 Thanks for coming. I'll be talking about Niew Caledonia today. It's kind of silk my thunder a bit by showing you the second slide. Even if you haven't heard of Niew Caledonia and don't know where it is, you've probably seen this. Anyone not seen this before? It's in a famous book called The Earth from the Sky. And this is called The Heart of Vau. It's actually a natural phenomenon. It's a mangrove swamp in the north east of Niew Caledonia. mewn i'ch fany relaxad a'r amser hwnnw ddewch ei wneud hynny yn cael ei byd yn hollu, ac rwy'n brydig i gael gydaethau, nid o'r bach, y tu pethau, wedi gwych wedi hail y ddoleddau. Gyda'r barriers, mae'r newid wedi gweld i'r maes iddyn nhw. Mae'r Rhysg Nesaf Cymru. Mae'n cael y Pwysifwyr. Mae'n cael y 1515iickyparks honno ddechrau Llyfridog. Mae'r Llyfridog yn cael eich hollot o'r Llyfridog. Mae'n 500 km o'r 50 km oed, mae'n Llywodraeth Llywodraeth, ac mae'n rhan o'r oedol Llywodraeth yn ddechrau'r gwaith. Rwy'n golygu o'r Llywodraeth yma, ac y cyfnodd i'r Llywodraeth yn cael ei gwybod yn cael amser yn cael y cyfnodd yn cael anodd. ..of whom 44% are indigenous people. So they have a built-in minority, a status in the population as a whole. Europeans, nearly 35%, and others, mostly from the Pacific area, make up, well, whatever it is left. And these people come mainly because it's got a relatively well-to-do economy a'r newid y byddai i'r byddai ar y gael o'r argyflwyno ac oherwydd'r cynhyrchu'r mewn iawn. Ym ni'n gyntaf, yn ei gael ei hanes i'r Ffranc, ac mae'n gael bod yng nghymru oedd y Gweithgrifennu ysgrifennu sydd yn 1956. Felly, mae'r cyfrinwyr yn unig i ddoch i'r Gweithgrifennu yn gyfrannu dwi'n gael. Mae'r hanes i'r gweithgrifennu. Mae'r Gweithgrifennu yn gael i'r Gweithgrifennu. Mae'n ei weld bod nid i swydd a gweld eu bod yn yr I. Rydyn ni'n gallu gallwch yn ei ddweud yn cynllun o oesio ac rhoad. Ond mae rhaid i'n golygu'n llyfrfodol yn ei fewn oeddol rhai yng Nghariaidd. Mae mynd yn ni'ch defnyddio'r map efo'r hyn i gmwylo hwnnw, felly mae'r yn ni i'n llyfrfodol i'r gwasanaeth Nfotwnol a Gwaith sensorion Cymru yn pryn oedd yn y New Caledoniau. Rwyf wedi gŷn gysylltu bod y gweithio'n pwysgu llyfrfodol o'r ffordd o Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Vanuatu, particularly. New Caledonia, because it's French and therefore francophone officially, tends to relate to other francophone territories in the area, or not so much in the area. So when you watch the evening news in New Caledonia, you get Polynesian news, meaning news from Tahiti, which is actually quite a long way away. You can't see it, okay, over here. You get a little bit of Vanuatu news, kind of Wallace and Fortuna news because, as I said, there are quite a few people from Wallace and Fortuna in New Caledonia. You get very little news from Australia and New Zealand. You wouldn't know they exist. And of course you get French news. Okay. No. Soci economically, the main industry is nickel mining, and that's why a lot of people come from other places to work in the industry. There's quite a lot of tourism as well, especially on cruise ships. So when you're there with some kind of foreign accent like me, they assume you're an Australian from a cruise ship. And there's some fishing. There's some attempts to start commercial shrimp farming, but there's also artisanal fishing. But interestingly, the local people where I was in the north east of the main island aren't allowed to sell the fish that they catch. They're only allowed to give them away or swap them. Oh, by my hand. I haven't turned my hand. Oh, for audio. I'll forget that. Okay. And that tourism, a lot of the tourists are interested in the World Heritage Site of the Reef, the lagoon around New Caledonia. And also, natural phenomena like the heart of O that I showed you just now. But there is some... What's the word? Not exactly conflict, but content... Yeah. What's that word? Tension. Thank you. Thank you, Peter. Between particularly tourist interest in environmental stuff and also the local people, the original indigenous people, the Canucks, and the nickel-based economy, because some of the techniques that are being used to my nickel are not terrifically good for the lagoon. Cultural survival here is quote here. Environmentalists and Canucks leaders alike are firmly against this particular company's proposed development due to its potential for environmental degradation. Okay. Also, there's a lot of subsidies into the economy from France. France, I think, spends a lot of money trying to keep people in New Caledonia sweet. And that's partly because there's due to be a referendum on independence next year. And at the moment, there's a pro-French party in power in the local parliament, which is not really a parliament, but it's sort of just a local sort of assembly. Okay. But there is a lot of urbanisation going on. There's no post-secondary education outside the capitol. So if anyone wants to go further on a higher education, they have to come to the capitol. And there's a lot of young people. As it says here, half the population is aged under 30. So, particularly among the Canuck population, there's a lot of... a Cenedish population, there's a lot of unemployment, education underachievement as well, which leads to a high level of drug use. Especially in marijuana, they identify quite a bit with reggae, partly because of traditional hairstyles. Gredlocks are quite traditional, apparently, in New Caledonia. And the colours as well, the colours of the Canuck flag are quite similar to reggae colours. And everywhere you go, you hear reggae music. So the culture of us making marijuana is quite strong among young people. And so you get quite a lot of road accidents. And several people that I spoke to have been bereaved because of road accidents, because of drug use and alcohol use. Right, so just to say, this is apart from the Inesco website about the World Heritage Site. And this is from Cultural Survival's website about the coral reef and the threats to it from the Niqua mining, if you're interested in that kind of thing. And here is that photo there in more detail, because you see the extent of the reef around it. If you've never seen a reef from the air, it's really quite something. And about here is the area where the language is that I'm going to be talking about. OK, so political background, as I said, colonised in France in the 1850s. Interesting in those days, the Catholic Church, who had already sent missionaries to New Caledonia, actually opposed colonisation and actually sent the soldiers away when they tried to establish a base near the oldest church in the island. But the colonisation led to land expropriation, reservations for the indigenous people. They say that there are only people outside North America who are putting reservations. OK, and it was also a penal colony for convicts from France. So eventually in the 1970s, 1980s, there was a euphemism called the events, a euphemism a bit like the troubles in Northern Ireland, if you've heard of those in the United Kingdom. And the people rose up against the colonial government, particularly in the north, which is the region where I was. And as that area was effectively out of government control, they established what they call the Ipecar, the Ipecar popular schools, which developed their own local indigenous curriculum, including stuff in and on local languages, local culture, local flora, fauna, et cetera. And I'm going to come back to that later because people remember that with great fondness, people who went to the Ipecar. And the church schools carried on going in parallel at the same time. And people who went to the church schools said they were going to look over the fence and say, oh, I wish I was at the Ipecar. Much more fun. Anyway, eventually there were peace talks. There was a leader of the indigenous movement called Jamari Chibaud. I don't know if you've heard of him. Almost like the Kanat Gondi and got assassinated in 1989 by people from his own side for being too moderate. But he was one of the main brokers of the peace negotiations. And after the two accords, there have been staged transfer of powers. I think we're about on the fourth step in transfer of powers from France to local control. But education and language policy have not yet been devolved, which is crucial for this particular talk. And as I said, pro-French parties are currently in power. And as I said, there's a lot of inducements from the French. Some people say there's even free electricity, particularly in rural areas. And a bit like the debate about Scottish independence here, a lot to talk about, oh, that the New Colonyn who couldn't possibly support itself. Well, there are much smaller places than that that do support themselves, like some of the islands you saw on the map earlier, like Cook Islands, Tahiti, for example. Okay, which Tahiti is further along in the step towards independence from France. Okay, so on we get to languages at last. French is the de facto official language. But there are also 28 living Kanat languages. Some have now died out. I'll show you a map of the languages in a minute. And there are also quite a lot of other languages such as Portuguese, Indonesian, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and so on, spoken by all the people who have come in to work there. I'm going to be talking, obviously, about the Kanat languages here, the indigenous languages, which poorly categorises as badly behaved or aberrant Melanesian languages. I like badly behaved better than aberrant myself. What that means is that they borrow a lot. And they are in the Austronesian language family, and they are related to Polynesian languages. The word Kanat comes from the Polynesian word for man, person, kanaka. People in Hawaii would recognise that word. But to hear Kanat languages, you wouldn't know that they're related to Polynesian languages because they've got a lot more phonology than Polynesian languages, a lot of phonology. And this is why they're called aberrant because they borrow a lot from neighbouring languages. And so they have a high degree of phonological and lexical differentiation between each other. And there's been extensive lexical borrowing between particularly the northern languages. I think, to a large extent, due to intermarriage, it's quite traditional and common for people to marry someone from outside their area, particularly from a joining area. So there's a tradition of borrowing, lexical borrowing, language contact, dialect continuous, so that people do understand neighbouring languages to a certain extent, intercomprehensibility. And also a tradition of multilingualism and intermarriage, as I said, which again I'll come back to when I talk about perceived problems nowadays. What's interesting now just to mention in passing is that generally there's a lack of pigeonisation. If you compare this to Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu, which are relatively close in the scheme of things, there you tend to find that most people speak a Creole. And the Creoles are the languages of wider communication. But that hasn't really taken off in New Caledonia. There's one small French-lexified Creole in the south, Teo. But generally French is used as the lingua franca. Okay, so French is the only language of education, literacy, public life. Languages taught in schools are English and very useful in Spanish. Where's the nearest place you could speak Spanish to this? Easter Island, yeah. Which is quite a long way away. Canak languages are generally not taught as subjects in schools, apart from a very small experiment, which I'll come back to later. As I said, French is now the lingua franca, so there's little cross-community language sharing. And the main island was mostly proselytised or Christianised by the Catholic Church, whereas the upland islands, the loyalty islands in particular, tended to be Christianised by Protestant missionaries. The Protestants, as you may know, were quite keen on Indigenous languages, quite keen on translating the Bible into Indigenous languages. But the Catholic Church saw Indigenous languages as a threat, really, a threat and as a problem. And all these inverted commas are quotes from people I talked to. The nuns used to hit our fingers with a ruler if we spoke our language, said someone I spoke to. I'll show you a slide in a minute. And Nomea, because of the urbanisation, people come to Nomea from all over the island. This is the capital. And also most of the immigrants live in Nomea. There's a lot of linguistic diversity. And I say people will speak to each other in French, but not learn each other's languages. And this is seen as a problem both by ordinary people and also by language planners. OK. OK. So this is a quote from a report just over 100 years ago by Church missionaries. My translation, as I explained to some of the students earlier, OK? The Indigenous language is so numerous, so different, so difficult to learn thoroughly. So we're just going to make them learn French, which is no less difficult for Indigenous people, of course. Lacking in expressions of Christian ideas, an obstacle to clear and a simple explanation of our doctrine. So it's best to consider them a temporary stopgap until the younger generations educated in French have replaced the elders. Which is, yeah, because they're ongoing, I think. But, yeah, definitely everyone is now educated in French. OK. So here we have a map of New Cardonia. So these colours are what they call the customary areas, traditional customary areas. There's something called a cannec parliament, almost. It's a sort of cannec senate, and it's where traditional leaders meet and, well, pronounce on various things. I don't think it has a lot of power, but it has quite a lot of prestige among Indigenous people. Indigenous people tend to be of the opinion, well, the people I talk to, that the French are trying to replace traditional structures, societal structures, and they're quite keen on keeping what they call the chieftains and their traditional representatives. OK. So I was in the north, mainly in the north also. No man is a capitalist right in the south here. It's a seven-hour bus trip right up round here because the middle is mountainous. You have to go right up to the north and then back down to Puebo, which is the area I'm going to be talking about mainly. OK. And you can see the outlying islands here, the loyalty islands. OK. So Puebo is in the Hoodmawarp customary area in northern province, which is, as you can see from here, the most linguistic rediverse area and also the largest of the customary, or largest of the provinces, at least, the modern provinces. And the main language spoken in the town of Puebo, I say town loosely, is called church. And interestingly, they only count in the sense of speakers over the age of 14, which makes it quite difficult for a linguist to gauge the linguistic vitality because they're not counting children. Because that's not proper people yet. I don't know. So you have to go and ask people about that. And this is something that I was very interested in, to what extent is language shift taking place and what are the attitudes towards that. And Puebo, although its own language is relatively small compared to other languages around it, so if I go back here, whoops, sorry. You can see this very small area here. And two other larger languages, Jawe in Nielauu to the north and south. But Puebo is said to be seen as a centre, again a very loose term. And children come to schools in Puebo. That is primary secondary schools from the outlying areas, which means that there are three language groups represented in the school. And I did try and ask people particularly, is there mutual comprehensibility between Jawe and Nielauu? Because this is perceived as a problem by teachers. Oh well, if we speak in church in the classroom, the other children won't understand, so we're just going to have to use French. And I said, well, there is a dialect continuum here. I know there is. I know there has been an intermarriage going on. Well yes, they would understand, but there are lots of excuses for not doing this. There is a lot of blame. There is not a lot of taking responsibility going on. There is also a lot of rapid cultural shift going on. But children seem to watch the Disney Channel all the time. Everywhere I went. In French. Disney's fairly comprehensively translated into French, all the songs and everything. So everyone pretty well, as far as I could see, has satellite TV. Has a car. The traditional way, and in the north people still live to a certain extent in the traditional manner in quite spread out communities. Both the individual homesteads and the communities as a whole are quite spread out. And people in the past would walk or perhaps cycle between them. But nowadays everyone drives in a car and together with the increased use of imported food that is leading like here to a bit of an obesity problem. And everyone has mobile phones, but there's not a lot of coverage. There's no internet access in the North Island and there's not a lot of landlines. And interestingly people don't seem to combine the satellite TV with satellite internet, broadband. So basically you could text people with your mobile phone and you find the place in the house. The house I was telling in, there's a mark on the wall in the main bedroom where you hold your phone once you've composed your text so that it will go. Yeah. And it's very difficult to actually make a call because they won't stay within the cell of the signal for that long. Yeah. Okay, and everyone has lots of running cold water, but not a lot of hot water. But that doesn't matter a lot because it's quite warm. It's about 30 degrees, but it rains all the time. It's very difficult to dry your clothes. Yeah. Okay, so this needs to be deconstructing a bit this picture I think. Looks like a traditional hut is more of a traditional hut. This is one of the buildings that this family have at their disposal. So most people's homes have several buildings and one would be a quite modern kitchen or bathroom or relatively at least. And they'll be often a traditional style hut and then they'll be sort of a fairly comfortable living area. Okay. There may not be a modern kitchen, actually. There may be a fairly very traditional kitchen with sort of a fire on top of sort of mud brick oven. Yeah, right. Interesting cultural juxtapositions there. So here we see Dany. It did us, his wife, the daughter, Karine, who works as a community worker. She organizes all the local farming and fishing cooperatives. She's employed by the government. This is... This is... Okay. This is Oly Coshaw, who is the linguist who was my host there or kind of a facilitator in my trip. And I owe her a great debt for introducing me to all these people. Here, what Karine and Dany are leaning on, these are traditional door posts. They haven't yet been installed by the door, but they're obviously very proud of them. And in fact, they set up this photo. They said, oh, you've got to have a photo of us by the traditional hut. Yeah. Yeah, so this battle is about it on that, I think, yeah. Okay. So in terms of language policy developments, there have been moves to improve attitudes towards the indigenous languages. And it was also recognized that the French that children were coming to school with was not typically good French because they'd been taught French by their parents, who were second language speakers. And really not necessarily to support the indigenous languages, but more to improve the French of the kids. The parents were... Well, there was... I don't know exactly when this was brought in, about 2003, I think. There was a policy encouraged in schools to encourage parents to speak home languages, traditional languages with their children before they went to school so the schools would have the responsibility for educating the children in French. They said this is a transitional model, not intended to support language maintenance. But they also started to employ language assistants in the schools who could interpret for the children and help them to understand what was going on in the French language classroom. OK. But somehow this new policy didn't get through to the parents. So often a lot of parents still think that the children aren't allowed to speak home languages at school. And the children tell the teacher that they aren't allowed to speak church at school. So they come along with these ideas. There's also a pilot project to teach a subject called connect languages and culture in schools. And this is about, rather than in, if you like, it's a subject rather than actually teaching the languages. A bit like a sort of language of awareness in some places. And there's also now some connect languages taught, again as subjects at the University of New Caledonia. They've started a BA in oceanic languages, partly taught by already's supervisor, Clermont Fauri, always Fauri. And there's also moves to have more place name signs in local languages. And I've got an example of one here. You could say this is in French it's called Sandinida Puebo, but the English name is Tumwa. And this is the parish name. OK. And what's interesting is that most of these, where are we? OK. Most of these Indigenous language signs tend to be rustic, either in colour or in materials, or in the kind of font that they use. Often they use a kind of like a childish font. The kind of sort of childish handwriting font that you get on computers for the Indigenous languages, which I think, again, sends a kind of subliminal message. OK. Where I took this photo, this is a kind of community centre. And in the community centre, they have an after school club, which is mainly sort of babysitting and making tea and stuff. But in theory, once a month, they have a language maintenance exercise, which I'll tell you more about in a minute. There's also interesting cultural here is the post box, which you can see. Up on the right you can see some houses. You can see they're sort of quite spread out. There's a whole culture of interesting post boxes in New Caledonia as well. Anyway, asking people about language shift, perceptions of shift in New Caledonia. People think that children are shifting to French. They say children apply in French when they try to speak to them in church. But if you look into it a little bit more closely, you can see sort of self-perpetuating circle going on there. Because parents think the children don't understand church or the church words. Well, they don't understand them because they don't know them yet. So the parents speak to them in French to help them, and therefore the children don't learn the church words. Yeah. So I talked to some of the teachers at the Catholic infant school. Children start school at age two years nine months, which I think poor kids. It's really a bit young. But in the reception class, what the teachers said, that only one child out of 21 children in the reception class spoke church well. I'm going to talk a bit more about what they mean by speaking well. The ALK here is the Language Academy, which I'll come back to in a bit, but there were very similar reports from people who went to the meeting I went to at the Language Academy. What happens nowadays is that, as I mentioned, there is a tradition of intermarriage. But nowadays if you get two parents from different language groups, they tend to speak French to each other and with the children. Whereas in the past, they would have spoken their own language or the mother would have spoken her own language until she learnt church, until she learnt the language of her husband. And some people learn languages more quickly and more easily than others. Okay. You also find there's quite a lot of code switching going on, which again is actually quite traditional. And I said there's a tradition of borrowing and multilingualism in connect languages that people seem to have forgotten about. So I spoke to some young people in the sort of late teens, early 20s. These particularly young people are members of a church youth group. Lovely young people, very nice, very helpful. And they said things like, we rarely finish a conversational in church and we often put French words into church and we don't know why. Very often people aren't aware of code switching, but they actually are these young people. But it's not necessarily a conscious choice. I said they don't know why they do it. But you could, as an ingress, interpret that as natural use of all their whole linguistic repertoires. But it tends to be seen as something as negative, particularly by people who criticise the language use of the young people and say, oh, they don't speak church properly and therefore language shift is happening. Yeah. Okay. So people say things like authentic church is being lost. The children speak deformed church. They don't speak proper church. They use different words. Sometimes the words are influenced by French. Sometimes they're just different words. A general language change as happens as we know, as linguists, that you can't stop. Young people tend to use abbreviations. This is something that's kind of traditional in France as well among young people. It may be something that's imported from French culture, it may not be. But that tends to be the case. And also there's phonological change going on, perhaps influenced by French. But again, this is quite normal for Cunac languages. They've traditionally always borrowed both Lexis and phonology. So one of the university students who is studying on the BA in the Oceanic Languages course who comes from Pueva said to me, this is a quote, is an old lady told me in my way of speaking, disturbed her. He said, there's a gulf between our generation and we have to preserve the language by adapting it. I think that was quite insightful. Of course he's a linguist. This relates to some of the things that we're finding with other languages as well. This is a quote from a friend of mine saying why are children and learners both eagerly expected to learn minority languages while at the same time often negatively evaluated in their actual practice of said languages. It's a bit of, again, a tension going on between what we want children to do and the criticism all the time of how they speak. And therefore, we're going to actually forget about actually passing on languages effectively to children. Going back to language maintenance revitalisation, there is a local language committee and they talk about working on the language. The people I stayed with and the sister-in-law, the woman I stayed with were on the language committee. The sister-in-law was saying not many young people like herself, she's in her mid-twenties, are interested in language. I was interested, and they kept talking about working on the language and I said, what do you mean by working on the language? What it means is that they collect words for a dictionary and not really kosher's been helping them with this because they really didn't have any idea how to do it, so she suggested that you start with a human body, here's a picture of a human body, so you click words for that and then you move out from that to what humans need, how food's grown, that kind of thing and then to things like place names, genealogies, kinship terms, we've been talking about here, cultural traditions which are very important ostensibly for people there. As I said, you also get animations at the after-school club and they try to focus on things like local history and customs because they're not part of the school curriculum. But again, this sends a subliminal message, they're not important enough to be taught, like for example Spanish or English. They have nice activities like Easter egg hunts with clues in the local language with the added incentive of chocolate, if you win. The chocolate doesn't last very long in that climate. But I asked, well, who has the ideas for this? The woman I stayed with, who's the one who runs the after-school club, said, well, the president of the association is very much a top-down model, like the farming and fishing co-ops are actually run by governmental representatives. And so despite or even because of perhaps this history of political activism and resistance to French rule, there's quite a strong paternalistic hand on language activities and also cultural activities. People have quite strong feelings about cultural shift, not so much necessarily about language shift. They don't necessarily see language and culture as the same thing. They see them as interlinked. And it is a quote here from someone in the village that language is disappearing and culture with it. And it is quite difficult to find people who are going to tell old stories who know about the old traditions. One of the people I interviewed actually done an MA in cultural anthropology at the university there. Mi'n orgy i'r troi'n hoffing to do some more research with him. Because they talk about children as being derasinae, uprooted. And they talk about losing their identity. And there's a lot of rhetoric about cultural shift. But as far as I could tell, this isn't necessarily a company by action and you get the same kind of thing with language revitalisation all around the world. They talk about languages all the most and the last thing they have left because they've lost a lot of cultural traditions. But most people still speak the language. Actually most children can still speak the language. One mother said to me was that children would speak to each other but they wouldn't necessarily speak it to her. They would apply to her in French. There are plans for a CUNAC TV channel. At the moment there are two local channels but they're really anything but local. You hardly ever see a CUNAC face on the local TV or any kind of TV. When I was there there was a documentary about the piano colony and a woman who was quite prominent in fighting for convicts rights who got together with some of the local people and there were some CUNAC people on TV. The children of the house where I was staying when they saw American films were very interested in seeing black faces on TV because they hardly ever see anyone who looks like them on TV. Which again is interesting subliminal and I wonder there's a lot of educational underachievements. This CUNAC TV channel, like the lessons are going to be about language and culture not necessarily in the languages. This is partly because the linguistic diversity is perceived as a problem. I'm talking to French immigrants in the capital. One of them said to me for example well I would learn a local language but there are so many of them. What is still very important in Euclidonia is what's called the customary gesture. Has anyone here been to Vanuatu? I think some people. I know they talk about custom there not sure it's exactly the same thing. When you go to somebody's house especially me as an English wanting something from them there's a kind of exchange idea that comes up in Papua New Guinea as well. You have to ask permission to go and talk to people in their house and you have to take along some presents generally, some cloth which is bought from the Chinese in town. In particular, particular kind of patterns and a bit of money as well generally. They like it if you bring something from home. I would go along and there's a particular form of words which ought to be in Indigenous languages but generally now it's in French and you can stand and have your hands down and your arms on your side like that and you say this form of words. Please let us come to your house and we are very grateful. It creates obligations on both sides so that I'm not expected to go back and every time I go back if they have accepted my gift they have to welcome me into their homes. People give you things back. I've got quite a few things people gave me like flip flops which is interesting because they are in the shape that people have there. As well as the traditional cloth people give things like this. This is a map of New Caledonia and it's in the colours of the Kanak flag which is almost officially recognised now. I'll put that on the table for people to have a look at in a minute perhaps. Sorry I was also given a what's the English pario which is again it's in the tradition of cloth but it's not quite the traditional customary gesture which is quite interesting also a mug map of New Caledonia but when I went to the school and I started trying to do the customary gesture to the teachers they said oh save that for the elders which I thought was very interesting because most of the other people that I'd been to were very keen on this customary gesture. This is it going on if you can see this very well at the Kanak Languages Academy you can see down here you've got some of this traditional cloth that people give a long time ago it wouldn't have been cloth they didn't actually have cloth and you can see on top of this this is a model of a traditional house this is actually a tourist souvenir but it's something that people give as part of the customary gesture and this is actually being handed round at the Kanak Languages Academy successively to the most senior person there actually it was given to someone from the Ministry of Education and people said to him after you do realise what you've done here by accepting this you've got to basically do what they say yeah yeah okay but in the background it is Wendy Coe Hager who was the head of the Kanak Languages Academy and this is one of the representatives they have representatives of the Languages Academy who are responsible for language development in each of the areas and they are more or less or variously they have different degrees of effect with these people and there's a huge arguments going on of the Languages Academy about that okay so I went to a meeting at the Kanak Languages Academy which was actually for its fifth anniversary was attempting to discuss what had been achieved or take a balance of what has been achieved in the last five years since it had been started it was eventually founded in 2007 under the new mayor accord that is nearly 10 years after that particular 1998 accord and its main names are I've deliberately put these inverted comma brackets in the French style because I really think it is following the sort of French idea of centralisation of language policy to fix the rules of usage and to contribute to promoting and developing Kanak Languages and Dialect which comes secondary but the university student I spoke to a couple of them they said it will definitely raise the status of our languages and it has in terms of making them more visible in all these road signs and things are partly due to them and also developing orthographies for the languages there's a view when you talk to people people tend to assume that the orthographies that are being developed for certain languages they focus on four main languages especially some of those from the islands because they tend to be the best maintained so there's not much hope at the moment of church being covered by the language academy because it's so small which is why it already is working on it particularly the propositions for orthographies developed by the languages academy tend to be seen as authoritative by people in the communities but the language academy stresses that there are actually only propositions and that there's a lot of argument going on about orthography as there is in quite a lot of places the language academy is of the opinion that a lot of documentary work has actually been done particularly for the languages they're focusing on so that they can now move from codification to normalisation of selected languages and they do tend to be rather fixated on norms in my view they talk about the problematic of normalisation graphic the problems of standardising spelling basically in connect languages and really writing is seen as preeminent although there is very little literacy in connect languages they're really mainly oral languages but writing and these are quotes from people who were at the language academy meeting writing can rectify the oral which can deform language usage they really want some kind of standard which worries me slightly these are some of the materials I've got some on the table as well some of you had a little look at them this morning we didn't really focus on these though some of the materials which are produced by the language academy they've got videos, quite nice stuff children's books including one in Fautunan because they don't forget that there are quite a lot of kids who don't speak indigenous languages some here in French as well and where there's worksheets working on languages and they're all very nice but as always a but with me because I'm critical as some of you know there's not a lot of liaison between the language the linguists working for the language academy and teachers or people basic curriculum developers so they produce these materials without a lot of thought about how they're going to fit in to the curriculum this is a little pun here of course spelling trouble so my question is what and who are they preparing these language materials for because most people in New Caledonia are literate through French only and there are no plans to introduce literacy through the local languages even though as I mentioned there is actually a ready made curriculum that they could draw on if they wanted to coming from the epic card the education assistant developed by the rebels back in the 80s but that's a bit of a no no hope we don't mention that and also ordinary people tend to find the linguist spellings quite difficult to process in fact there's pretty well only linguists who can manage to use them so people do try texting in the local languages as I mentioned people text quite a lot using their mobile phones and people I haven't got any examples of this because people don't have smartphones anyway it's so difficult to collect texts but people said that they text in the way it sounds to me i.e. using French spelling because that's how they're educated yeah but at the same time there's literally religious attachment there's a linguist who lives there was very critical of the policy of the academy some Protestant missionaries introduced spellings back a hundred years ago which in some cases the academy would like to reform because they're not seen as very efficient spelling systems but people and Jacqueline de Fontanel at the academy meeting and she was saying just get on alright and speak don't worry about your accents don't worry about the spelling just do it and someone respond to that well how can we pronounce words correctly without the tremor which is the two dots on top of some a lot of these accents they represent things like length of our length and nasalization stuff so then I said this is fan of fixation on standardization and on the written language although most languages aren't actually written so in conclusion we're not exactly where anyway I think there has been not very much sociolinguistic research done at all in New Caledonia in fact not a lot in the Pacific altogether there's been some language documentation done as I said due of the language academy some languages are fairly thoroughly documented and not by no means all of them though in New Caledonia there's also been a fair amount of anthropological work done on well a fair amount of some anthropological work done on traditional culture in terms of other sociolinguistic research all I know about is one undergraduate project one of the students I talked to who interviewed some people or did a little questionnaire in the village about language shift so I think there's quite a lot of work particular language attitudes to be done actually and I was quite interested in doing some work with me on that I also feel that the linguists who are developing materials and I did talk to some of them as well don't have much knowledge about language education about education in general about applied linguistics and as some of you know I'm quite keen for linguists to work with applied linguists on language materials rather than doing it in a way which isn't terrifically useful particularly there's not a lot of knowledge of how people actually develop literacy and how people learn to write and there's very much an autonomous or technocratic view of literacy development and orthography development not taking ideological and cultural practices into account when developing spending systems or what people are going to use the language of the writing for in other words so I think there's quite a lot of scope for training collaboration in that respect as well and as it has said as it says on the back of my book I think it's very important to understand and address language ideologies and attitudes when trying to promote low status languages because if you don't tackle the underlying reasons for language shifts then they're really not going to be very effective in terms of language maintenance this is a quote from a couple of people that I interviewed as a married couple the husband said after we'd finished discussing stuff ending up the interview he said discussing this makes us look at ourselves in a mirror discussing things like this because they never really talked about language attitudes before and Gigi his wife said when we look in the mirror we see blemishes which I thought quite interesting comment anyway that's the end of my talk just show you, sorry picture this is the Centre Couturentibau which was named after the current leader who was assassinated and this is the home of the Connect Languages Academy it's a cultural centre on the outskirts of the capital you can see the capital in the background there on the other side of the bay and it aims to it was designed by Renzo Piano a famous architect and the idea is to bring together both traditional and modern i.e. French influences so they have cultural events and lots of stuff that's it bibliography, I've read stuff I have many questions from Julia about things like where did she get the money to go to this one my credit card but I won't ask those questions even important ones are the ones the aspects that you cover for me so if you're listening by next day culture and the languages what was yours, any questions thank you for a very interesting talk and I'm interested to know what you particularly want to do next what's your sort of oh I'd really like to research this and where do you hope to start I would like to do more research and this is really a very very small pilot study I would like to do more research into language attitudes and ideologies there as I said in the end slide in particular I want to try and collaborate with Aurelia Coshard and the guy who initials a JM there who's the one who did a beer and anemai on traditional culture to look at language and cultural shift and attitudes towards that but it's very difficult to get money for things like that so unfortunately I've been looking yes thank you very much can I ask a follow-up question on the development of the ethnographies and reading material because you were saying that it's not clear actually what the purpose is for you and that's very interesting question but was wondering whether you had thoughts as a social linguist in the situation what potential readers would be and to what extent the development of reading materials and of other pieces is a useful investment of time or whether people are quite happy actually reading and writing in French and that's so ingrained it's a less symbolic value making a writing system attractive or something like that I think you're quite right yes I think that's this is something to be discussed with and this is something that isn't happening is discussing with people what they would like to do with reading and writing the languages the people who've developed these Protestant orthographies are very keen on Bible translation interesting the local language is still not using the Catholic Church and in fact the priest in Pwyd actually comes from Vanuatu he's a French speaker from well he's Francophone Vanuatu and so he doesn't speak any of the local languages and everything is through French there but there's quite a lot of church spoken around and about so yes they are still mainly oral languages and the question is as you say what purpose will be served as you say mostly symbolic I think with regard to things like place names I think place names are actually quite important for cultural survival and and developing the self confidence of indigenous people going back to the talk that Jeanette King did beginning of term I do think that confidence in traditional culture improving people's self confidence in general is a very important aspect of language and cultural revitalisation and as I said there is quite a high level of alcoholism drug use and basic underachievement in the indigenous population and if by promoting local languages one can help to promote a bit of pride among people that I think would be very helpful I think this is a case in Australia as well Tim there's more comment than the question I was interested in the fact that you were saying that French is the language of Franco that's what I mean there I think that's all delegating Gabon in Africa that's another fairly small friend ex French far as I know it's the only African friend country that has that situation I mean it's an interesting comparison there I know some people well I know friends of friends who have been doing work in Gabon yes but is it more French well I mean it's an actual French colony excellent but this one isn't still French yes I don't know why they're clinging on to it perhaps it's on the nickel they are they're clinging on to it it's quite small it's only about 4 million Gabonese there's even fewer new Californians the question is obviously because it's still French given that the French education system does not promote linguistic diversity whether it's in mainland so anyway that must have massive implications for all of them and it's odd that actually I mean it's not surprising to somebody that the activists don't really get too far because all these social support is not even in their hands where's Gabon I'm sure it's sending a whole load of expression well I mean it's interesting I'm sorry the earlier he's single with the first president there I mean he's single he was barely into French and if the language is French we're always saying what if it's a language it's a different situation there was never a widely spoken lingua franca in New Caledonia there was this sort of language sort of dialect continual I was just wondering with regard to the education system for French do they have their specific sort of literacy materials for children or is it all based on French curriculum it is all based on French curriculum I mean none of these materials are actually used in schools I'm afraid but it basically sort of basically literacy would be this is France, this is Paris, blah blah blah so I'm wondering where they did any sort of adaptation to the cultural reality as it worked or do they still teach children about where Paris is if you're lucky you'll find something that gets on camera this capital is a rather unattractive French town it is very much a French town you really see very apart from a few people you see a very little kind of presence there you said about increasing the national pride increasing the pride of the people in their own language in their own culture you mentioned films with actors who look like the people themselves might be beneficial what other things would you say what other steps first baby steps might be good to take in situations like this there was a session on this at the Languages Academy they had someone from Tahiti well actually no no they had someone who just joined the New Caledonia Broadcasting Authority from Tahiti Tahiti is about 20 years ahead of New Caledonia in language policy language maintenance and stuff so he had lots of interesting ideas about things like competition for young people writing songs whatever yes because I think he's keen on engaging younger people because as in many places there's a bit of kind of hyper traditionalising going on with this kind of focus on we're losing our culture and I think there is a bit of a time bomb there with a huge number of young people and sort of sort of dispossesiness feeling what about languageness? and yeah they don't know much about Australia or New Zealand at all actually they have no links with them no no that will be very interesting yes that will be very interesting thing to think about yeah just one silly comment there's actually tens of thousands of speakers of Spanish living in Australia oh yes okay right so they could speak Spanish with someone there but if they even acknowledge the existence of Australia apart from tourists they really have no link with Australia that's actually my kind of question you didn't really broach this but there are issues of attitudes and ideology between Francophonie and the Anglophone now you come in what's your perception are you a Anglophone? well you've clearly come from England or are you you have been in the past quite some tensions between the academic community the you know the policy makers and so on within this area within the Anglophones you said they ignore Australia and New Zealand exactly that it has been quite difficult in the past so are some of the things that you're saying could simply be taken as crazy Anglophone or crazy person from outside with the indigenous people I did kind of position myself as another person from an indigenous minority community to kind of get over the idea that I was sympathetic to their point of view and I was speaking French all the time I didn't I speak any English in your colour too I do speak French quite well and yeah they would recognise that I wasn't French but they thought I was Australian but that didn't that wasn't perceived as an issue it might be more of an issue when one comes to interact with the other academics at work there who are doing language documentation because it's very much straight linguistics no sociolinguistics and that might be a bit of a clash and a problem but there are some like as I mentioned Professor Lafontinelle who are quite open to this kind of ideas and are challenging this kind of top-down model particularly of orthography development so yeah there's possibilities Shall I go back to that if I if you as your work has been or these interviews have been with the church people and there are some other people in Numia is that right? People in Numia I talked to at the Language Academy and people study students from church, from Puebo studying the BAE nursing languages at the University of New Caledonia and their tutor so the question the ideology and the link is that actually the people identify themselves as connect and that language would be maybe not as important for this sense of identity or are they identifying themselves as chat Very good question and I can't speak for everyone obviously and it's not a question I really went into so I really can't answer that one I would guess that people identify themselves from their area but also from the traditional area rather than from New Caledonia and also as Canucks and there's lots of possible pictures I could have showed you that I haven't there's a bridge in Puebo which still has from the 80s a bit of graffiti saying Canuckie will win Canuckie is the Canuck name for New Caledonia this is a kind of a modern concept as well to have the whole country obviously in the past people were fighting each other as well Some of this is from Jival Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes I was just wondering where English fits into this language attitudes over there because in Vanuatu the Francofranc ministers would go to great pains to not position New Caledonia as a great Francofranc place when I was asking about French, English and all the other languages but they would actually talk of it as a good bilingual example by bilingual they were meaning French in English Really? It seems that it was becoming difficult for friends in Vanuatu to justify French that they would justify bilingualism meaning English and French would be a way of and so if you try and look at New Caledonia they would say that's a good example it's not French only, they still got English and they would always say that New Caledonia is desperately looking to both French and English rather than suggesting it's a good example of Francofranc which is what I'd expected to see but I don't know what it looks like from New Caledonia whether English is even talked about or Probably getting beyond what I know about but from what I can see that standard English is not great it's what you might expect from people who have learnt it at school and they don't get a lot apart from the cruise ships which really don't get anywhere except the capital and they're not for very long I mean they'll land for a couple of hours go to the local market perhaps visit one of the islands and then they're off and very few people will interact with English speaking tourists And the satellite TV is it? It's all in French and badly dubbed Moroccan soap operas it's all sorts of stuff that's highly irrelevant to the local community but it's a load of rubbish I'm guessing it's French but I don't know, I'm afraid It is that company whose name was mentioned largely but that's out of my area of expertise I'm afraid I'm guessing that they will I know there is interest from Australia in New Caledonia and I think it's largely because of the nickel deposits and they would like to develop more trade but yeah that's as far as I know I'm afraid so I think a lot of Indonesian people work in the English industry is what I was told I couldn't tell you, I'm afraid They're all in French but it's international Yes, yes Among the indigenous languages do people place hierarchy which one is the best or which one sounds intelligent or That's a very interesting question Again, I don't know The Languages Academy has its own hierarchy in terms of what might be the most useful languages to develop authorities for first meaning the ones which are most widely spoken but apart from that I think people are quite attached to their own home languages and they don't tend to learn other connect languages, well not nowadays but they tend to understand the nearby ones What happened to APK? Is it still running? No, no, no, no That finished when they were running and finished and they went back to school but it's still very alive in people's memories there's a lot of nostalgia going on for that period It is a question about the academy again Is each language represented by a person or several people or is certain languages a representative for each area and that person is supposed Pardon? Yes, yes the customary areas and that person is supposed to run local committees developing things like dictionaries and stuff and to be promoting the language and as in some areas these people are more effective than others so I think around the middle of the island there's a radio station starting with stuff in some local languages different times of day but there was a huge argument about this at the academy meeting about how some people were just simply not doing their job properly but to be fair, the woman who runs an audience has a huge area to cover and it will take her all day to go from that round to there Are they represented? I'm not so sure People seem to have a lot of money but they don't do a lot of work into it Maybe or they just get government money Gender issues are there differences between young men and women who are pro or against It's a lot less sexist and many other traditional societies I think but most of the people I talk to are female and most of the people who are interested in language that I talk to are female actually and what they used to in French or in local languages there's a thing that goes against all of it at least there's some stuff in the literature about who promotes who or but as in many other things you know you go to the language academy and most of the people there and there are some women you can see there are two women in there and the important people standing at the front and the technical advisor is a female linguist a French linguist the education minister person who came along there is a female