Language toktok

Weekender

How can local dictionaries help you?In these monthly discussions we answer one question about language in PNG and beyond. This month we are looking at how Tok Pisin and tok ples dictionaries can help us.
When Australian or Japanese school children learn each other’s language, they almost always have a dictionary next to them. When they want to say something in the foreign language that they don’t know, they just look it up in the dictionary.In the same way, when they read or hear a word in the foreign language, they can use the dictionary to tell them what the word means in their own tok ples.
In the classroom, having bilingual dictionaries like this speeds up the lessons, as the teacher does not have to try and explain each word as it is introduced or slow up the class fora student who is a bit behind the others. Students simply look upwords that they don’t know without interrupting the flow of the lesson.Papua New Guinean students learning English do not usually have this luxury. There are often dictionaries in the classroom, but these are monolingual dictionaries made for native speakers of English, with all the explanations written in English. This might help by providing an explanation when a student comes across an unknown English word, but when the student is thinking in his or her own language and searching for an English word (“how do I say‘mambu bilong nek bilong kakaruk in English?”), a monolingual dictionary isn’t going to be much help.
This reliance on monolingual dictionaries is a legacy of Australian colonial rule. In Australia, English is the tok ples of almost all schoolchildren, so a dictionary with all explanations in English makes sense for them. This practice was brought to PNG by teachers in the colonial period by Australian teachers, most of whom did not have any experience in any language other than their own.Habits that these teachers brought have remained unchanged in the four decades since independence. This is despite the fact that bilingual dictionaries in English and Tok Pisin, Hiri Motu, or many local languages do exist.With these dictionaries, students thinking in their own language but writing in English could look up the word or phrase they need and see,for example, that “mambu bilong nek bilong kakaruk” is “gullet” in English. But to do this, students need to be shown how to use such a dictionary, and most of their teachers themselves have had no experience using one.
More importantly, schools need to actually have the dictionaries.While at least one publisher of school textbooks does make a TokPisin dictionary available in its textbook catalogues, dictionaries in other languages are often printed in small lots by overseas university presses or SIL. They are not available through normal distributors and are often not reprinted when the first printing is sold out.
To make matters worse, the PNG government does not invest in printing or reprinting these dictionaries like the Indonesian government does in neighbouring West Papua. But with a bit of online detective work, if a dictionary is available in your language, you can usually track it down.Luckily, some of these, such as the many dictionaries published by Pacific Linguistics at Australian National University, are now available as pdf e-books that can be downloaded for free.
Bilingual dictionaries have another use as well; besides helping to learn English, they are valuable tools for improving your knowledge of your own language.In today’s world, few people grow up in a haus boi or next to Grandmother listening to eloquent songs and stories told with complicated vocabulary. As a result, many people have limited ability in their own language, using English or Tok Pisin much of the time and mixing these languages with their own when their limited mother-tongue vocabulary runs out.
Bilingual dictionaries can help by giving true local language equivalents for the difficult English or Tok Pisin words that you use when you stumble in your own language. Older dictionaries are especially useful as they often contain classical words that have gone out of use or are not used with the same kind of precision that speakers had a couple generations ago.
In some cases these dictionaries can even bring “sleeping”languages back to life. This was the case with the Myaamia language,once used by the Myaamia tribe in the central United States.Because of forced migrations and government oppression, by the twentieth century these Native Americans had stopped using their own language in favour of English. Once the last old speakers died, there was no one to teach the language to younger people, and it was described as “extinct”.But one young man, Daryl Baldwin, came across old dictionaries and grammatical descriptions made by French missionaries who had come to his people three centuries earlier. Using these materials, he taught himself the language of his ancestors and used it with his children when they were born.This was the beginning of a movement towards linguistic revival among his people. Today there is once again a small group of Myaamia children for whom the Myaamia language is their mother tongue.
Bilingual dictionaries have much to offer in the educational and intellectual development of the nation. They can help students’ learning English at school and can help people of all ages become more fluent and confident in their own languages.
Tok Pisin dictionaries are easily available, and bilingual dictionaries in many other PNG languages are available through overseas university presses or SIL. They should be in every school library and all educated people should have a dictionary of their own language(s) as well as English.

  • Professor Volker is a linguist living in New Ireland, and an Adjunct Professor in The Cairns Institute, James Cook University in Australia. He welcomes your language questions for this monthly discussion at [email protected]. Or continue the discussion on the Facebook Language Toktok page.