 Fel rhoi, thank you very much everyone for coming to this Linguistics Department seminar. I'm very pleased to welcome Dr Cindy Schneider, who is an academic visitor. She has been here for a month or so and is here for another couple of months I think. If you are interested in talking to her after the lecture she will be around for a while. She is a senior lecturer at the School of Behavioral and Cognitive and Social Sciences at the University of New England, which is not in America, but in Australia, on the day on New South Wales. She's been working on Pacific languages for about 10 years, mainly in Vanuatu, but also in Papua New Guinea, which is the topic of the talk this afternoon. She's worked on a variety of fields. Her background is in language documentation description. Her PhD was a descriptive grammar, but she's also been working particularly on literacy, has conducted orthography development workshops, which is very relevant for this week's topic for our applied language documentation seminars, and has also been, has also taught English as second language and adult literacy for 10 years, and therefore her linguistic interests are wide-ranging, and she considers herself a generalist. So thank you very much. Thank you for the very generous introduction, and thanks to Peter particularly, and everyone in the department for allowing me to come to SOAS and work here for a few months. It's a great opportunity for me. So today, as you can see, I'm going to be talking about literacy planning in Papua New Guinea. So just a quick preview of the talk. I'm going to start out by talking about by introducing you to the language of focus, which is Kyrak, and looking at the neighbouring languages in the area, and then examining how literacy is used in the community in general. So literacy is used in a sort of a different way than we use it in a Western context. Then we're going to look at the educational policy for the national government, how this translates into policy implementation at the local level, and then looking at some of the challenges that the schools face from implementing this policy. I'm going to make the suggestion that talk-piz in, rather than the vernacular, rather than the local indigenous language Kyrak be used as the language in the classroom for teaching literacy. Now, obviously, I'm not suggesting that vernacular literacy be canned in other schools, but I'm just talking about my one particular situation, and so you may wonder why this is relevant, but it actually can be very relevant to other communities because the types of decisions that this local community made could easily be made in other communities. So what's happened in this situation could easily happen in other situations, and I think it's worth talking about. So, here is a nice map of Papua New Guinea. Can this pointer work? This is Papua New Guinea. For those of you who aren't familiar with this part of the world, it's just north of Australia. So here's a northern tip of Cape York in Australia. To the southeast, or the Solomons, and then below the Solomons is Vanuatu and New Caledonia. New Guinea, the island of Papua is shared with Indonesia. So, basically, to the west of this line is West Papua, the province that's in the news, at least in Australia. I don't know how much it's in the news in England. And my field work is based in New Britain, on the island of New Britain. So this is the island of New Britain here, and New Britain is cut into two provinces, which are west and east New Britain. I work in East New Britain, not far from Rabao. Has anyone heard of Rabao? No, okay. It's actually, it's a really interesting place. It was in the war, the Japanese occupied Rabao for a few years. In my field site we found small handguns at the bottom of the river. Not me, but the people I lived with a small handgun there that I have a photograph of. There's an active volcano. The volcano erupted, I think, in 1994, and it actually trashed Rabao completely. So Rabao, although it's written in capital letters here, really isn't, there's not many people living there anymore. Everybody's moved to Kokopo, which is this little place over here. But my field site's a little bit in the hinterland of Rabao and Kokopo. So here's a language map of New Britain and New Ireland, which is the map of the island above New Britain. And you can see that New Britain and New Ireland are peopled by speakers of Austronesian languages and non-Austronesian languages. So the Austronesian languages are dispersed all throughout the Pacific, basically. And Southeast Asia. It's a very large family. And then the non-Austronesian languages, the other name for non-Austronesian languages are Papoan languages. There's a lot that we don't know about Papoan languages, except that we don't know how they relate to other language families or languages in other families, and we don't know how Papoan languages relate to each other. And Papoan languages are basically mostly spoken in Papua New Guinea. And here, as I pointed out before, here is East New Britain, and on the Gazelle Peninsula, that's where I'm going to focus. And here's Chirac, so that's the language of focus for today. So you can see that the Gazelle Peninsula and this area is very linguistically diverse. So just in the Chirac neighbourhood, it's a small area. Chirac itself has between 750 and 900 speakers, so it's not a very large language. Very closely related to Chirac is ORA, which is, you can see right here, has doubled the number of speakers, about 2,000. It's much bigger language. So that's about 15, 20 minute walk from the Chirac area is the ORA, sort of stronghold where more ORA speakers live. Although they're all sort of interspersed with each other. Then you have in the same area, like 10 minute walk from the Chirac area is the Tawwills. You can see that's not a binding language. Sorry, I should have mentioned the green area. All these languages in the green area, they're all binding languages, so they all belong to the same family. So all these languages are known to be related to each other and have language descriptions. Some are well-described, like Mali is well-described. Chirac is, I'm afraid, not well-described, not yet. Cachet is being worked on at the moment. ORA, which is what we're going to talk about more today, missionaries have come and they've worked on ORA. They've spent a lot of time working on ORA. Tawwill is unrelated to Chirac. There's someone working on Tawwill at the moment, but not sure it's how it fits in with the linguistic picture. Now the Tolais are a group of people who are Austronesian speakers. They speak the Cuenua language. They are latecomers onto the Gazelle peninsula, so they pushed the binding people inland. So the binding people originally inhabited the entire peninsula, but the Tolais came and they took over and they're still economically and socially dominant in the Gazelle peninsula. So there's also relevant to this talk is Cuenua, so we talked about Cuenua, Chirac. Also Tok Pison. I should especially mention Tok Pison, so Tok Pison is the lingua franca, which is a common language. That means it's a language of communication that people across the northern half of New Guinea speak. So it's not the home language of any one individual group, but all children, by the time they're five, they can speak Tok Pison more or less reasonably well. I don't really know anyone who doesn't speak Tok Pison, anyone under the age of, say, 70, who doesn't speak Tok Pison. English is the official language of government and education officially, although in practice nobody speaks a whole lot of it. And we'll talk about English more later. So Chirac is in situating one of New Guinea's wealthiest provinces. It's a well-developed province. It's a very nice place to do fieldwork, I must say. There's a good road network. Like I said before, the binding people have been marginalized by the Toli people who've pushed them inland. But actually the Chiracs are starting to really come onto their own. They are traditional landowners in an area that people want to move to now. Land is becoming increasingly scarce, especially because of the volcanic eruption in the 90s. So people who had land near that volcano now don't have that land. And that's an ongoing problem of where did these people go? And some people have tried to hang on and struggle and farm on land that's full of volcanic ash, being optimistic, some people have given up and they've moved inland. In the Chirac area, there are Cuanua-speaking families, Toli families who have moved up there. Some of them have lived up there for a long time because of missionization. Also the Chiracs are negotiating contracts with foreign investors in co-production, et cetera. Christianity is a major influence in the lives of most people. So that's worth pointing out. It's an important point. Chirac, I would say, is a language that's under threat. I looked at ethnologue, which Peter was mentioning ethnologue last week in his talk. Ethnologue gives a status to languages where one is a language of international importance and ten is an extinct language. According to ethnologue, Chirac is categorized as 6A, which is vigorous, which means that it's used for face-to-face communication by all generations and the situation is sustainable. I would beg to differ, actually. I would categorize it as 6B, which is... There's actually a really big difference between 6A and 6B. 6B is threatened, used for face-to-face communication within all generations, but losing users. I think that's a fair depiction of the situation in Chirac. Now, let's just talk about literacy because although Chirac, as I've said, is changing in the sense that there are fewer users and the place is modernizing and it's developing economically and socially, it still uses literacy in a very different way from the West. When I say the West, I mean places like England or Australia or the U.S., okay? In the West, we're surrounded by literacy, especially, of course, at a university, but in rural East New Britain province, which is where Chirac has spoken, in this area of the world, it's much more limited. People do a lot of text messaging. That's one thing that people do. If people go to town, okay, so the Chirac area where I am based is about an hour from town. It's not for pick up a newspaper written in English, English newspaper, bring it back. Someone will bring back a newspaper. People will sort of leaf through it. Shopping lists. There's a limited amount of workplace literacy, but in terms if you walk down the street in the Chirac area, it's not like walking down the street in London or in Northampton or wherever. You're not confronted with signs everywhere. There's very little in terms of actual visual print, okay? So, I would say that it's fair to say that literacy in the area is pretty limited. It's non-pervasive, and I can say that there's three characteristics of literacy in the area. First of all, I'd say that imported English literacy is very prestigious, but actually only a small percentage of people speak reader-write English. Literacy is very highly multilingual, and we'll look at examples of that later. Literacy is a public activity, and I'll explain what I mean by that. I'll explain what I mean using examples. Here is an example from a coca wholesaler, someone in the area who's buying coca wholesale. The sign is basically written in... using English vocabulary, you can see, but it's not entirely familiar, is it? Because the structure of the signage is not in English, but it's written using... written using talk-pizzen structures. For example, the future tense marker here, and the possessive construction days of working, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. But you can see that in cases where the talk-pizzen word is similar to English word, because talk-pizzen has... cases of its vocabulary does come from English, for the most part. Instead of writing the words with a talk-pizzen pronunciation, and there is a talk-pizzen dictionary, so it is possible to write things in a talk-pizzen fashion, but rather than doing that, people just take the English word, but put it within talk-pizzen structures. Here's another example. Here's a housewind. If you keep in mind the fact that this area is four degrees below the equator, what do you think a housewind is? It's a place to cool off. And again, so this is Gallim Teachers College, 2011 housewind. Okay, I'm arguing here that even though it's written in English, it's actually... it's a talk-pizzen phrase. You have the modifier following the noun, as you would expect in talk-pizzen. Here's another example where you have English words nested within talk-pizzen structures, church program for every or for all weeks. I think the use of English is sort of a nod of acknowledgement to the authority of English literacy, because English is so important in the schools. But because people don't actually use English, if you actually had everything in English, there would start to be comprehension problems. And that's not what people want. The other thing that is true about literacy is that it's very multilingual. So in the church, for example, even though we're in a Chirac area, the churches are Cwynuwa. Many of the churches use Cwynuwa, which is the language that the Tolais people speak on the coast. Tolais people were the first to be missionized. They have a Bible in their language. And so they took their religion and they went inland with it. So there were Cwynuwa missionaries. And so even the Chirac people may or may... most people understand Cwynuwa and they may or may not speak it, but it's there, okay? It's accepted, you know? It's fine. They're not upset by that. Now, here's a video. I don't know if I... This is a video that shows... it's only 30 seconds. And it shows... it's this woman reading from the Bible. She's reading from an English Bible. But she's reading English. A lot of people don't actually understand what she's saying. What she does is she translates into talkpizen and English and also in Cwynuwa. And so the point of the video was to show that literacy is sort of a public activity. It's shared and it's something that people do together because individually individual capacity and ability varies so much. Do you want to see the video? Hei. Okay. Sorry. The quality is not great. I was... Oh, wait. That's not the one I want. That's not the one I wanted. Wait. I wanted the other one. This one. Okay. So that was the point of showing you that video. That people... you could see she's speaking... she was speaking three languages there whether or not you caught it. Bottom right hand corner. Like that. That's good. So, yeah. It's a public activity. People don't normally read... people never read books. I've never seen anyone read a book. People don't do that. People have Bibles and they'll occasionally read the newspaper. But people do not read. It's not something people do. And so when people do read, like in this situation, it's a public shared activity. To account for the fact that many people actually don't know how to read very well. This is an interesting example. This is a letter from the government sent to someone in the community, a community leader. And it's interesting that the letterhead... So the national language, official language of New Guinea is English. So the letterhead's in English. The stat... the dear Mr. Councillor is half in English. The job title is in English. But everything else, the subject lines in English, everything else is in Pigeon, Tok Pison. So I think this is really interesting because there's the nod to authority again. Like this is an official letter from the government. I'm using English. But in order to actually communicate, Tok Pison has to be used. So that's what's being used to communicate. And what's also interesting about this is that the person who received this letter hung this on the wall of his house, the way you would hang your graduation certificate or something that you're proud of that you want to show people. So the reason that I think that this person hung the letter up is because it's a sign of prestige. It shows that he's an important person in the community and it also shows that he's literate. And it also shows how important Tok Pison is in terms of communicating with people in a language that they can understand. So Chirac and Ora. Let's go back to Ora. Remember, that's the language near. It's another binding language located very nearby Chirac. Closely related linguistically, they're mutually intelligible. If one person speaks Chirac, then the Ora speaker can understand vice versa, but their literacy context are quite different. Chirac isn't written at all basically except perhaps a greeting within a text message, but it has no history of reading. On the other hand like I said before that missionaries have come into the Ora area and over the past 20 years or so they labored and they translated four chapters of the New Testament into the Ora language. I was actually at the Bible launch for Ora in 2008 and it was a full day event with music and food and people sitting out in the sun and they sold the Bible and I couldn't get a copy because it had sold out. Every copy of this Bible sold out it. It was very popular so everyone wanted this Bible and religion is important. But then a few years later three years later when I was back there I was talking to the people who run the Adult Literacy School for Ora and what they told me is that everyone had a copy of the Bible but then nobody knew what to do with it because they couldn't actually read it. So what they did was they opened a school for adult literacy so this is an example of the alphabet that the Ora people have been using and this school has grown by leaps and bounds it's extremely popular it's doubled in population in a year people are very keen to be literate in Ora. So the benefits of vernacular literacy are very well known students are always best off in learning literacy in their own language their mother tongue and UNESCO brings up another very important point that when you learn to read you only learn to read once and then once you have that skill you can translate it you can use your skill to learn to read in other languages students have the best chance of success at school if they've received their initial literacy tuition in the mother tongue so the Papua New Guinea national government endorses vernacular literacy but this was not always the case so the history of language planning and policy that's what LPP stands for the history of language planning policy in New Guinea was English only until 1975 when Papua New Guinea became independent from Australia and starting in the 1980s there's all across the country grassroots vernacular literacy schools started to pop up of their own accord so just individuals enthusiastic individuals within communities wanted to have literacy in their schools and so they just started to do it themselves even though there was no official recognition of vernacular languages and then the government sort of caught and onto this and so in 1989 they made a policy a national language policy that endorsed vernacular literacy so it's really a case where the local practices motivated national policy so the government says the right types of things every person has the right to become literate in the language they know best and in the curriculum there's nominal at least nominal provision for the 800 languages of Papua New Guinea so every school and every community has the right to teach they're encouraged to teach in the indigenous language of the area so English is taught starting in year 3 officially and in most cases I'd say even earlier than year 3 and nominally the curriculum provides for Hiri Motu which is the lingua Franca the common language spoken in the southern half of the country and Tokpizin which is the lingua Franca spoken in the northern half of the country so acording to the government Tokpizin and Hiri Motu are considered to be the languages of convenience their languages of convenience so English is the language of communication and commerce and the indigenous languages have heritage value and it's part of the cultural fabric of the country but Tokpizin is referred to as a language of convenience and I think that's an interesting turn of phrase and I think it's true it's viewed because it doesn't belong to anyone it's not like it belongs to any particular cultural group but on the other hand it's not a language of aspiration the way English is it's just this thing in the middle it doesn't have any real status so yeah even though it's the most widely spoken language at least in the northern half of the country it doesn't really get any official recognition it does get official we'll talk about that in a second it does get recognition but not much okay so here's a ministerial policy statement at the elementary level in other words like kindergarten, the equivalent of kindergarten kindergarten to elementary level 2 which is like year 2 or grade 2 the language of instruction is completely in the child's vernacular or the community lingua franca with an introduction into oral English at the end of year 2 children will leave elementary school letter in their first language so I'd like to highlight that the community lingua franca in other words Tok Pison is mentioned it is given a mention here there seems to be in my opinion this preference for first language and I think that's highlighted in the last sentence so even though the lingua franca does you know does get some kind of mention it's the next sentence then reverts back to the first language and I think the reason for this, the reason why it's worded this way is A it really is optimal if you can become literate in your own language in your first language but also I think it's also due to the history of the way the language policy is developed in the country that you had all these vernacular programs that then created impetus for a national policy favoring indigenous languages to be developed so there are two main objectives to the policy vernacular literacy followed by English only instruction but how do the schools deal with these two policies are they complementary or are they in competition the teachers have to work really hard to to teach vernacular literacy and then also to get ready for English literacy so they think it's really valuable to teach vernacular literacy like at this this is an orthography workshop that was held in 2008 and then we had another one in 2011 they see for example that English speakers have their alphabet and they have literacy and look at English speakers they're running the world right and then they see aura speakers aura speakers have their own alphabet and they have a Bible so I think they assume that if you have your alphabet then alphabet eventually translates to economic and social advantage for the community so in the schools the teachers try to present each language as a separate codified entity so here's an example from kindergarten class the A with the the macron over it is it's pronounced like the upside down V it's a mid, back vowel, unrounded it's pronounced uh okay here's another example from the kindergarten class what do you think this is months of the year which parts borrowed from from Tok Pison all the months themselves okay so this part's written in Kyrak and then the borrowing so in Bislama pre-nasalised worst stops of December November October now they're not pre-nasalised it's just December they're not pre-nasalised November I see what you're saying yeah why are they writing December December December yeah interesting bebuon yeah but so you can see that even though Tok Pison isn't officially supposed to be used in the schools really has no place in the school you're supposed to go from university to English and Tok Pison's not even mentioned it's not in this particular school it's not given any space at all but it has to have space because it's so functional it's useful it's for example there's these are the months of the year is that because there aren't words like that in Kyrak? yes well they're I'm sure there would be words off the tough of my head I can't remember but I'm sure there would be words that measured time but people don't use them in the modern context so it's like counting as well counting beyond like 20 it's even counting beyond 10 really um um this is year one this is taken in the year one class a photo I took in the year one class okay so year one you're not supposed to be doing English yet but you can see this teacher decided to get a head start lots of really sort of culturally appropriate things like ice cream, robot um yeah so um here's this is from did I skip one? no that's okay this is from year two okay this is from second grade um this is something this is a resource that was made in PNG clearly because it's culturally appropriate and then the teacher has put in the um the words in Kyrak for the students oh no that's true well I'd say this resource is probably 20 or 30 years old maybe I'm sure if they had a new resource they'd put a mobile phone in there um here's a and this year two teacher I might add is particularly um she's really really dedicated um she's made hapes of materials um another thing that she made um this is the theme okay so now we're in year two so you're supposed to be you're supposed to be teaching the children oral English okay but she's she's you know getting them started theme garden okay now the description is written in Tok Piz in here um and can you if you can guess any of the words talking about the garden plants what else what yeah well that you and Mary Mary is woman Mary yeah Mary yeah oh now because it's placeway or man now Mary man and man and woman cut the grass um blah blah blah and so if you keep in mind that the Tok Piz in alphabet is completely borrow I mean it's it's appropriated from English um can you spot the spelling error keeping in mind that this is um written in English and in Tok Piz in even though Tok Piz in shouldn't be written or English shouldn't be written at all in year two can you spot the spelling error okay look at this okay what has this person done how does how is this pronounced it's pronounced like oh so garden okay so even the teacher um who's um talented and skilled and dedicated has um it's it's it's there's a lot of a lot to sort of untangle she's working um basically with with three languages um so it shows that even the teacher can get confused by the multiple of bits um it's it's can be quite confusing um so here is the teacher I don't think we have the time to talk if we have time at the end we can look at this hey do you want to see it's a 30 second video okay um and yeah just you'll you'll very quickly see I think what she's doing this one's not as loud ah come on where is it oh wait wait wait okay wait wait start again taken by someone who has not attended ELDP so as language documentation classes and you can see the result so um what was she doing what was what was she teaching them do you know she was yeah she was contrasting the English with the Kyrak alphabet so there's a lot of you know there's a lot of linguistic sophistication in um in the with those children and language and literacy learning is multi a multilingual affair um but the there's a lot of practical challenge there are many practical challenges to the literacy program first one being the teaching materials so um liticote says a well known um language planner says the effective implementation of the syllabus depends on the nature and supply of the teaching materials so any teaching materials that they have in the vernacular are made by the teachers okay and that's great if your teacher is invested in willing to spend the time but not all teachers actually are some are more than others um in this school that I went to there's only two schools um Kyrak elementary schools anyway the one I went to the year the year two teacher and the prep teacher were both pretty invested the year one teacher just wasn't you know um the he he didn't um he hadn't gone to the workshop um and he didn't have any materials in the classroom in Kyrak so he was he was just more invested his motivation was teaching English literacy so he obviously thought that English literacy was more important for them so when you have these two policies um meant to be complimentary but more likely competing this is what happens okay um so that's just a practical reality um again like well what I've just said the policy objectives are competing with each other the year teacher the year two teacher in particular has has a major challenge because I know that starting in year three these children are going to go into primary school which is a different school and um they really do shift pretty heavily into English because I went to those school those classrooms as well to the year three classrooms and the teachers aren't necessarily Kyrax speakers in fact most of them are not and um so there's a lot of talk pigeon and English in primary school and the year three teachers are far more serious about actually speaking English in the classroom they really are at least the ones I've visited but they may have been doing that because I was there you can never tell when you're going to into a classroom you don't know how people are changing their behavior the major challenge really for um this classroom is that a sizable minority of the students in the classroom do not speak Kyrax they are from the Talil area okay so L1 stands for first language so the first language of um many of the students um I think it's like it's written in a notebook in Australia so I don't have the exact number but I think it's about 40% of the students but it's 40% more or less in that classroom are not Kyrax speakers they speak Talil and if you recall Talil is not even it's not like ORA where it's sort of related and mutually intelligible with Kyrax it's not at all related um to Kyrax and yet these children are going to a school where they're learning Kyrax literacy Kyrax vernacular literacy um so they're basically replacing English as a second language with um Kyrax as a second language um so this is happening well the school happens to be situated right on this boundary area between the Talil and the Kyrax area um and so it's close it's just close by to the Talil area um and so parents um send their kids there um some of them are probably not aware of what their kids are doing you have to keep in mind that many of the parents really don't have a lot of education um themselves and so they're not very well equipped to oversee the education of their children and they place a lot of faith in the teachers and in the schools and they're assuming that the teachers in the schools are are doing um the right thing I suppose and from the school's perspective if you think about it from the teacher's perspective they're doing their job right they're carrying out the policy that you teach either the vernacular or the lingua franca um in elementary school so because so many schools because of this history of vernacular literacy and it because it's viewed as such a good thing and a positive thing um the schools I think what these teachers have done is they've just taken that and run with it really trained to interpret or analyze language policy so um even though the policy does allow for teaching in the lingua franca I think the default option is literacy in the vernacular so um and then the other major problem is functionality like there's just not enough out there in Chirac for students to have any motivation to read so even if you do speak Chirac language um you don't there's no um you don't use it for anything except for your class um so um if it's only a school based activity um with no um no other function um that can actually undermine the value of learning the vernacular it's just like anything I'm sure everyone's when they've been in school you learn you have to take some class that you you might not even enjoy and then if you don't see the functional value in it you resent it even more right um so it could be even counterproductive um Kulma says that um if you know literacy has never been part of the tradition speech community may have no use for it and Mule Hoysler says that um new literates if there's no functionality for the literacy new literates frequently and rapidly revert to illiteracy okay so um yeah so this is just something I'm going to skip over but basically the point is that um you can see it's challenging enough for the teachers and the students in the schools to to teach and to learn and so you would hope that the language policy facilitates as much as possible learning and teaching and that's why I see top prison as a viable alternative because A the policy already allows for and it is taught already um in the cities where there's a lot of population linguistic mixing and even in this area near um near the kayak area there is a top prison school that's what I forgot to mention is that there's a teacher's college nearby and the teacher's college has people from all over New Guinea like trainee teachers coming and they bring their families with them and their kids so you have all these kids from different first language backgrounds going to that school but it's not only for the children of the teachers no one can go to that school so um that top prison school is there even in that in the area in the local area children didn't speak it I would certainly wouldn't think it was a good idea but children speak the language it's not um their first first language but by the time they reach school most of them speak it at least reasonably well and if they don't speak it reasonably well on day one of school they start they will speak it well because a lot of their classmates have parents with mixed linguistic backgrounds where the father and the mother speak different languages so the children of those parents are speaking top prison they grow up speaking top prison as their first language anyway and they don't speak the vernacular so the kids even if they don't speak it well they have to communicate with their other classmates and they use top prison okay so it's the vernacular students vernacular speaking kids switching the top prison to accommodate the top prison speaking children rather than vice versa okay there's more resources for teachers to draw from okay what about the argument that you know literacy you know literacy helps to um save the language well there's really no um evidence for that okay reading and writing doesn't guarantee transmission Kayrak was healthy for a long time and it was never read or written um it's not it's vulnerable now because um some parents aren't using it with their children um the other thing is that top prisons already de facto language written language anyway you can see it's pervasive um in the community and in the schools even though it's not officially acknowledged so it doesn't um disrupt the language ecology quote unquote the way um vernacular literacy may and what I mean by this is like mule Heusler again says that um if you write down a language that has never been written before you can potentially endanger the linguistic ecology of the area because um by writing one language and then you're not writing another one then that can put everything at a balance um he gives examples from the pacific um but that aside talk prison since it's already written anyway you don't have that potential problem dairy now Peter last week was talking about dairy that was had a grammar developed for it in the 70s and 80s literacy materials in the 80s but ethnologue called it extinct right so that doesn't seem to make a difference but what has made a difference for dairy it seems from what I understand about what Peter was saying was that the economic and the social development is what gave people a bit of a lift which gave them the head space so that they had the luxury to think about maintaining their language I know it's a different type of situation but it's just an example um okay so um how does language policy fit into all this so macro versus micro macro policy what macro refers to high level policy micro policy micro macro micro is like high level sort of general governmental level micro is local community level policy is like what you want to do with your language and planning is how you implement that so like policies statement of intent versus implementation so who's taking the initiative here so in the case of New Guinea what happened first was that you had grassroots implementation um at an unofficial level which prompted macro level planning or policy making which in turn once that decision had been made that policy had been made that we're going to have vernacular literacy that then prompted all these communities that had not yet initiated a vernacular literacy program to start making some decisions about what are we going to do in our school okay so it's not really evident though that this community made some made a sort of a very active whether it's not evident they actively developed a policy but what is evident is that they looked to their neighbors the aura speakers who already had an orthography and who already had development in their language and thought this looks like this is what we will take so they adopted the alphabet and they adopted the policy of the aura speakers but what's good for one group isn't necessarily appropriate for the other and if they had thought about it more carefully and thought about well if we have a school where almost half the children don't actually speak that language maybe we shouldn't be offering just one language they probably would have decided not to but I think there's just a lot of sort of assumption that if it works for one community if it you look to your neighbor for guidance I think and I think it's because the benefits of vernacular literacy in this case have been misunderstood and overstated so in the planning that's the implementation at the macro level at the government level they're creating lots of materials in English which is great but at the micro level anything related to vernacular literacy it all has to come from the local teachers everything like developing the orthography I was there I came in several years after the initial orthography had been developed and we worked on revising it and they were very happy to revise it because they could see there were some problems with it but I just happened to come through what if I hadn't there's loads and loads of languages where nobody the communities are doing it completely on their own completely on their own resourcing and support at the government level in Moresby they've got consultants and language planners and they've got research that they can refer to to help them with their decision making but at the community level it's they're very much left to who happens to come through they're left to their own devices and they make their own decisions which is good but it can also be difficult if you don't have enough assistance and expertise so if you consider the entire picture and who's taking the initiative in which areas of planning and policy and planning and if you think about what the resourcing is like and the minimal support that the community actually received for making important decisions then you can sense the impending danger of what I call copycat policy so that's when you use your neighbor's policy as a basis for your own but in the case of Chirac and Ora they have very different situations Ora has double the population it's got you know some and double the population is important because you can have entire schools filled with one group of speakers okay they've got something at least only you know they've got some part of the bible it's something better than nothing and you've got like this sort of fervent group of literacy users in the adult population who can then who they transmit that enthusiasm to their own children so they have some interest in literacy but the Chirac population is sort of politely interested in literacy when I'm around but they don't think they really care very much to be honest the teachers care teachers care but they don't use it so I think then when you have micro-planning, micro-planning really needs to be like at the local level you're planning for your local community and that is valuable because you're looking specifically at your community and that is inherently very variationist but when you're sort of looking to your neighbor which is a very natural thing to do if you need assistance and you're not sure what to do then what you have really is sort of macro-planning in disguise really it's just like well let's take their plan and apply it to me, to us macro-planning is fine but it doesn't cater to the needs of the individual communities the way that micro-planning does so optimally in a stable, homogenous community vernacular literacy in the first language of course is optimal but that's not the case for other types of communities so when I'm suggesting that in a multilingual classroom in a rural area like this at Tok Pison is probably a better option am I sort of stating the obvious well, you might think so, you might think why have I sat here for an hour to listen to this but it's not necessarily obvious to people in communities where the importance of the vernacular has sort of been overemphasized at the expense of all other considerations and communities at the local level really need that support in analysis and in planning to make good decisions or otherwise their natural inclination will indeed be to look to your neighbors for inspiration and that's all thank you a lot of time okay, sure Lydia is it not also stating the obvious to say that there could be a separation between emphasizing the importance of the local language and focusing on literacy which could be in Tok Pison and having those two be separate things in the classroom where people are taught that their language is valuable yeah yes, good point that's a good point it's true because yeah, you know just because you don't teach even if you don't teach these people are teaching literacy in the vernacular but say they decided not to that doesn't mean that they can't talk about the importance of the vernacular and use of vernacular but then they also need to use they need to use the other vernacular as well so or cut it into two different schools for example have two different schools but that's not happening at the moment you talked about the community making decisions but you also said that the other was diagnostic about literacy so how does the community make decisions that's what for well I think it's like in 2002 which was quite a few years after the policy decision in 1989 for vernacular literacy there was the first vernacular literacy workshop where they sort of formulated the alphabet so I think it's whoever is interested is basically involved in the decision making yeah so typically it's important people sort of big men important people in the community teachers are invested in that so it's usually a group of people like also like the pastor pastor and pastor's family is involved in that kind of decision making people who have a profile in the community make these types of decisions so yeah that was SIL it was an SIL thing that they brought to the community and then the community was involved in it the one in 2002, yeah, that first one yep Peter it was really interesting but I wonder if there isn't a sort of ideological dimension to that you haven't really talked about you touched a little bit on issues of evaluation and what people consider to be to be valuable or not valuable and so on and aspiration but English and English literacy is something to aspire to I think there's also this sort of ideological position which is, you know, we're all one talks we should all, you know, love and support and whatever our own language but talk business is something that you just put up with you know, you need it, you have to use it but nobody really wants it to be there in any kind of individual sense and those views are sort of supported also by organisations exactly like SIL and the consultants and advisers that you mentioned we had a nice case of this a few years ago we had a student who was working in London and what she found there was that the missionaries, the consultants, the outsiders the linguists were all saying your language and then sort of French but what the local community did was they had a lingua franca that was used in church and everybody wanted and there was no no question to them that they were going to shift to that they just used it, they kind of put up with it and so on so there was a conflict of ideology and the viewpoint taken by the local community and this other ideology which has been promoted by the government and the consultants and SIL and linguists and outsiders and those two are really banging into conflict and I think what you're suggesting is putting that lingua franca into the middle there, you've got no attraction there because in either ideological position and support I mean it's true and actually this was in Vanuatu where they speak Bislama which is another dialect of Melanesian pigeons and I just happened to stay in the same guest house as these people who worked for the Department of Education and we were talking about Bislama in the school and it's the same thing in Vanuatu where Bislama is basically ignored in the school and I was asking them what do you think about Bislama don't you think it has some sort of useful function at some level as a bridging language because you're using it anyway why don't you acknowledge it and they don't it's like the orphan it's an orphan, it's an ideological orphan I suppose it doesn't have status Bislama and Tokpiz in the same they don't have status or value for because they're not English so they don't have that they're not aspired to but they don't have that they're not custom so yeah I mean it's a problem but it's some of these kids some of these kids they don't speak any language but they still, I suppose you could say they still belong to that you could say, well my mother is Talul and my father speaks Kyrak or whatever but I don't know, I don't have a solution to that but it's a in practical terms if you want to increase the literacy in the country if that is something that you genuinely want to do then I think you should take some steps to try to improve it improve the situation and a lot of it is just I mean I'm not saying I think I think you can promote the vernacular and you can also promote Tokpiz it isn't a valuable and useful language acknowledged sorry, Itesh Is there a Bible in Tokpiz? Yes Okay, and then this is a very basic question but I don't know much about Pigeons and Creoles Is Tokpiz a Pigeon or Creoles? It's a Creole Okay, I mean it's a Creole it's spoken as a first language by lots and lots of people I heard you say Pigeon Yeah, I know, it's called Pigeon but it's a Creole it's a Creole Julia Can we talk later? Is there other people who have comments and questions? Eleanor Why does it have one point to make building on Pigeon's point about whether there is a kind of ideological framework in which like the Melanesian Pigeon is kind of found and I know in my experience in Melmato I came across some speakers who, especially when people visiting from the Solon Islands or from PNG they were really excited by this kind of like cross-nation common ground so maybe that's kind of one angle which Pigeon has a way of doing that That's interesting Building a community of Melanesian Yeah I mean think about I don't know, think of smoking or something I mean that's probably a bad analogy but I mean smoking had this certain appeal 30 years ago 40 years ago if you smoked you matched a certain profile and I still think if you smoke you're sociable you have a better social life and things like that but not anymore, not anymore but the public information campaign public information campaign I think has has changed opinions and I'm not saying you want to ignore the vernacular, you certainly don't but you want why not promote this language that everybody in the country speaks it should be a source of national pride really Julia and then Sophie Yeah I think you're right that Pigeon, or Prio, is definitely mixed language is basically the lowest below in terms of prestige it's called the prestige cunning tends to get let out of language planning and policies so in other places where they have promoted or let's say decided to use the lingua franca the local Prio as a language of education and forgotten to raise its prestige parents turn around and say we want our children to learn a proper language Yeah but the problem then is that if you raise the prestige of the lingua franca you may increase language shift but maybe you won't but okay, yeah a few dead languages later well can't you don't die anyway there are people who are voting with their mouths they are talking pissant so shift is happening anyway I want to ask you to what extent is language shift happening you talk about some kids oh it's common because the area is very mixed it's very very mixed there's been a lot of economic development along with all that and there's really good infrastructure they now have electricity so they watch English TV a lot of the TV it's mostly in English actually I got to watch lots of whatever that show is anyway no 60 minutes tick tick tick counter yeah, lots of English TV talk pissant so it's happening and there's a lot of intermarriage okay the family I lived with sorry the wife was from Goroka kids don't speak Kyrak because the mother just speaks to them in Pigeon all the time and Kyrak and these languages the Bining family is sort of notoriously thought of as being a very difficult you know so the Toli people on the coast the Kuanua speakers say that oh Kyrak Ora, they're very very difficult their language is really hard our language is easy and the Kyrak people actually say the same thing they say yeah our language is hard the Kuanua is actually very easy and so in that sense too and personally I mean having worked on both an Austronesian language in Vanuatu and this language in PNG language complexity I'm sorry but I think some languages can be more complex than others and this language is this Papo language and Papo languages I think are known for being more complex and this language is certainly Kyrak language is certainly more complex than the language I worked on in Vanuatu that's being recorded too oops but yeah so there's shifted from that I mean I'm not sure how significant that is but there is this sense that like this language is really hard and so people who marry into the community tend to not learn the language and the kids don't and so when your mother is not speaking to you in language there are a lot of kids that don't speak it I know there's one family there's a Cuanua speaking family they came from the coast a long time ago so the kids with Cuanua speaking parents grew up grew up in the neighborhood they don't speak any Kyrak at all either well I guess it's not surprising but yeah there's in that family too the Cuanua speaking family there are two sisters one learned Kyrak the other one didn't there's a variation but a lot of people move into the area and they don't learn the language because they don't need to they can use pigeon oh sorry Sophie a lot of things that you're saying remind me a lot of the area I work in in Nigeria so the multilingualism and so on and so forth and also so I'm like and then I see the pictures of primary school teachers and they're all members of the local community and that's where the difference comes in because there's a lot of members of the local community where I work there's a lot of teachers and there's a lot of teachers in the school the government just post them now they do the same thing in Vanuatu they don't do that here now it's good what they do here is they it's very good in Vanuatu they do the same thing they take a person and they send them on the other side of the country is it the schools that demand the teacher or is it the government that sends them and if the government sends them there will be another way in which they actually support that on policy and practical terms well now these teachers are local they speak the local language except for that way yeah I mean at least it's sensible in that way like these teachers are Chirac speakers they speak Chirac yeah it certainly helps this is you mentioned for the Ura that they have the Bible too so what the Chirac people are missing is something to read so maybe this is there a possibility of addressing that yeah I mean I suppose that's something I could do is translate the Bible I know that Nick Evans I mean it's it's not something I'm personally very interested in I mean I'm not a missionary but that's what the demand is for I mean people I don't know whether the children really care about reading the Bible but certainly the parents are interested in reading the Bible and Nick Evans who works in southern New Guinea I hear that's what he's doing they want him to translate the Bible so he's spending part of his time on the language that he's working on in southern New Guinea doing Bible translation Peter there is an alternative Nick Tibergott has tried it out I know in several places is comics the phantom comic something that the kids really love really easy because they've just got the little speech balloon you can put any language in there that you want to have and it's way more appealing than I mean the Bible the presence of the Bible there is not something for people to read it has an iconic value as being connected with the church with the pastor the pastors have political power they have money the churches are rich and so on so that's the connection with the Bible if you actually want people reading do you enjoy reading cartoons, manga whatever they have you have to make a lot of cartoons sure, yeah cheap and easy to produce black and white photocopy them but you need it for others you need sort of depths you need more than just one thing you need lots and lots but the thing is I mean people really just don't read very much that's neither do they in the West yeah but in the West you have to read you can't get by if you don't read well, I mean it's really really hard it's very hard to get by in this community if you don't read people do but they have to hide it because they feel ashamed which is terrible that they feel ashamed but if you can't read in this community I think it would be very hard you're at a real disadvantage whereas there you're not at a disadvantage because reading and writing are public public activities reading and writing is something that you're not necessarily expected to do because other people can do it for you and it's not if you can't read and write people do feel a little bit ashamed if they can't read and write but it's especially nowadays because education is becoming more important but still there are an awful lot of people who still can't read and write and who depend and who get by quite well without reading and writing it's called on they can easily lean on someone else to do that and other people seem to know that that's their job it's part of the culture it's an oral it's an oral culture sorry, I've forgotten your name and your identity and do they see themselves as the chyrex community or do they say do they identify with the place there now they see themselves as chyrex and what about those who say they don't speak with a smaller have just been as a smaller unit or as part of different I think okay so like chyrex they're part of the binding family and so there are certain things that all the binding people do like for example fire dances and mask making so there are certain things that that the larger grouping of people who live in the gazelle peninsula that whole green covered area on the map they identify themselves as binding people but within the binding people, people view themselves also as part of the smaller clans chyrex and aura and mali and cacet and then the Talil they really are very different they are very different their religion, their Catholic when you walk into the Talil area it feels different it really does it's just got a different vibe to it I can't explain but it feels quite different it's just down there it's like ten minutes away but they're different areas and they view themselves as distinctive and they are oh yeah I mean they communicate with each other all the time because they live so their neighbors they all know each other yeah but they have their own identity yeah does that I don't know if that's the fun I was just wondering what how far the path is because if they would in that case they would use talk person to communicate with each other yeah they do talk person I mean really if you want to communicate on a national level you really do need to use talk person and that's the really ironic thing I also find it very ironic in Vanuatu as well it's the same thing it's not given any real it doesn't have any value it's not valued but everybody needs it everyone really needs it and so there's a lot of variation in the way it's written I don't think it really matters in the way it's written as long as people understand it but in the case of Bislama in Vanuatu there's a dictionary at least one dictionary made for Bislama there's probably a really old dictionary of talk person so outside linguists have come in and they've developed materials but it really hasn't taken off they've developed materials focusing on the language with them on to as literacy instruction but if there are not really materials with the information described that information would be something that became valid that everybody wants to know because the language, the literacy that's just the input information that they want isn't it's not in Kyra in top business fun I think we have to just continue this discussion in the pub I'm afraid because we have to work on this room now but thank you very much for coming for this very interesting and lovely talk and please join us at the Institute of Education while we turn up these recordings