Terry Crowley

An Erromangan (Sye) Grammar

This volume presents a description of the language that is currently spoken on the island of Erromango, in southern Vanuatu in the southwestern part of the Pacific.

Beach-la-Mar to Bislama : the emergence of a national language in Vanuatu

List of figures List of tables List of abbreviations The language and its name Language contact in the early years: 1265 - 1865 Language contact since 1865 Language contact and the Bislama lexicon Beach-la-Mar to Bislama: Emergence of the grammar More reent developments: More on substrate superstrate and independent development Lukluk Bak:Recurrent themes References Bibliography

Competing agendas in indigenous-language renewal: Initial vernacular education in Vanuatu

Abstract Vanuatu, being linguistically the worlds most complex nation in terms of number of languages per head of population, faces unique linguistic problems. These issues are made more complex by the inheritance of both English and French as official languages of education from the colonial era, and the English-lexifier pidgin / creole Bislama as the national language. Basic mission-based education was conducted originally through the medium of local vernaculars, but as the colonial state moved into education from the 1960s, emphasis shifted to the exclusive use of either English or French in schools. Two decades after independence, Vanuatu is now examining prospects for implementing a program of initial vernacular education in conjunction with a range of other major changes in educational practice. This discussion examines the sometimes conflicting attitudes toward this idea from the various stakeholders, including the parents of children, education officials, francophones and anglophones, expatriates and locals, academic linguists, international advisors, and national politicians. While there is considerable goodwill toward the new policy from a variety of sources, there are sufficient tensions between different groups of stakeholders that success in implementing this policy cannot be ensured.

The Indigenous Linguistic Response to Missionary Authority in the Pacific

Views have been expressed about the structural homogenization of Pacific languages in the direction of English, and the ultimate replacement of these languages by English (Mühlhäusler 1996). It has been argued that one of the primary agents of linguistic change has been the imposition of literacy by European missionaries, which has involved the imposition of standard written varieties over original linguistic diversity. This paper discusses the situation on Erromango (Vanuatu), where a structurally aberrant—and somewhat English-looking—variety of the language produced by missionaries has come to represent the norm in the translated written literature. However, rather than influencing the spoken language and threatening its structural integrity, this aberrant variety was adopted by Erromangans to suit their own purposes, showing that literacy, rather than representing a colonial imposition, has actually been successfully indigenized.

Parallel Development and Shared Innovation: Some Developments in Central Vanuatu Inflectional Morphology

have for some time presented linguists with difficulties in accounting for their distribution and behavior. These patterns do not appear to be directly derivable from an original simple oral-nasal grade alternation, yet the patterns are so widespread and at the same time so similar that it does not seem plausible to argue that these features evolved completely independently since the breakup of Proto-Central Vanuatu. This paper argues that there was no original oral-nasal grade alternation, but as a result of a morphophonemic asymmetry that had developed in ProtoCentral Vanuatu at the point where an earlier realis prefix came into contact with the verb root, the descendent languages were in a sense predisposed toward the development of nasal grade-like mutated roots in certain morphosyntactic contexts. The presence of this morphophonemic instability in Proto-Central Vanuatu and not in other members of the Oceanic subgroup would also account for the fact that the same developments did not occur elsewhere in the same way. The systems that evolved in Central Vanuatu were also subject to the pervasive influence of analogical pressure as morphological paradigms were realigned.

Linguistic demography: Interpreting the 1989 census results in Vanuatu

Melanesia is a part of the world that is both highly diverse linguistically, as well as being relatively little known. Language issues tended to receive low priority in colonial times, and have continued to receive low priority since the gaining of political independence. Even the listing of languages and the counting of their speakers have traditionally been left up to linguists rather than official census takers. Where censuses attempt to elicit linguistic information, seemingly odd results often emerge. This paper examines the results of the first census in the republic of Vanuatu to ask questions about language ability. It demonstrates that while the census data do allow us to estimate how many people speak a particular vernacular, we are required to consider a wide range of demographic information in order to arrive at such estimates.

The voiceless fricatives [s] and [h] in Erromangan: One phoneme, two, or one and a bit?

While s and h in Erromangan can be shown to contrast, there is also a considerable amount of both free variation and complementary distribution between them, which would be consistent with the two being co‐allophones of a single phonemic segment. This paper examines the conditioning provided by the linguistic environment, as well as the social constraints on the occurrence of these phones, and in particular examines the difference between religious and secular usage, as well as writing and speech. This situation reflects an intermediate stage in a shift from s to h. While many would not recognize conceptual problems with a resulting ‘semi‐phonemic’ contrast, such a situation certainly poses real methodological problems in actual description. Surprisingly few accounts of languages spoken in small‐scale societies seem to address these kinds of issues in detail, and this account aims to partly fill this gap.

Pre‐1860 European contact in the pacific and introduced cultural vocabulary 1

Abstract South Seas Jargon is the name used to refer to the precursor of a number of Pacific pidgins, used for communication between European sailors and people from many parts of Polynesia and Micronesia before 1850. Some debate exists over the extent to which this “jargon” was structurally stable and lexically developed beyond an absolutely minimal stage. This paper argues that the jargon was possibly not as lexically impoverished as some have argued. Evidence is presented in the form of possible loans from South Seas Jargon into Pacific languages by 1860 that there were almost 250 items of cultural vocabulary in circulation, which would necessarily have been used along with a somewhat larger set of non‐cultural vocabulary. If this is so, then the so‐called “jargon” period in the development of Pacific pidgins and creoles needs to be, fairly drastically shortened.