t t̕ ṭ k k̕ ʔb d ḍ gf fʼ θ θʼ ṣ hm m̕ n n̕ ŋ ŋ'l l̕r̃w w' y y'296 APPENDIX 3Melanesia: AustronesianPort Sandwich BanoniPw P t c k P t ts kbw b d g b d dz gmbw mb nr ŋgs x s hvw v v γmw m n ŋ m n ŋl r̃r̃Ririo Adzerap t ts k ʔ P t c k ʔmP nt ñc ŋk ŋʔb d j gmb nd ndz ŋg ñjs f s hv z γm n ŋ m n ŋlr rw yPije DrehuPhw Ph th khpw p t c k p t ṭ c kmbw mb nd ñj ŋg b d ḍ gɸ f s x f θ s x hv ð zmw m n ñ ŋ m n ñ ŋm̥w m̥ n̥ ñ̥ ŋ ̥ m̥ n̥ ñ̥ ŋ ̥l ll ̥ l ̥w y ww̥ y̥ w̥Sample Phoneme Systems 297Melanesia: PapuanAwa AbauP t k ʔ p kb gs s hm n m nr rw y w yKobon Kâtep t k kpb d g b d g gbf s x h f s hvts tsdz dzm n ñ m n ŋl ḷ λr̃ rw y ŋ yWahgiP t kmb nd ngnd̪z̪s̪m n̪ n ŋl ̪ l ɫw yAustraliaAnguthimriP t ̪ t tr ty k ʔmb nd̪ nd ndr ndy gv ð Ʒ γm n̪ n ñ ŋlrw y298 APPENDIX 3APPENDIX 4Glossary of Technical TermsThis glossary of technical terms used in the text is intended to assist thegeneral reader to understand the basic meanings of those terms. For thisreason, many technicalities and intricacies have been deliberately omitted.ablative. A case marking the direction from which the action proceeds.absolute dating. In prehistory, the assignment of an actual (approxi-mate) date for a particular event (say, the breakup of a language family).See also relative dating.absolutive. The case of the object and the intransitive subject in an erga-tive language.accusative language. A language (like English) where the subjects oftransitive and intransitive verbs are marked in the same way and theobject of transitive verbs is marked differently. Also called nominative-accusative languages.active voice. A sentence is in the active voice when the subject of theverb is also the performer of the action, as in John hit the dog. See alsopassive voice.adjective. A class of words whose function is to describe nouns.adjunct, adjunct construction. A construction, common in Papuan lan-guages, in which a noun or an adjective (an adjunct) is bound closelywith a verb, expressing an idea that is often expressed by a single verbin other languages.affix. A morpheme attached to a root. An affix may not occur by itself. Seealso infix, prefix, suffix.affricate. A consonant combining a stop with a fricative release, like thesound of ch [tf] in English chin.299agent. (1) The performer of an action; often the semantic (but not the gram-matical) subject in a passive sentence, like Fred in The window was brokenby Fred. (2) The subject of a transitive verb in an ergative language.alienable possession. A construction in which the possessor is in con-trol of the relationship with what is possessed. See also inalienablepossession.allative. A case marking the direction toward which action proceeds.alveolar. Made by the tip of the tongue touching the ridge behind the topteeth, as for [t d].alveopalatal. Made with the front part of the tongue touching the frontof the roof of the mouth as far forward as the alveolar ridge, as for [ʃ].anaphoric. Referring to something already mentioned.antipassive. A structure found in ergative languages to derive intransi-tive sentences from underlying transitive ones.aorist. A tense that marks an action as non-future but does not specifywhether it is present or past.apical. Made with the tip of the tongue, like [t].apicolabial. A sound produced with the tip of the tongue touching thetop lip.applicative. Marking the instrument with which the action was per-formed, the reason for the performance of the action, and similar roles.Often referred to as the “remote transitive.”article. A morpheme that marks some aspect of the class or reference ofa noun. The English articles a and the, for example, mark a noun as in-definite and definite, respectively.aspect. Expresses the duration of the event or state referred to by theverb, or the manner in which the action or state is carried out. The dif-ference between He went and He was going in English is one of aspect(punctiliar vs. continuous). See also tense.aspiration. The puff of air accompanying the production of certainsounds. English p and t in words like peach and tick are aspirated; inwords like speech and stick they are not aspirated.asterisk (*). Symbol used to mark an utterance as not (normally) occur-ring, either (1) because it is ungrammatical, e.g., *They will went today or(2) because it is a reconstruction for a particular protolanguage, and hasnot actually been attested, e.g., Proto Oceanic *paka- ‘causative prefix.’Australian. A language family consisting of nearly all aboriginal lan-guages of Australia.Austronesian. A large family of languages, whose members are found ina few areas on the Asian mainland, in island Southeast Asia, Madagas-300 APPENDIX 4car, parts of the New Guinea area, most of the rest of Melanesia, and inMicronesia and Polynesia.auxiliary. A morpheme with little semantic content that functions tocarry tense and sometimes other grammatical information in the verbphrase, like did in Did you see it?avoidance style. A variety of a language in which the speaker has toavoid certain terms (e.g., names of recently dead people or of in-laws).back vowel. A vowel made with the highest part of the tongue in the backof the mouth, like those in English sue and saw.benefactive. A case marking the beneficiary of an action.binary numeral system. A system of counting based on two.bilabial. A consonant made with both lips, like [m].borrowing. A process whereby speakers of one language adopt somefeatures of another language. Sometimes called copying.bound morpheme. See affix.case. An indication of the role of a noun phrase in a clause or sentence.causative. Bringing about the action of a verb or the quality of a noun oradjective. Compare Tongan mohe ‘to sleep’ and fakamohe ‘to put (some-one) to sleep,’ with the causative prefix faka-.central vowel. A vowel in which the highest part of the tongue is in thecenter of the mouth, as in English bird and bard.classifier. A morpheme marking a noun as belonging to a particular class.clause. A group of phrases containing one predicate.clitic. An affix attached to a phrase rather than a word, like the Englishpossessive suffix ’s, which is attached to the last word in the possessornoun phrase, as in the President of the United States of America’s hat.close vowel. A vowel made with more tension than its open equivalent;the vowel in English seat is close, but the vowel in sit is open.closed syllable. A syllable ending in a consonant. See open syllable.coarticulated sound. A single sound involving two simultaneous but dif-ferent articulations. The labial-velar stop /kp/ is an example.code-switching. A situation in a bilingual or multilingual context wherepeople switch from using one language to using another one.cognate. Words in different languages whose meanings correspond andwhose forms are related through regular sound correspondences. Cog-nates by implication all derive from a single protoform.comitative. A marker of accompaniment, like with in He came with me.commonancestor. The language ancestral to a group of related languages. Acommon ancestor may be either known through documentary records or elsehypothesizedorinferred(inwhichcaseitisreferredtoasaprotolanguage).Glossary of Technical Terms 301common article. An article used with common nouns.common noun. A noun that is not the name of a specific individual.comparative linguistics. See historical-comparative linguistics.completive. An aspect that marks an action as completed.compound preposition/postposition. A compound of a locational nounand a preposition (or postposition) introducing a prepositional (or post-positional) phrase—for example, in back of, compared with behind.conjugation. A set of verbal affixes. Different verbs take different af-fixes, which thus distinguish different conjugational classes or conjuga-tions (as in Latin).conjunction. A morpheme joining two clauses, like and, if or.consonant cluster. Two or more consonants coming together with no in-tervening vowel.consonant length. A long consonant takes almost twice as long to ar-ticulate as a short consonant. Difference in consonant length is phone-mic in many languages.construct suffix. A suffix added to a directly possessed noun, or to a pos-sessive marker when the possessor is a noun phrase.continuous. An aspect marking action as continuing over a period of time.copying. See borrowing.creole. A pidgin language that becomes the first language of a signifi-cant number of people and that (in comparison with the pidgin) is muchless simplified. The process by which creoles develop is known as cre-olization.dative. A case marking the receiver of the object or the person spoken to.daughter language. A descendant of a protolanguage.decimal numeral system. A system of counting based on ten.demonstrative. A morpheme locating a noun in space (or time), oftenwith reference to its position with respect to the speaker and the ad-dressee, like English this, that.dental. Made by the tongue touching the top teeth, like the two Englishth-sounds [θ ð].derivational affix. An affix that turns one part of speech into another,like English -ize, which turns nouns into verbs.descriptive linguistics. The branch of linguistics that deals with theanalysis and description of the grammars of languages.diacritic. Any mark added to a letter. Accents are the most common dia-critics.dialect. Differences between communities’ ways of speaking the samelanguage that are not great enough to prevent normal communication302 APPENDIX 4between the communities concerned. Dialectal differences may bephonological, grammatical, or lexical.dialect chain. A series of dialects without any clear language boundarybetween any two neighboring dialects, although people whose dialectsare not neighboring speak what seem to be different languages.dialect mixing. See koine.diglossia. A situation in which two quite different dialects of a languageare used side by side, one in formal contexts and the other in informalcontexts (such as Standard Hindi and Fiji Hindi in Fiji).digraph. Two letters representing a single phoneme. In English (andmany other languages), for example, the digraph ng represents the sin-gle sound [ŋ].direct possession. A type of construction in which a possessive pronounis directly attached to the possessed noun, e.g., Motu tama-gu ‘my fa-ther,’ where -gu ‘my’ is directly suffixed to tama ‘father.’ See also indi-rect possession.directional particle. A particle marking the direction of the action orsome other spatial or contextual reference.discontinuous morpheme. A morpheme occurring in two separate parts,like the French negative ne preceding the verb and pas following it.distant demonstrative. A demonstrative referring to someone or some-thing distant from both speaker and addressee.dual number. Referring to two and only two.emblematic function of language. The use of linguistic fea-tures—often deliberately exaggerated or created—to mark a group’sidentity and to accentuate its differences from other groups.ergative (or ergative-absolutive) language. A language in which thesubject of a transitive verb is marked in one way and the subject of anintransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb are marked in a dif-ferent way. The ergative case is the case of the transitive subject.exclusive first person. A pronoun referring to the speaker and someother person or persons, but not the person(s) being spoken to, for ex-ample, Bislama mifala ‘we (he and I, they and I).’ See also inclusivefirst person.family tree. A schematic representation of the subgroups of a languagefamily and thus of the degrees of relationship between member lan-guages.final verb. The last verb in the sentence. In a language with aswitch-reference system, this is the verb fully marked for tense-aspectand features of the subject.Glossary of Technical Terms 303flap. Aconsonantmadebyoneveryfaststrikeofthetongueonthealveolarridge.Infastcasualspeech,thedd inEnglish ladder isoftenpronouncedasaflap[r].free morpheme. A morpheme that may stand on its own as a word.fricative. A consonant made by allowing a small amount of air to escapeunder considerable friction, as with English [f v s z].front vowel. A vowel made with the highest part of the tongue in thefront of the mouth, as in English seat and set.genetic inheritance, genetic relationship. Descended from a com-mon ancestor (said of languages). Deriving from phonemes or words inthe ancestor language (said of phonemes, words, and so on).glottal. Made in the glottis, like [h].glottal stop. A consonant, symbolized [ʔ], in which the stream of air iscompletely stopped in the glottis. (Cockneys are supposed to substitutea glottal stop for tt in words like butter and better.)glottalization. Simultaneous closure of the glottis in the production of anonglottal consonant.glottochronology. A technique, now shown to be unreliable, for datingthe splits in a protolanguage.goal. The noun phrase at which the action of the verb is aimed.habitual. An aspect indicating that an action is performed regularly as ahabit or custom.head. The main word in a phrase.high vowel. A vowel made with the tongue high in the mouth, like thevowels in English see and sue.historical-comparative linguistics. The branch of linguistics thatseeks to discover the history of a group of languages through comparingthem. Sometimes referred to as comparative linguistics.imperative. The modality of a command.imperfective. An aspect indicating that action is not seen as completed.inalienablepossession. Aconstruction inwhich thepossessordoesnotcontrolpossession.Oftenusedofbodypartsorrelatives.Seealienablepossession.inceptive. An aspect indicating that action is seen as beginning.inchoative. Inceptive.inclusive first person. A pronoun including the speaker and the personor persons spoken to, e.g., Bislama yumi ‘we (you and I).’ See alsoexclusive first person.independent pronoun. A pronoun that may occur alone, as opposed toother types of pronouns, which occur only as prefixes or suffixes.indirect possession. A construction in which a possessive pronoun is notattached to the possessed noun (as in direct possession) but to some304 APPENDIX 4other morpheme, e.g., Motu e-gu ruma ‘my house,’ where -gu ‘my’ is at-tached to the possessive marker e- and not to the noun ruma ‘house.’infix. An affix inserted inside a root. Tolai, for example, changes verbs intonounswith the infix -in-,as inmat ‘die,’m-in-at ‘death.’Seealsoprefix,suffix.instrumental. A case marking the instrument with which the action isperformed.intentional. An aspect marking the fact that the subject intends to per-form the action.intermediate demonstrative. A demonstrative referring to someone orsomething near the addressee but not near the speaker.interstage language. An intermediate protolanguage, which is both adaughter of the common ancestor of a whole family and the ancestor ofone subgroup of that family.intransitive. A verb with no object; a clause or sentence containing sucha verb as the main verb: e.g., They are sleeping. See also transitive.irrealis. An aspect or mood marking an action or state as not real, i.e.,not having taken place or existing. See also realis.isolate. A language that appears to be related to no other language.koine. A language that develops (through a process known as koineiza-tion, sometimes called dialect mixing), out of contact between andmixing of a number of dialects.labiodental. Consonants produced by touching the top teeth to the bot-tom lip, like [f v].labiovelar. Velar consonants produced with simultaneous lip-rounding,like [kw].laminal. Made with the blade of the tongue, like sh in English (phoneti-cally [ʃ]).language family. A group of related languages deriving from a commonancestor (actual or hypothesized).Lapita. A distinctive pottery style found in the Pacific. Lapita culturerefers to the culture associated with this pottery style, assumed to bethe culture of speakers of Proto Oceanic and its immediate descendants.lateral. A sound made when air passes around the sides of the tongue; [l]is a typical lateral.lexicostatistics. A statistical technique for measuring the degree of re-lationship between languages by comparing similarities in basic or non-cultural vocabulary.lingua franca. A language used as a common language between peo-ple who speak different vernaculars.linguistics. The systematic study of language.Glossary of Technical Terms 305locative. A case marking the place where an action takes place.long consonant. See consonant length.long vowel. See vowel length.low vowel. A vowel made with the tongue low in the mouth, like the vow-els in English back and bark.macron. A bar over a vowel, used in many Pacific (and other) languagesto indicate vowel length: e.g., ā = [a:].medial verb. In a language with a switch-reference system, any but thelast verb in a sentence. Medial verbs usually do not mark tense or sub-ject but do indicate whether the next subject is the same or different.Melanesian Pidgin. Cover term for the different English-lexifier pid-gins/creoles spoken in Melanesia, specifically Tok Pisin (Papua NewGuinea), Pijin (Solomon Islands), and Bislama (Vanuatu).metathesis. A morphophonemic process by which phonemes changeplaces. Adding the Lenakel trial suffix -hel to the pronoun kami- ‘you’produces kamhiel ‘you three’ (not *kamihel), with metathesis of i and h.mid vowel. A vowel made with the tongue between the high and low po-sitions, like the vowels in English bed and bird.“mixed” language. A language that has been so heavily influenced by-one or more unrelated languages that its family membership is notobvious.modality. See mood.moiety. One of two units into which is a society is divided, all members ofthe society belonging to one or the other moiety.mood. Marker of whether the event or state described by the verb is seenas being actual/realized or non-actual/unrealized.morpheme. The smallest meaningful unit in a language. The Englishword ungodly contains three morphemes, the prefix un-, the root god,and the suffix -ly.morphology. (1) The study of morphemes; (2) the way in which mor-phemes combine to form words in a language.morphophonemics. The study of sound changes that take place whenmorphemes combine to form words.nasal. A sound produced through the nose. Consonants like [m n] arenasals, and vowels like those in French vin blanc are nasal vowels.nominal sentence. A sentence in which the predicate is not a verbphrase. See also verbal sentence.nominalizer. A morpheme that converts a verb into a noun; the processis called nominalization.non-Austronesian. See Papuan.306 APPENDIX 4non-Pama-Nyungan. Languages in the north-west of Australia, distin-guished from Pama-Nyungan languages by having prefixes as well assuffixes.noun class. Nouns that take a different set of affixes for the same func-tions belong to different noun classes (like the Latin declensions).noun phrase. A phrase in which the head is a noun.number. The marking in a noun, verb, or some other word of linguisti-cally recognized categories relating to the number of participants—likesingular, dual, plural.numeral. An exact number (two, three, seventeen, etc.). See quantifier.numeral classifier. A classifier used with a numeral in a noun phrase tomark the class of the head of the phrase.object. The goal of the action of an active verb. In the sentence The boyhit the dog, the object is the dog.object marker. A form of a pronoun that occurs within a verb complex tomark the person and number of the object.Oceanic. A subgroup of the Austronesian family. It includes all the lan-guages of Polynesia and almost all the Austronesian languages ofMelanesia and Micronesia.open syllable. A syllable ending in a vowel. See closed syllable.open vowel. See close vowel.orthography. The letters used to represent the sounds or phonemes of alanguage; spelling.palatal. Produced by touching the blade of the tongue to the palate. They sound of many languages is a palatal consonant.Pama-Nyungan. Cover term for a large group of Australian languagesdistinguished mainly by a suffixing morphology.Papuan. Cover term for a number of language families in Melanesia notbelonging to the Austronesian family.particle. Words whose principal function is grammatical. Particles arepronounced and/or written as separate words rather than as affixes.passive voice. A sentence is in the passive voice when the subject of the verbis the goal of the action: e.g., The dog was hit by John. See active voice.paucal. Referring to a small number, though more than two.penultimate stress. Stress applied to the next-to-last syllable of words.phoneme. A significant unit of sound in a particular language.phonemics. See phonology.phonetics. The study of the sounds used in languages.phonology. (1) The study of the significant sounds and the sound pat-terns of a particular language; (2) the sound system of a language.Glossary of Technical Terms 307phrase. A group of words functioning as a unit in a clause.phylum. A group of related stocks.pidgin. A simplified language, usually no one’s first language, which de-velops (through the process of pidginization) in a multilingual contactsituation to allow for intergroup communication.Polynesian Outliers. Genetic members of the Polynesian linguistic sub-group that are spoken outside geographical Polynesia.possessive affix. A pronominal form marking the person and number ofthe possessor.possessive classifier. A classifier used in a possessive construction tomark the class of the possessed noun.possessive marker. A marker used in an indirect possessive construc-tion, to which pronoun affixes are attached.postpositions. Grammatical markers that follow noun phrases, markingthem as postpositional phrases, and that either indicate the relationshipbetween them and other noun phrases or mark their function in the sen-tence. See preposition.predicate. That part of a clause that comments on the topic or subject. Ina verbal sentence, the predicate is a verb phrase, but in a nominal sen-tence it may be a noun phrase, an adjective phrase, etc.prefix. An affix that precedes the root, like re- in rewrite. See also infix,suffix.prehistory. That part of the past before the period covered by writtenrecords.prenasalization. The production of a nasal immediately before, and aspart of, the production of a following sound. For example, both the d andb in Fijian dabe ‘sit’—phonetically [ndambe]—are prenasalized.prepositions. Grammatical markers that precede a noun phrase and in-dicate the relationship between it and other noun phrases or mark itsfunction in the sentence. Prepositions in English include in, to, for, from,by, with, at, and so on. See also postpositions.prepositional phrase. A noun phrase introduced by a preposition; e.g.,In the morning they walked to the store.proper article. An article used with proper nouns.proper noun. The name of a specific individual.prosodic features. See suprasegmental phonology.Proto Australian. The protolanguage from which all Australian lan-guages are presumed to have derived.Proto Austronesian. The protolanguage from which all members of theAustronesian family are presumed to have derived.308 APPENDIX 4protolanguage. The hypothesized common ancestor of a group of lan-guages that, on the basis of comparative evidence, appear to be geneti-cally related.Proto Oceanic. The protolanguage from which all members of theOceanic subgroup of Austronesian are presumed to have derived.proximate demonstrative. A demonstrative referring to someone orsomething near the speaker.quantifier. Amorphememarkingapproximatenumber (like some, few,many).quinary numeral system. A system of counting based on five.realis. An aspect or mood marking the fact that the action or state actu-ally happened or existed. See also irrealis.reciprocal. Performing an action on each other, as in They kissed eachother.reconstruction. A procedure by which, through comparison of cognateforms, an educated guess is made about the phonemes, words, or gram-matical structures of a protolanguage.reduplication. A process whereby all (complete reduplication) or part(partial reduplication) of a word or root is repeated, usually involvinga different grammatical function or a slight change in meaning: e.g.,Hawaiian ‘aki ‘to take a nip and let go,’ ‘aki-‘aki ‘to nibble (as a fish),’‘a-‘aki ‘to nip repeatedly.’regular sound correspondence. In cognate words in two or more lan-guages, the systematic and predictable correspondence of a particularsound in one language to a particular sound in the other language(s).related languages. Languages descended from a common ancestor.relative dating. In prehistory, a statement that one event took placebefore (or after) another, without the assignment of an actual date to ei-ther event. See absolute dating.relative pronoun. The pronoun that takes the place of a noun when onesentence is embedded in another, like who in The man who came yester-day will come again today.retroflex. Produced with the tip of the tongue turned back to the roof ofthe mouth.rhotic. Any r- like sound.root. A morpheme to which affixes can be attached.rounded vowel. A vowel made with the lips rounded, like [u] in do and[o] in short.segmental phonology. That area of phonology dealing with the seg-ments of speech—consonants and vowels. See also suprasegmentalphonology.Glossary of Technical Terms 309semivowel. A consonant with vowel-like qualities, like [w] and [y], whichare similar in some ways to [u] and [i].sentence. A group of one or more clauses that can stand alone withoutrequiring the addition of any more phrases.sequential. An aspect indicating that an action follows the action of theprevious verb.serial construction. A construction involving the stringing together oftwo or more verbs in a single clause.shared innovation. A change from the protolanguage shared only bycertain members of the family. Shared innovations are one of the criteriafor delimiting a subgroup.short consonant. See consonant length.short vowel. See vowel length.sound correspondence. See regular sound correspondence.split-ergative language. One in which certain nouns function erga-tively and others (including pronouns) function accusatively.stative. Expressing a state rather than an event or an action.stock. A group of related families. See also phylum.stop. A sound whose production involves the complete blockage of the airflow, like English [p t k].stress. Emphasis placed on one of the syllables of a word, making it moreprominent than the others, as in the third syllable of university.subgroup. A group of languages within a family, more closely related toeach other than any is to any other language.subject. The topic in a nominal sentence, or the doer of the action or ex-periencer of the state in a verbal sentence.subject marker. A form of a pronoun occurring within a verb complex tomark the person and the number of the subject.suffix. An affix following the root, like -ing in raining. See also infix, prefix.suprasegmental phonology. The area of phonology that deals with as-pects of speech that cannot be segmented, like stress, tone, and intona-tion. See also segmental phonology.switch-reference. A grammatical category marked on verbs that indi-cates whether the subject of a verb is the same as, or different from, thesubject of some other verb.taxonomy. A classification of words in which there is a generic, overarch-ing term and a number of levels of specific terms. The lower-level termsare members of the higher-level terms’ families.tense. The time of the action or state referred to by the verb in relation tothe time of speaking or writing (or, occasionally, in relation to some other310 APPENDIX 4time): The difference between I went, I am going, and I will go, is one oftense—past, present, and future. In many cases, a marker of tense alsomarks aspect; such markers are referred to as tense-aspect markers.ternary numeral system. A system of counting based on three.thematic consonant (vowel). A consonant (or vowel) not present whenthe root occurs alone, but which surfaces when an affix is added: e.g.,in Palauan char ‘price,’ one must add the thematic vowel a before anypossessive suffix. Historically, thematic vowels or consonants may havebeen part of the root that were lost except in such environments.tone. For our purposes, changes in pitch that causes changes in mean-ings of a word. Such tone is phonemic tone.transitive. Having an object (of a verb); containing such a verb as themain verb (of a clause or a sentence). Example: They are eating icecream. See intransitive.trial number. Referring to three and only three.trigraph. Three letters representing a single phoneme.trill. A series of very fast flaps giving a rolling sound (phonetically [r])found, for example, in Scots English.unrounded vowel. A vowel made with the lips not rounded, like the vow-els of seed and sad.velar. Made in the back of the mouth, like [k].velarized bilabial. A bilabial sound produced by simultaneously raisingthe tongue at the back of the mouth, giving an accompanying w-sound:e.g., [mw].verb. A class of words expressing actions and states.verb complex. A phrase in which the head is a verb.verb root. The form of the verb with no affixes.verb serialization. See serial construction.verbal sentence. A sentence whose predicate is a verb complex. Seealso nominal sentence.vernacular. The language of a community, which is little used outsidethat community.voice. See active voice; passive voice.voiced and voiceless sounds. A sound is voiced if the vocal folds vibrateduring its production, and voiceless if they do not: The voiced sounds [bv z] have voiceless equivalents [p f s].vowel copying. Occurs in an affix whose vowel is a complete copy ofsome other vowel in the root. In Bislama, when the verbs kuk ‘cook’, kil‘hit,’ and sem ‘shame’ take the transitive suffix vowel +m, the vowel is acopy of the vowel of the root: kuk-um, kil-im, sem-em.Glossary of Technical Terms 311vowel length. A long vowel takes almost twice as long to articulate asa short vowel. Difference in vowel length is phonemic in many lan-guages.word. The smallest freely pronounceable unit in a language.word taboo. A practice whereby the name of a relative of a particularcategory, or of a recently dead person, or any word that sounds like thatname, may not be uttered. A synonym or a borrowed word must be usedin its place.312 APPENDIX 4NotesCHAPTER 11. Some linguists use the term “verb phrase” to represent this type of unit, butothers use it to refer to the verb complex together with the object. I do not use theterm in this book.2. The first and third sentences could stand on their own with the assistance ofcontext, that is, they would both be acceptable answers to the question “Who werekilling the cats?” They could not, however, stand in isolation, or as, say, the first sen-tence in a conversation.3. See section 2.1 in the next chapter for a discussion of the concept of dialect.CHAPTER 21. In the absence of other evidence, the number of speakers in the region wouldlead us to predict the existence of about six languages, not fourteen hundred, as-suming that all the world’s languages had an equal number of speakers.2. The points of the Polynesian Triangle are Hawai‘i to the north, New Zealandto the southwest, and Easter Island to the southeast.3. Crowley (1994) estimates that Paamese currently has about 4,750 speakers, al-thoughTryonandCharpentier (1989)put thenumberof speakers ataround2,400.Evenwith changes of this order in the figures for some other languages, however, no Vanuatulanguage has anywhere near 10,000 speakers.4. The Western Desert language has a variety of local dialect names, but no in-digenous name for the whole language.5. The name Nakanamanga, both widely and commonly used by speakers of the lan-guage, may have been avoided by missionaries who had some experience with Fijian,since this term is obscene in that language.313CHAPTER 31. The family was for a long time called “Malayo-Polynesian,” but because thisterm appeared to exclude the languages of Melanesia and Micronesia, most schol-ars have adopted the term “Austronesian” (lit., southern islands).2. Most of the groups mentioned here correspond to those listed in Pawley andRoss 1995, an admirable summary of the current state of research. (Exactly howa small group of Oceanic languages in northeast Irian Jaya is related to the restof the languages of the subgroup is still not clear.) In a few cases, I have incorpo-rated more recent research. In such cases I have specified the source. Lynch, Ross,and Crowley (1998) suggest that groups five through eight may belong to a singleCentral-Eastern Oceanic group.3. For a brief discussion of lexicostatistics, see 1.3.3, above.4. I do not list the actual terms here. For both a list and more detailed discus-sion, see Chowning (1991) and Pawley and Ross (1995).CHAPTER 51. Recall from the discussion in chapter 1 that the sounds of languages areorganized into a number of sound units, or phonemes. In discussing individual pro-nunciations of words, linguists use square brackets [ ], while phonemes are writtenbetween slant lines / /. I use italics for single letters. Appendix 2 provides a chart ofthe phonetic symbols used in this book, and appendix 3 gives some examples of thevowel and consonant systems of a number of Pacific languages.2. I make occasional reference in this section to the two non-Oceanic languagesspoken in Micronesia, Palauan and Chamorro.3. The contexts need not concern us here. But see 6.2.1 below and Churchward(1940, 14).4. The phonetic explanation for this seems to be that the production of voice-less obstruents involves greater muscle tension and a higher larynx than does theproduction of voiced obstruents, and greater muscle tension and a higher larynxare associated with higher pitch (Clark and Yallop 1990, 282–283).5. The Rotokas voiced phonemes /v r g/ are pronounced as nasals [m n ŋ] insome phonetic environments.6. Tone marking has been omitted from these examples so as not to obscure theplacement of stress.7. “On the whole these [tonal systems] seem better analyzed as pitch-accentsystems rather than as genuine tonal systems. The vast majority of such Papuanlanguages have a single contrast between high and low tone, and this suggests apitch-accent system with a contrast between accented syllables and unaccentedones” (Foley 1986, 63).8. Unfortunately, the sources do not show full contrast, as there appears to beno word /nǎ/ that would contrast with the other three words listed here.9. The Rapanui (Easter Island) rongorongo may be an exception to this, althoughit was apparently a system of mnemonics rather than a writing system per se.314 Notes10. Many nonlinguists do not conceive of the glottal stop as a proper consonant,but more as a “break” between two vowels. In his grammar of Tongan, Churchwardis at pains to correct this misconception and to stress the consonantal nature of theglottal stop: “To call it the break, as is sometimes done, is convenient but is rathermisleading” (Churchward 1953, 1).11. The Catholic forms have eventually been adopted, partly because they cor-respond most closely to the English system, and partly due to the influence ofWantok newspaper, the first Tok Pisin newspaper, which was originally produced bythe Catholic Church.12. This principle was taken to its ridiculous extreme in Erromango (Vanuatu),where early missionaries wrote /au/ as x and /oi/ as c.13. The only violation of this principle has been the use of the digraph dr to rep-resent /nr/̃. The controversy, which surfaces every so often, usually takes the form ofpressure to revise Fijian orthography more in the direction of English, and to writemb, th, and so on for what are currently written as b and c.14. This convention is based on German orthography.CHAPTER 61. Note that the Fijian pronouns given here (and elsewhere) have a preposedpersonal article (see 6.2.2 below), which is i in the Nadrau dialect given here and oin Standard Fijian and some other dialects. I sometimes refer to Standard (Bauan)Fijian simply as “Fijian,” but specify other varieties by name (e.g., “Nadrau Fijian”).2. The Nehan forms are those used in past tense. Non-past forms are slightlydifferent, involving the loss of initial k in most persons and the replacement of kwith m in the first person exclusive and the second person plural.3. The variation in the third person plural in Kiribati is between animate (-iia)and inanimate (-i) objects.The forms given for the subject markers in table 5 are what appear to be theunderlying forms. There is considerable variation in current usage as a result ofchanges in progress in this system (see Lynch 1995).4. In citing Rotuman data, I use standard orthographic symbols for consonants,but phonetic symbols for vowels, since the system of vowel diacritics in Rotumanorthography is somewhat unwieldy.5. Many of these languages probably once did have at least one article, derivingfrom the Proto Oceanic common article *na. In Vanuatu especially, however, this ar-ticle has become attached to the noun and now forms part of the noun root, thoughit may be removed in certain contexts (cf. the discussion on pluralization in Anejom̃in the previous section).6. In Fijian, ko tends to be used quite often in writing where o is used in speech,while a is sometimes used instead of na. This variation is not important for ourpurposes here. I will continue to gloss articles as “a” or “the,” adding additional in-formation (personal, plural, etc.) where relevant.7. Ke is most often used before words beginning with a, e, o, and k, while katends to precede words beginning with i, u, and any consonant except k.Notes 3158. The numeral for one does not usually follow the same pattern in these lan-guages.9. The vowels of some of the possessive markers in both languages undergomorphophonemic changes in various environments. Note that, in both Paameseand Fijian, the markers for food and for passivity are formally identical. As somelanguages mark these two categories differently, there is good reason for believingthat these were distinct in Proto Oceanic.10. Generally, however, the form, function, and semantics of possessive classi-fiers are different from those of numeral classifiers. Some languages, like Kiribatiand Kilivila, for example, have elaborate numeral classifier systems but no corre-spondingly elaborate possessive classifier systems.11. I say “for the most part” because there are vestiges of the direct construc-tion in some of these languages (cf. Wilson 1982, 35–40).12. The Nukuoro orthography used here differs slightly from that in the originalsource (Carroll 1965): I write the simple stops p t k and the long stops pp tt kk; Car-roll writes the simple stops b d g and the long stops p t k.13. I use the term “verb complex” in place of “verb phrase,” which has differentmeanings in different theoretical approaches to linguistics. The term “particle”refers to words that have a grammatical function (marking tense or negation, forexample) rather than a lexical one (denoting some thing, action, or quality in thereal world), but which are pronounced and written as separate words and not asprefixes or suffixes.14. Thus I had drunk (completive), I used to drink (habitual), I was drinking(continuous), and I drank (punctiliar) illustrate different aspects of the English verbin the past tense.15. Rotuman is somewhat unusual in having no preverbal subject markers andin marking the person and number of the subject of a stative verb by a suffix:Iris la joni-eris.they FUTURE run:away-they:STATIVE“They will run away.”16. To some extent, this consonant reflects an earlier morpheme-final conso-nant that has been lost in word-final position. Take, for example, Fijian kini ‘pinch,’whose transitive form is kini-ti. This verb derives from Proto Oceanic *giñit, and theintransitive form kini has lost the final *-t quite regularly. The transitive form kini-tiderives from *giñit-i, from which *-t- was not lost because it was no longer word-fi-nal. By no means all thematic consonants, however, can be explained in this way.On the basis of comparative evidence, one would expect the transitive form of theFijian verb gunu ‘drink’ to be gunu-mi, but it is in fact gunu-vi.17. The fact that the pronoun object is not part of the verb complex but a sep-arate phrase can be seen from sentences that emphasize the object by placing itfirst:Iik ka, r-ɨm-eiua-in mun.you that, he-PAST-lie-TRANS again‘He lied to you again.’316 Notes18. In some of these languages both transitive and object marking occur to-gether only when the object is human or animate.19. Passive and transitive are closely linked concepts, and this suffix is presum-ably the same historically as the -Ci transitive suffix. There has been considerabledebate in the literature over whether the -Ci suffix marks passive or transitive inother Polynesian languages, a matter I do not take up here. See, for example, Biggs(1974), Chung (1977, 1978), Clark (1973, 1981), Hohepa (1969), Lynch (1972), Mil-ner (1973), and Tchekhoff (1973).20. The Kiribati numerals given here include the general classifier -ua.21. “Accusative” here is short for “nominative-accusative” (subject in thenominative case, object in the accusative case). “Ergative” is short for “ergative-ab-solutive,” defined later.22. This is probably a result of influence from one or more neighboring non-Austronesian languages (most of which have SOV preferred order) on a languageancestral to the Oceanic languages of southern mainland Papua New Guinea. Seechapter 9 for further discussion.23. Verb-initial languages do allow some flexibility when the subject or object isemphasized. Some Oceanic languages have flexible phrase order, but certain gram-matical contexts may require one order and others another.CHAPTER 71. The marking on nouns and other noun phrase constituents varies for number(aleman n-ahe‘ ‘the man went,’ alemam m-ahe‘ ‘the men went’), and in some classesthe markers are not phonologically identical in all environments (numata‘ kw-ahe‘‘the woman went’).2. The Anggor verbs in the examples below are more complex morphologicallythan illustrated here, but I have simplified the analysis for purposes of illustration.3. The numerous morphophonemic changes in Enga verb roots and suffixesneed not concern us here, but note that the root meaning “go” appears as both p-and as pá-in the examples.CHAPTER 81. Given my lack of first-hand experience with Australian languages, I haverelied very heavily in this chapter on Dixon’s The Languages of Australia (1980),which is an excellent introduction to the topic; and I am grateful to Terry Crowleyand Nick Thieberger for their assistance.2. Pronouns may take case suffixes, and in many cases the combination pro-noun + case suffix has fused to produce a pronoun form impervious to analysis. Insuch cases I give the intransitive subject form of the pronoun.3. This discussion of case marking relies heavily on the discussion in Dixon(1980), especially his treatment of case in Yidiny (294–301).4. The Tiwi language of Bathurst and Melville Islands is an exception. Dixon(1980, 488) says that Tiwi “is probably unique in Australia in having no case inflec-tions of any type; local relations are shown by prepositions.”Notes 3175. The last example is the version used by female speakers. Male speakers dis-pense with the prefix nya- with nouns of this class, saying simply yabi arrkula “onegood man/boy.”6. When the consonant-initial prefixes are followed by a consonant, a vowel in-tervenes.7. In some split-ergative languages, proper nouns—or even all nouns referringto humans—behave like pronouns, while other nouns behave ergatively.CHAPTER 91. Note also that these words have adapted to another phonological feature ofMotu—the fact that every syllable must be open. (Examples are from Crowley 1992,85.)2. Not all consonants are included in these tables. In order not to clutter thepicture, I have concentrated only on those pertinent to the point I am making.3. A third of his correspondences are classed as indeterminate. There are nodiagnostic differences between the two sets (since, for example, phonemes like *mand *n are reflected as m and n in both set I and set II).4. Readers interested in this debate might wish to consult, in the first instance,the summaries in Lynch (1981b) or Thurston (1987, 89–93), and the more detaileddiscussions in Capell (1976) for mixed languages and Biggs (1972) against them.CHAPTER 101. Recall the discussion in chapter 2 relating to the indeterminacy of the terms“language” and “dialect.” This is another case in point. Tok Pisin, Pijin, and Bislamaare mutually intelligible, and under this criterion should be classified as dialects ofa single language. Each, however, functions as the national language of the countryin which it is spoken, and under this sociopolitical criterion each could be viewedas a separate language.2. As to the origin of these terms, the term “pidgin” may derive from the ChinaCoast Pidgin English word pijin, meaning ‘business’: thus Pidgin English meant‘business (trading) English.’ The term “creole” comes originally from Portuguesecrioulo, meaning a person of European descent brought up in the colonies. Koineis the Greek word meaning ‘common,’ and was used to refer to the standard AtticGreek that replaced other Greek dialects.3. Bêche-de-mer is sometimes translated ‘sea-cucumber.’ The name Bis-lama—the Vanuatu variety of Melanesian Pidgin—ultimately derives from the word“bêche-de-mer.” “Bêche-de-mer English” was one name given to this early tradelanguage.4. One exception to this statement is Hawai‘i. Because of the recruitment ofAsian laborers, the need for a pidgin remained.5. There are one or two very minor exceptions to this statement, most notablythe widespread pronunciation of the third person singular pronoun em as en aftera preposition in Tok Pisin, as in, Em i givim long en ‘He gave it to him.’318 Notes6. A notable exception is the adjective meaning ‘bad,’ which follows the noun,as in Pijin Mi kaekae fis nogud ‘I ate a/some bad fish.’7. If the subject is mi ‘I,’ yu ‘you,’ or yumi ‘we (inclusive),’ i is not used. In Bis-lama, i is replaced by oli if the subject is third person plural.Ol pikinini oli spolem garen blong yu.PL child PL:PREDICATE damage:TRANS garden POSS you‘The kids have messed up your garden.’8. The Hiri Motu word tamana ‘father’ derives from the Motu form tama-na ‘his/her father.’ The Motu third person suffix -na has become part of the Hiri Motu root.Hiri Motu has also fused the (optional) Motu free pronoun and the possessive pro-noun as a single form: (lau) e-gu > lauegu ‘my,’ (oi) e-mu > oiemu ‘your,’ etc.CHAPTER 111. Even the spellcheck on my computer doesn’t recognize four of these words:quinic (acid), quinquagenerian, quinque-, and quinquefoliate.2. In a study of German children aged between eighteen months and elevenyears, Wagner (1985, quoted in Crystal 1987, 244) found that they used on averagethree thousand different words in a single day, with the eleven-year-old using fivethousand words in a day!3. In fact, in some dialects of English, yam refers to the sweet potato, an en-tirely different root-crop.4. In some languages with a decimal system the word for “ten” includes theword for “one”: “one-ten” = “ten,” parallelling “two-ten” = “twenty,” “three-ten” =“thirty,” and so on.5. Many languages have borrowed numerals from other languages either be-cause they do not have higher ones, because their own higher numerals are incon-veniently long compounds, or simply because such numerals are used mainly in“modern” contexts (money, time, airline flight numbers, and so on).6. The length of such compounds is one reason for borrowing numerals. MostLenakel speakers today do not express the numeral nineteen by the long-windedcompound katilum-katilum-katilum-kuvɨr, but instead use the much more conciseBislama borrowing naintin.7. Forms for numerals vary depending on what is counted. Where there is vari-ation, I have cited the forms for (male) humans.8. Even though all kinship terms can be extended almost without limit, mytranslations include only the more immediate relatives.9. The suffix -k on some of these kin terms means ‘my.’ Note that some kinshipterms are directly possessed (grandparents, all relatives in the parents’ generation,same-sex siblings, wife, and grandchildren), but others are indirectly possessed(opposite-sex siblings and children are the most notable of these).10. The verb lai is generally used of plants and trees that are much shorter ortaller than the norm, or that have developed flowers of the “wrong” color or leavesof the “wrong” shape.Notes 31911. Clark cites Fischer’s (1957, 27) report that all the male inhabitants ofNgatik are said to have been massacred by some European sailors (who presum-ably spoke some variety of Pidgin English). These sailors then married the localwomen and remained on the island.12. Kalam words like wjblp ‘bird’ look unpronounceable because Kalam orthog-raphy does not mark the neutral vowel /ə/, which occurs predictably between anytwo consonants. Wjblp is phonemically something like /wəjəbələp/.13. This behavior has obvious implications for a shift in language-use patterns.See 11.6 below.14. In Vanuatu, some schools are English medium, others French medium.CONCLUSION1. I say “words of English origin” because in many cases, in Ifira-Mele as inmost parts of Melanesia, the immediate source is much more likely to be the localvariety of Melanesian Pidgin (in this case, Bislama).2. There ought perhaps to be an attempt to find some less negatively loadedname for languages like Melanesian Pidgin. Gillian Sankoff, for example, has re-ferred to the varieties of Melanesian Pidgin as “the Bislamic languages,” and cer-tainly the name Bislama does not have the negative connotations to an Englishspeaker that names like Pijin or Broken might have.3. 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Names of Papuan language families which appear only in Table 4.4. Technical terms listed alphabetically in Appendix 4.5. English, French, etc., where these languages are used to illustrate a pointof grammar.General categories (such as Polynesia, languages of) are indexed onlywhere a generalization is made about that category, and not when a specificmember of the category (e.g., Hawaiian or Tongan) is referred to.Abau, 298Abelam, 167, 173ablative case, 188absolutive case, 151, 187–188, 199–200Abu‘, 169–170, 171, 317accusative structures, 150, 317in Australian languages, 200, 202in Oceanic languages, 150–151active (voice), 6adjectives, 6–7adjectives vs. verbs, 6–7, 115–117in Australian languages, 190, 192in Melanesian Pidgin, 228–229in Oceanic languages, 115–117adjunct constructions, 175–177Admiralty Islands group, 48Adzera, 76, 84, 249, 297affix, 3agent (in ergative structures), 151,199–200Aitchison, Jean, 279A‘jië, 102, 130, 131, 156, 159Alamblak, 167Alawa, 91Ali, 101alienable possession, 9, 122–123, 172,194, 217allative case, 188Alpher, Barry, 257Amara, 215Amto–Musian family, 67anaphoric demonstratives, 114–115345Anejom̃, 7, 102, 104, 105, 106, 109,114–115, 118, 140, 150, 154, 156,217, 240, 241–243, 256, 315Anêm, 215–217Anggor, 178, 179–180, 317Anguthimri, 91, 93–94, 190, 296, 298anitpassive, 200–201apicals, 91–93apico-labials, 80Apma, 34applicative, 140Arai family, 67Aroma, 12–13, 15–16Arosi, 83, 245articles, 110absence ofin Australian languages, 191in Melanesian Pidgin, 228in Papuan languages, 170common, 110–111gender marking in, 112–113in Oceanic languages, 110–113proper, 110–111aspect, 133. See also tense-aspectasterisk, use of, xviiAustralialanguages of, 39–40death of, 269demography of, 28, 39–40external relatives of, 69–70history of research into, 43–44origins of, 69–70orthographies of, 98–99relationships between, 68–69word taboo in, 214–215See also names of individual lan-guages as per Map 12settlement of, 60–61, 70, 206Australian creoles, 221, 223, 263, 282Australian family, 68–69Austronesian family, 45, 279–280, 314dispersal of, 53distribution of, 45–46external relatives of, 53origins of, 51, 53–54subgroups of, 46–47auxiliary, 187aversive case, 188avoidance styles, 258–260Awa, 89, 298Awadhi, 235Babatana, 71baby-talk words, 261Bahasa Indonesia, 25, 262, 264Baldauf, Richard, 282Banaban people, 206Bandjalang, 93, 99, 200Baniata, 41, 168Banoni, 84, 121, 157–158, 159, 297Barai, 170, 177–178Bareke, 41Bauan Fijian, 315Bauer, Winifred, 286Bavin, Edith, 260, 289Bazaar Hindustani, 235Beaumont, Clive H., 287Bêche-de-mer English. See BislamaBellwood, Peter, 53, 56Bender, Byron W., 30, 42, 120, 281,286, 287Benton, Richard A., 282Bhojpuri, 235, 274Biak-Numfor, 38Biggs, Bruce, 213–214, 281, 286, 287,317, 318Big Nambas, 81–82, 84, 257bilingualism. See multilingualismBilua, 169binary numeral system, 249–250Bislama, 8, 25, 210, 220, 223–224, 226,227–230, 232, 264, 273, 281, 304,311, 318, 319, 320;status of, 262, 266, 275See also Melanesian Pidgin“Bislamic languages”, 320Blake, Barry J., 280–281, 289Blust, Robert A., 279, 280borrowing. See copyingBradley, John, 289Bradshaw, Joel, 82, 288Braj, 235Breen, J. G., 289Broken, 25, 274, 282, 320Bruce, Les, 288Brumby, Ed, 282346 IndexBudibud, 120Bughotu, 48Buin, 71, 90, 246Burling, Robbins, 251, 253, 289Capell, Arthur, 44, 285, 318Carolinian, 76, 98Carroll, Vern, 287, 316case, 180ablative, 188absolutive, 151, 187–188, 199–200allative, 188in Australian languages, 187–190aversive, 188causal, 188dative, 188, 201ergative, 151, 187–188, 199–200instrumental, 188locative, 188peripheral cases, 180–182possessive, 188–189, 194in pronouns, 186–187, 317purposive, 188causal case, 188causative, 131, 144–145Cèmuhî, 82, 113Cenderawasih Bay family, 67Central-Eastern Oceanic group, 50, 314Central Pacific group, 50Chamorro, 46, 50, 76, 108–109, 314change in language, 9–12deliberate, 71rate of, 57–58Charpentier, Jean-Michel, 34, 287, 313Cheetham, Brian, 248, 288China Coast Pidgin English, 318Chinese in the Pacific, 25, 263Chowning, Ann, 280, 314Chuave, 263Chung, Sandra L., 317church languages, 207–208Churchward, C. Maxwell, 287, 314, 315Clark, J.B., 286Clark, John, 314Clark, Ross, 257, 273, 279, 286, 317, 320classifiers, 9, 121–122numeral, 9, 111, 118–120possessive, 9, 126–128clause, 5Cochran, Anne M., 288code-switching, 264–265Codrington, R.H., 43cognate, 15common ancestor, 10–11compound postpositions, 165compound prepositions, 163conjugation(al class), 196–197conjunctionsabsence of in Papuan languages, 184consonant cluster, 83–84, 90, 93–94consonant length, 79, 98consonant systemsin Australian languages, 91–93in Oceanic languages, 78–80in Papuan languages, 88constitutional status of languages,265–266construct suffix, 124copying, 11–12, 206, 272–273‘necessary’ and ‘unnecessary’, 273of numerals, 319Corston, Simon, 287counting systems. See numeralscreole (language), 221origin of term, 318creolization, 221, 223Crowley, Terry, 50, 69, 278, 279, 280,285, 286, 287, 289, 290, 313, 314,317, 318Crystal, David, 238, 279, 319Daga, 171, 172, 180, 247–248DaniGrand Valley Dani, 38, 178Western Dani, 38dating, 55–57archaeological, 56–57relative vs. absolute, 55dative case, 188, 200–201daughter language, 10Davies, H.J., 288decimal numeral systems, 244–246demonstratives, 113in Australian languages, 191–192kinds of, 114–115in Melanesian Pidgin, 228Index 347in Oceanic languages, 113–115in Papuan languages, 169, 170Dempwolff, Otto, 46, 279–280derivational suffixes, 189, 195diacritics, 98dialect, 10, 25–27, 313, 318dialect chain, 26–27dialect mixing. See koineizationdiglossia, 236digraph, 98direct possessive constructions, 8–9,122ff, 234distant demonstratives, 114–115, 170Dixon, R. M. W., 39–40, 44, 68, 69,71–72, 193, 200–201, 214–215,237, 239, 241, 243, 249, 257,258–259, 276, 280, 281, 282,289, 290, 317Diyari, 94Djapu, 192, 194, 215Dobuan, 208Dougherty, Janet W. D., 287Douglas, Wilfred H., 289Drehu, 33, 80, 113, 248, 297dual (number), 8, 101–102, 167,169Duranti, Alessandro, 258, 282, 287Dutch in the Pacific, 207, 262Dutton, Tom, 232–233, 281, 282, 288,290Dyen, Isidore, 286Dyirbal, 94, 189, 200–201, 210, 243,259Eades, Diana, 289Early, Robert, 286East Bird’s Head family, 67Easter Island. See RapanuiEast Futuna, 50East Papuan phylum, 67East Uvea, 28, 30, 50, 263education system, 266–268, 282Ekagi, 38, 248Elbert, Samuel H.‚ 286, 287Eleman languages, 232–233Emae, 78emblematic function of language,57–58, 71, 270Enga, 34, 171, 179, 182–184, 317English in the Pacific, 25, 207,221–223, 224, 234, 235, 262, 264,275, 320constitutional status of, 265–266in education, 266–268, 320influence on Australian languages,210influence on Melanesian Pidgin,224–225influence on Oceanic languages, 209,210–211, 272–273in the media, 268Pacific dialects of, 262equational sentence, 5, 198ergative case, 151, 187–188, 199–200ergative structures, 151, 317in Australian languages, 199–200in Oceanic languages, 151–152split-ergative languages, 199–200,318Erromango, language death on,268–269exclusive first person. See inclusive/ex-clusive distinctionFagan, Joel L., 286Fagauvea, 78Fakamuria, Kenneth, 219family tree, 10Faraclas, Nicholas, 268Farr, Cynthia, 288Farr, James, 288Fijilanguages of, 32–33language use in, 264–265See also Fijian, Fiji Hindi; Rotumansettlement of, 55–56Fijian, xiv, 7–8, 11, 17, 26–27, 42, 83,101, 103–105, 107, 110–111, 114,115, 117, 121, 123–124, 131, 133,140–142, 144, 145, 146, 149, 157,162, 210, 218, 245, 264, 308, 313,315, 316Bauan Fijian, 315dictionary of, 238Eastern vs. Western, 32–33history of research, 42, 278348 Indexinfluence on Fiji Hindi, 235–236Nadrau Fijian, 102, 315orthography of, 97, 315pidginized, 235, 264Standard Fijian, 33, 80, 110–111, 315status of, 265, 276Wayan Fijian, 105Fiji Hindi 25, 220–221, 235–236, 264,272, 274–275, 282, 303Firchow, Irwin B., 288Firchow, Jacqueline, 288Fischer, J. L., 320flaps, 294Foley, William A., 61, 67, 69, 71, 89,166, 176–177, 178, 270, 280, 282,288, 289, 314Fontinelle, Jacqueline de la, 285Fore, 89Fox, G. J., 285Fox, Helen, 257Franklin, Joice‚ 288Franklin, Karl J., 281, 288, 289French in the Pacific, 25, 207, 262, 264,268, 275, 320constitutional status of, 266in education, 266–267, 320influence on Bislama, 224Pacific dialects of, 262fricatives, 79, 80, 93, 294Futuna. See East Futuna; West FutunaGabelentz, H. C. von der, 43Gapun village, 260–261, 270–271Garland, Roger, 288Garland, Susan, 288Gedaged, 208gender (grammatical), 7in articles, 112–113in pronouns, 101, 167–168, 186gender (sociological), 256–257and kinship terms, 254, 256genetic inheritance, 12genetic relationship, 10ffGeraghty, Paul, 238, 280, 286German in the Pacific, 207, 222, 262influence on Oceanic languages, 209influence on Tok Pisin, 224Gilbertese. See Kiribatiglottal stop, 93, 315and orthography design, 95glottochronology, 55–56Goodenough, Ward H., 209, 286Goodwin, Charles, 282Gooniyandi, 98–99Grace, George W., 57, 280Grand Valley Dani, 38, 178Greek influence on Oceanic languages,209–210, 211Greenberg, Joseph H., 69Groves, Gordon W., 286Groves, Terab’ata R., 286Guhu-Samane, 250Gujarati, 263Gumbaynggir, 192, 193, 198Guugu Yimidhirr, 192Guwal style (in Dyirbal), 259Hackman, B. D., 34, 280Hagen, 34Harris, J. W., 282Harris, John B., 282Harrison, Sheldon P., 245, 286, 287Hattori, Shirô, 34, 38, 279Haudricourt, André-G., 280, 286, 287Haviland J.B., 289Hawaiian, 78, 84, 95, 107–108, 111,143, 309history of research, 279language shift and revival, 269–271,272, 276Hawaiian Creole, 25, 318Hazlewood, David, 42Hebrew influence on Oceanic lan-guages, 210, 211Henderson, J.E., 289Hindi, 235–236, 263constitutional status of, in Fiji, 265pidginized, 235, 264Standard, 236, 264, 275, 303See also Fiji HindiHiri Motu, 25, 220–221, 232–234,264–265, 282, 319constitutional status of, 265in the media, 268hiri trading complex, 206, 232–233Hiri Trading Languages, 232–233, 282Index 349Hobbs, Susan, 274, 282Hohepa, Patrick W., 286, 317Holzknecht, Susanne, 285, 286Horoi, Rex, 285Hula, 12–13, 15–16Huli, 34, 179, 248hyphen, use of, 3–4Iaai, 76–77, 126, 127–128, 155, 156, 295Iatmul, 87identity, social, 26Ifira-Mele, 78, 273, 320inalienable possession, 9, 122–123,172, 194, 217inclusive/exclusive distinction, 7–8,100–101, 167–168, 185–186, 217,227inclusive first person. See inclusive/ex-clusive distinctionindependent pronouns, 8, 103–105,168–169, 185–187indirect possessive constructions, 8–9,122ff, 234Indo-Pacific Hypothesis, 69infix, 4infixed reduplication, 86inflectional suffixes, 196instrumental case, 188intermediate demonstratives, 114–115,170interstage language, 14intransitive, 6–7, 231.See also transitive/transitivityIrian Jaya: languages of, 38.See also names of individual lan-guages as per Map 10irrealis (aspect/mood), 134, 136–137,138Irwin, Barry, 289isolate, 61Jackson, Frederick H., 245, 280, 285,287Jacobs, Roderick, 286Jalnguy style (in Dyirbal), 259Japanese in the Pacific, 207, 262, 263influence on Oceanic languages, 209Javanese, 263Jawe, 247Johnston, R. L., 286Jones, Alan A., 286Josephs, Lewis S., 285Kabana, 215Kalam, 176–177, 259–260, 320Kalkatungu, 94Kamano, 34Kamasau, 90Kapauku. See EkagiKapingamarangi, 30, 50, 78Kâte, 88, 208, 298Kayser, Alois, 287Keen, Sandra, 290Keesing, Roger M., 274Kewa, 34, 88–89, 181, 250, 251Kilivila, 110, 120, 121–122, 316Kilivila family, 120kinship, 241, 251–256Anejom̃ kinship terms, 254–256distinctions in pronouns, 186Njamal kinship terms, 251–254reciprocal use of kin terms, 254Kiribati, 30, 75, 79, 96, 101, 102, 104,105, 108, 114, 120, 121, 125–126,137, 141, 145, 149–150, 155, 159,244–245, 263, 315, 316, 317constitutional status of, 265Kobon, 88, 176, 298Koiari people, 206koine, 221origin of term, 318koineization, 221, 235Koita, 89, 166, 170, 171, 180, 181–182,206Koita people, 206Kolia, J. A., 287Komaitai, Rusiate T., 286Korafe, 174Korean, 263Koriki, 232–233Kosraean, 76, 79, 85, 120, 142, 295,296Kove, 215Kriol, 25, 268, 282Krupa, Viktor, 78, 280, 281, 287kula trading complex, 206350 IndexKulick, Don, 71, 261, 270–271, 282,289Kuman, 34, 166, 168–169, 174–175,176, 179, 180, 181Kunjen, 91, 92Kwamera, 208–209, 218–219, 240Kwara‘ae, 34Kwomtari family, 67Labu, 121, 128, 152–153, 295Lagoon Trukese. See Trukeselaminals, 91–93Lang, Adrienne, 288Langdon, Robert, 287language contact.in Australia, 72, 206, 214–215between Austronesian and Papuanlanguages, 53–54, 57, 67, 206, 212,215–218, 317effects on grammar, 211–212effects on lexicon, 208–210effects on phonology, 210–211effects on semantics, 210between intrusive and indigenous lan-guages, 209–211, 218between Melanesian Pidgin and in-digenous languages, 212between Pacific and Indian languages,235–236between Polynesian and non-Polyne-sian languages, 78, 208–209,211–212, 218–219See also Chapter 9language family, 10language revival programs, 269–271language vs. dialect, 25–27, 318Lao, 263Lapita, 56culture, 56people, 56–57pottery, 56Lardil, 186, 202laterals, 88, 92–93, 98, 99, 294Latin influence on Oceanic languages,210, 211Laycock, D. C., 40, 71, 244, 250, 251,276, 287, 288Lee, Jennifer, 281, 289Lee, Kee-dong, 286Leenhardt, Maurice, 43Lenakel, 5, 8, 34, 41, 103, 104,109–110, 116–117, 118, 132,133–134, 138, 141, 146–147,153, 157, 161, 210, 247, 306,316, 319Lewo, 160lexicostatistics, 15, 55–56, 314Lichtenberk, Frantisek, 285, 286,287Lincoln, Peter C., 157, 285Lindstrom, Lamont, 286lingua francas, 264linguistic rules, 1–2linguistics, 1comparative-historical, 16–19, 42,58–59, 279descriptive, 1, 42, 279salvage, 44theoretical, 42See also Chapter 1Lister-Turner, R., 286literacy, 267–268Litteral, Shirley, 180, 288locative case, 188long consonant. See consonant lengthlong vowel. See vowel lengthLoving, Aretta, 288Loving, Richard, 288Loyalty Islands. See New CaledoniaLuke, Allan, 282Lusi, 215–217Lynch, John, 48, 50, 208, 218–219, 254,279, 280, 281, 285, 286, 287, 314,315, 317, 318macron, use of, 95Magahi, 235Magi, 172–173Magori, 57, 217Mailu people, 207Maisin, 57, 154, 217, 259Malayo-Polynesian, 314.See AustronesianManam, 86, 110, 113–114, 118, 125,132, 138, 141, 144, 159, 164Manem, 166Index 351Māori (New Zealand), 30, 81, 85,107–108, 110, 114, 131, 135–136,143, 149, 155, 156, 161language shift and revival, 269–271,272, 276Mapos, 249Marck, Jeffrey C., 285Margany, 249Mari, 76, 101Maringe, 84, 101, 113–114marriage in Aneityum, 254–256Marsack, C. C., 287Marshallese, 30, 76, 120McElhanon, Kenneth A., 71, 280McEwen, J. M., 287McGregor, William, 289media, languages in, 268Mekeo, 83Melanesialanguages of, 30–38articles, presence or absence of,110–113consonant systems of, 79–80demography, 28, 30–38history of research, 43, 279interrelationships between, 50–51mission/church languages in,207–208multilingualism in, 263–265numeral systems in, 244–251orthographies of, 97–98passive, presence or absence of,143–144vowel systems of, 76–77See also under individual countrieslinguistic diversification in, 57–58,70–71settlement of, 51, 53–57Melanesian Pidgin, 212, 220–221, 233,235, 262, 263, 264–265, 267, 268,272, 275, 276, 280, 320differences between varieties of,223–224ff., 230first-language interference in, 226history of, 221–224orthography of, 96, 226phonology of, 225–226pronouns of, 227–228status of, 223structure of, 224–232See also Bislama; Pijin; Tok PisinMelpa, 88Mendi, 34merger (of phonemes), 13Meso-Melanesian subgroup, 48Micronesialanguages ofarticles in, 111–112consonant systems of, 78–79demography of, 28, 30, 31history of research into, 42–43,279interrelationships between, 50numeral classifiers in, 118–120numeral systems in, 244–245orthographies of, 97–98passive in, 142possessive classifiers in, 126–127vowel systems of, 76See names of individual languagesas per Map 4settlement of, 54–57Micronesian group, 48, 50Mihalic, F., 280, 290Milner, G. B., 286, 287, 317mission languages. See church lan-guages“mixed” languages, 217–218, 220modality. See moodmoiety, 210, 219, 251–254moka trading complex, 206Mokilese, 76, 110, 111–112, 120, 144,148, 295Mono-Alu, 41, 100, 102mood, 136–137, 174Moriori, 27morpheme, 3–4free morpheme, 3morphology, 3morphophonemics, 4in case-markers, 189–190of reduplication, 86–87in verbs, 172, 174–175, 317Morphy, Frances, 289Mosel, Ulrike, 287Mota, 40, 208352 IndexMotu, 8–9, 11, 40, 100, 102, 107–108,114, 148, 151–152, 154, 157, 161,206, 210–211, 232–234, 246, 303,305, 318, 319Motu people, 206, 232–233Simplified Motu, 233–234Mountain Koiari, 90Moyse-Faurie, Claire, 286Mugler, France, 282Mühlhäusler, Peter, 281, 282multilingualism, 263–265Murane, Elizabeth, 288Murik, 270, 272Murray, Sir Hubert, 274Murrinh-Patha, 243–244mutual intelligibility, 25–26Muyuw, 120Nadrau Fijian, 102, 315Nakanai, 102, 114, 152, 157, 245Nakanamanga, 40‚ 41, 86, 100, 102,136–137, 139, 142, 159, 313Namonuito, 30nasal, 78, 294nasalized vowels, 87voiceless nasals, 78, 80national languages, 266Nauruan‚ 48, 50, 76, 79, 96‚ 120,296negation, negatives‚ 136‚ 212‚ 216discontinuous, 160–161in Melanesian Pidgin, 231–232negative verbs, 161–162in Oceanic languages, 159–162in serial constructions, 147–148Nehan‚ 103–104, 130, 315Nekitel, Otto‚ 169, 288New Caledonialanguages of 33, 57articles in, 112–113consonant systems of, 80history of research into, 43orthographies of, 98phonemic tone in, 82vowel systems of, 76–77See also names of individual lan-guages as per Map 6settlement of, 55–56New Guinea area,linguistic diversification in, 70–71settlement of, 53–57, 60–61, 69–70See also Irian Jaya; Papua NewGuineaNgatikese, 30men’s language, 257, 320Ngunese. See NakanamangaNimboran, 167Niuafo‘ou, 50Niuean, 30, 50, 129, 130Njamal, 251–254, 256nominalizers, 109–110nominal sentences, 148in Australian languages, 198in Melanesian Pidgin, 227in Oceanic languages, 148–150in Papuan languages, 179Non-Austronesian. See PapuanNon-Pama-Nyungan group, 68,195–197North-Central Vanuatu subgroup, 48North Malaita, 34, 79North New Guinea subgroup, 48Northeast Ambae, 34noun classes, 126, 169–170, 179,190–191, 243–244noun phrase structure, 5in Australian languages, 192–194in Melanesian Pidgin, 228–230in Oceanic languages, 120–122in Papuan languages, 171nouns, 105, 107plurality in, 107–109, 187Nuclear Polynesian subgroup, 50Nukuoro, 30‚ 50‚ 76, 129, 159, 212, 316Numanggang, 249–250number (grammatical)‚ 7–8in demonstratives, 114–115in pronouns, 101–103, 166–167,185–186, 227in verbs, 197numeral classifiers, 9, 111, 118–120numerals, 117–120, 228–229, 244–251,319binary systems, 249–250decimal systems, 244–246formation of ordinals, 145Index 353quinary systems, 246–248tally systems, 250–251ternary systems, 249–250object, 5–6in ergative structures, 151object marker, object pronoun,104–105, 131, 140–142, 169, 187,196–197, 227, 234Oceanic subgroupdispersal of members of, 53–57distribution, 46origins of, 51, 53subgroups of, 46–51, 56Ochs, Elinor, 282official languages, 265–266O’Grady, G. N., 280open syllable, 83–84, 90Orokaiva people, 207orthography, 3, 94–99orthography design, 96–99in Australia, 98–99in Melanesia and Micronesia,97–98in Polynesia and Fiji, 97problems in development of, 95–97Ozanne-Rivierre, Françoise, 286, 287Paamese, 40, 76, 102, 122, 123, 137,147–148, 153, 161, 313, 316Paicî, 33Palauan, 46, 50, 76, 108–109, 311,314Pama-Nyungan group, 68, 195–196“Pandanus Language,” 259–260Paol, John Natu, 289Papua New Guinealanguage in the media, 268languages of, 34, 37constitutional status of, 265national and official languages, 266orthographies of, 97–98phonemic tone in, 82–83, 88–89See also names of individual lan-guages as per Map 9literacy programs in, 267–268Papuan languages, 60, 61, 280external relatives of, 69–70families of, 45location of, 60, 62–64relationships between, 61, 64–67origins of, 69–70See also names of individual lan-guages as per Map 9Papuan Tip subgroup, 48passive (voice), 6absence of in Australian languages,200absence of in Melanesian Pidgin, 226in Oceanic languages, 142–144, 317Pat, Fa‘afo, 280paucal (number), 8, 102–103Pawaian, 87, 89Pawley, Andrew, 55, 67, 259, 280, 281,287, 288, 314person, 7–8, 100–101, 166–168Philippine languages, 263Philips, Susan U., 257–258, 287Phillips, Donald J., 289phoneme, 2–3, 314phonemics. See phonologyphonetics, 2phonology, 2segmental phonology, 80phrase, 4–5phylum, 67Piau, Julie Anne, 179, 279, 288pidgin (language), 220–221, 222origin of term, 318pidginization, 220, 222, 225Pije, 80, 98, 297Pijin, 25, 220, 223–224, 226, 227–230,264, 274–275, 281, 318, 319, 320.See also Melanesian PidginPileni, 78Pitjantjatjara, 40Pitta-Pitta, 92–93, 186, 192, 195plural (number), 8, 101–103, 107–109,146, 187Police Motu, see Hiri MotuPolynesialanguages ofarticles in, 110–111chiefly styles in, 257–258consonant systems of, 78demography of, 27–30354 Indexhistory of research into, 42, 279interrelationships between, 50numeral systems in, 244–245orthographies of, 97passive in, 142–143possessive constructions in,128–130vowel systems of, 75–78See also names of individual lan-guages as per Map 3 and Table 2settlement of, 55–56Polynesian Outliers, 50–51, 78, 212Polynesian subgroup, 50internal subgrouping, 50, 52Ponapean, 9, 30, 76, 86–87, 118–120,121, 126–127, 130, 134–135, 153,210, 245Port Sandwich, 121, 295, 297Portuguese, 263Pospisil, Leopold, 248, 288possessive case, 188–189, 194possessive classifiers, 9, 126–128possessive constructions, 8–9alienable vs. inalienable, 9, 122–123,172, 194, 217in Australian languages, 194direct vs. indirect, 8–9, 122ff, 234in Melanesian Pidgin, 230in Oceanic languages, 122–130in Papuan languages, 171–172possessive markers, 123ff, 172possessive pronoun, possessive affix,104–105, 171–172, 194postpositional phrases, 163–165in Oceanic languages, 164–165in Papuan languages, 180–182postpositions, 163–164in Oceanic languages, 163–165,216–217in Papuan languages, 180–181predicate, 5prefix, 3prefixed reduplication, 86prehistory, 16–19prepositional phrases, 5, 162in Oceanic languages, 163prepositions, 5, 162, 317compound prepositions, 163in Melanesian Pidgin, 229–230in Oceanic languages, 162–163Price, D. J. de Solla, 248, 288pronouns, 7–8in Australian languages, 185–187,199–200in Fiji Hindi, 235independent pronouns, 8, 103–105,167–168, 185–186, 217, 227, 234in Melanesian Pidgin, 227–228object pronouns, 104–105, 131,140–142, 169, 187, 196–197, 227,234in Oceanic languages, 100–105in Papuan languages, 166–169possessive pronouns, 104–105subject pronouns, 8, 103–104, 132,137–139, 168–169, 172–174, 187,196–197, 227, 234, 316prosodic features, 80in Australian languages, 91in Oceanic languages, 80–83in Papuan languages, 88–89Proto Austronesian, 47, 58Proto Central Pacific, 213–214Proto Oceanic, 316article, 315causative, 144, 300location of, 53–54numerals, 118possessive constructions in, 122ff,316reciprocal, 145reconstruction of, 58–59transitive and applicative, 140protolanguage, 11proximate demonstratives, 114–115,170Pukapuka, 17, 50Pukui, Mary Kawena, 286Puluwat, 100, 102purposive case, 188quantifiers, 117–120quinary numeral systems, 246–248Raga, 41, 160Rapanui, 17, 161, 314Index 355Rarotongan, 7, 30Ray, S. H., 43realis (aspect/mood), 136–137, 138reciprocal, 131, 145–146, 216reconstructionof culture, 18of Proto Oceanic culture, 58–59of languages, 12–14, 17–18Australian languages, 70Papuan languages, 70Proto Oceanic, 58–59reduplication, 84–87, 91, 94, 231, 232functions of, 85–86, 94, 187, 231, 232kinds of, 85–86morphophonemics of, 86–87Reef Islands language, 217regular sound correspondences, 12–13Rehg, Kenneth L., 118–119, 134, 287Rennellese, 41Rensch, Karl H., 287respectful styles, 257–258rhotics, 92–93, 99Ririo, 71, 297Rivierre, Jean-Claude, 285root, 3Ross, Malcolm, 48, 50, 55, 82, 280,281, 286, 287, 288, 289, 314Rotokas, 88, 314Rotuman, 32, 76, 77–78, 102, 108, 114,128, 131, 133, 149, 160, 212–214,245–246, 281, 315, 316Roviana, 4, 143–144, 147, 149, 208Saint Matthias Islands group, 48Salisbury, Richard, 263Salt-Yui, 249–250Samoan, 28, 30, 50, 76, 81, 86, 102,115, 129, 139, 145, 146, 151,162–163, 209–210, 211, 258, 263influence on Melanesian Pidgin, 224influence on Rotuman, 214status of, 266, 276Sandefur, J. R., 282Sanders, Arden G., 288Sanders, Joy, 288Sanders, Major Eustace, 274Sankoff, Gillian, 320Santa Cruz languages, 217Sarmi-Jayapura subgroup, 48Satawalese, 30Savage, Stephen, 287Sayaba, Timoci, 287Schieffelin, Bambi B., 282Schnukal, Anna, 282Schütz, Albert J., 146, 279, 286Scott, Graham K., 288Sebeok, Thomas A., 279secret languages, 257Selepet, 71Senft, Gunter, 286sentence, 5Sepik-Ramu phylum, 67Sera, 101serial constructions. See verb serializa-tionshared innovations, 15–16, 55Sharpe, Margaret C., 289short vowel See vowel lengthSiane, 263Siau family, 101Siegel, Jeff, 279, 281, 282, 286, 290Simons, Linda, 281, 290Simpson, Jane, 238Sinagoro, 12–13, 15–16, 164–165Sinasina, 179singular (number), 8Sissano, 101Sko family, 67Smith, Geoffrey P., 248, 249, 282, 285,286, 288, 289socialization, 260–261Sohn, Ho-min, 287Solomon Islandslanguages of, 34, 36national and official languages, 266See also names of individual lan-guages as per Map 8settlement of, 54–55Som, 250Sommer, Bruce A., 289Sonsorolese, 30sounds, 2–3Southeast Solomons group, 48Southern Melanesian subgroup, 48Southern Oceanic group, 48Southwest Tanna, 150–151, 161–162356 IndexSpanish in the Pacific, 25, 207, 262influence on Oceanic languages, 209split-ergative languages, 199–200, 318Spriggs, Matthew, 55, 56stative verb, 7, 115–116stock, 64stops, 78, 80, 92–93, 294aspirated, 78, 80coarticulated, 88glottal, 93, 315prenasalized, 78, 80, 97–98, 294retroflex, 80, 92–93, 294voicing distinction in, 78, 93stress, 80–82, 88–89, 91Suau, 208subgroup, 15–17subject, 5–6in ergative structures, 151subject-marker, subject pronoun, 8,103–104, 132, 137–139, 168–169,172–174, 187, 196–197, 227, 234,316and switch reference, 182–184suffix, 3suffixed reduplication, 86Sugita, Hiroshi, 209, 286Summer Institute of Linguistics, 43, 44,60, 267suprasegmental features. See prosodicfeaturesswitch reference, 182–184Sye, 109, 110, 125Tahitian, 17, 30, 85, 117, 121, 139, 143,155–156, 161, 212loans in Samoan, 211Taiap, 260–261, 270, 272Takuu, 78, 129tally systems of counting, 250–251Tamil, 263Tasmania, languages of, 68–69, 70taxonomies, 241–244Tchekhoff, Claude, 317Telugu, 263tense, 133tense-aspect, 132, 216in Australian languages, 196–197in Melanesian Pidgin, 231–232in Oceanic languages, 133–137, 138in Papuan languages, 172–175,182–184Tepahae, Philip, 254ternary numeral system, 249–250thematic consonant/vowel, 140–141,142, 171Thieberger, Nicholas, 317Thomas, Dicks, 281, 290Thomson, N. P., 288Thurston, William R., 215, 217, 281,286, 288, 318Tigak, 79, 85, 247Titan, 246Tiwi, 190–191, 249, 281, 317, 318To‘aba‘ita, 80, 112, 114, 121, 130, 131,148, 153, 157, 162–163Toaripi, 90Todd, Evelyn M., 287, 288Tok Pisin, 2–3, 25, 96, 212, 220,223–224, 226–232, 234, 261,270–271, 274, 275, 276, 281, 282,315, 318constitutional status of, 265in the media, 268See also Melanesian PidginTokelauan, 50Tolai, 34, 40, 102, 148, 158, 207, 305influence on Tok Pisin, 224tone, 80, 82–83, 89, 91, 314Tongan, 17, 28, 30, 40, 50, 78, 85, 86,96, 120, 139, 149, 160, 245,257–258, 263, 301, 315influence on the Lau group, 207influence on Rotuman, 214status of, 266Tongic subgroup, 50topic and comment, 148Topping, Donald M., 285Torricelli phylum, 40, 67transitive/transitivity, 6accusative vs. ergative, 150–152in Melanesian Pidgin, 230–231in Oceanic languages, 139–142, 317Trans–New Guinea phylum, 67Trefry, David, 288trial (number), 8, 102trigraph, 98Index 357trills, 294Trukese, 30, 76, 78–79, 103–104, 120, 209Trukic languages, 30Tryon, D. T., 34, 280, 281, 286, 287,290, 313Tumleo, 101Tuvaluan, 263Ulau-Suain, 101Ulithian, 76, 120, 142Uradhi, 196Uvea. See Fagauvea; East UveaVanimo, 87Vanuatulanguages of, 34, 35consonant alternation in verbs,136–137constitutional status of, 266orthographies of, 97See also names of individual lan-guages as per Map 7settlement of, 54–56Vászolyi, Eric 282, 289verb, 6–7existential verbs, 179–180final verb, 183internal structurein Australian languages, 195–197in Melanesian Pidgin, 230–232in Oceanic languages, 130–132in Papuan languages, 172–175medial verb, 183stative verb, 7verb root, 130verb complex, 5, 130, 313, 316in Australian languages, 198in Melanesian Pidgin, 230–232in Oceanic languages, 146–148verb phrase, 313.See also verb complexverb serialization, 147–148, 175–177verbal sentence structure, 152ff, 177ff,199–202, 317Verhaar, John W.M., 281vernaculars, 264constitutional status of, 265in education, 266–267in the media, 268Vietnamese in the Pacific, 25, 263Vinmavis, 107, 118vocabularyof Pacific languages, 237–244specialized/technical, 239specific vs. generic, 239–244taxonomic classification of,241–244Voorhoeve, C. L., 280, 282vowel copying, 190vowel length, 75–76, 87, 91and orthography design, 95, 98vowel systemsin Australian languages, 91in Oceanic languages, 75–78in Papuan languages, 87Wagner, K. R., 319Wahgi, 34, 90, 173, 178, 298Wajarri, 92, 185–186, 200, 249Wallisian. See East UveaWalmajarri, 187Walsh, D. S., 287Walsh, Michael, 243–244, 282, 289Wang, Judith W., 30, 120Wantoat, 249–250Wargamay, 92, 185–186, 189–190,193–194, 195, 199–200, 249Warlpiri, 260Waskia, 88–89Wayan Fijian, 105Wedau, 208West Futuna, 78, 145, 160, 208–209,218–219West Guadalcanal, 41West Papuan phylum, 64, 67West Uvea. See FagauveaWestern Dani, 38Western Desert language, 39, 94, 187,313Western Oceanic group, 48White, Geoffrey M., 286Whitesands, 34, 41Wilson, William H., 316Wiru, 167, 169Woleaian, 245358 Indexword structurein Australian languages, 93–94in Oceanic languages, 83–87in Papuan languages, 90–91word taboo, 214–215, 258–260Wunambal, 196–197Wurm, S. A., 34, 38, 64, 67, 279, 280,281, 282Xârâcùù, 77, 98, 295Yabêm, 82–83, 208Yallop, Colin, 280, 282, 314Yanyuwa, 191Yapese, 48, 50, 76, 79, 102, 112, 120,125, 155, 296Yaygir, 192Yele (or Yeletnye), 88Yidiny, 187–189, 200, 240–241, 243,317Yimas, 173, 178–179, 212Yolŋu, 215Young, Hugh, 281, 290Yukulta, 193Index 359About the AuthorJohn Lynch is professor of Pacific languages at the University of the SouthPacific’s Emalus Campus in Vanuatu. He is the author of Lenakel Dictionary,A Grammar of Lenakel, and An Annotated Bibliography of Vanuatu Lan-guages. He is co-author of The Design of Language and The Oceanic Lan-guages, and co-editor of Pacific Languages in Education.

The Wala language

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The Wala language

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