Language Toktok

Weekender

By CRAIG ALAN VOLKER
Is the California way of preserving local languages good for PNG?
IN this monthly discussion we answer questions about language in PNG and beyond. This month we are looking at the master-apprentice method of learning and preserving local languages developed in California and ask whether it has anything to offer us in PNG.
When most people think of California, they might think of Disneyland, movies, and rock music, all phenomena that are expressed in English. But before colonisation, the area that now forms the American state of California was inhabited by many small groups of indigenous people, each speaking its own language, much like in PNG.
After invasion by the Spanish in the 1500s, the area became the northern part of Mexico before being invaded and taken over by the United States about 170 years ago.
With these centuries of domination by two powerful languages, Spanish and English, and massive numbers of immigrants from around the world, it is no wonder that almost no one speaks indigenous California languages today.
Very few children grow up in households that use these languages, and even if they do, once they go out of the house, there is usually no one else who uses them. Today quite a few California languages have only two or three old people who speak them.
Some years ago the California government recognised its responsibility for doing something to ensure that at least some of these languages will not disappear forever.
It set funds aside to pay one language master and one language apprentice for a year or so for each of several languages.
The language master’s job is to teach the language to the apprentice through everyday living, with support and advice about language learning given by linguists from California universities.
The apprentice’s job is to spend most of the day with the master, speaking only in the indigenous language. Once the apprentice has learnt the language, even when the master passes away, there will still be at least this one person who knows the language. In this way the language never dies.
This technique has been adopted by other areas with small, endangered indigenous languages.
Here in PNG there are already some languages that have only a handful of speakers.
Could this language master-apprentice approach work to keep these highly endangered languages alive? Should a provincial or national government department give funding and support to this kind of language preservation?
Besides supporting endangered languages, this approach might also be used by universities to teach local languages. PNG universities are the logical place for people to study PNG languages, but right now only one university, the University of Goroka, teaches a local language, the Alekano language spoken around Goroka town.
With the large number of languages spoken in the country, no university can ever begin to teach even a small fraction of the languages spoken in the country.
But in a language master-apprentice programme, universities could give university credit to students who want to learn a language that is completely new to them or who want to deepen their knowledge of a language they already have some acquaintance with.
They would just need to be able to find an elder willing to teach them the language. With this type of programme, the role of university instructors would be to coordinate and oversee the language learning, rather than actually teaching the language themselves.
The real teachers would be the elders with no university degree, but with the wisdom and knowledge handed down from their ancestors.
Whether this approach or others are taken, some innovative effort will be needed to make sure that the cultural heritage in each PNG language is preserved for future generations.
This is the generation where it is still possible to do this.
As Californians know all too well, someday it may too late.

Professor Volker is a linguist living in New Ireland and an Adjunct Professor in The Cairns Institute, James Cook University, Queensland. He welcomes your language questions for this monthly discussion at [email protected]. Or continue the discussion on the Facebook Language Toktok page. You can learn more about indigenous Californians today by going to http://www.costanoanrumsen.org/video-gallery.html.