OLAC Record: Morehead: Languages of Southern New Guinea

OLAC Record
oai:www.mpi.nl:1839_00-0000-0000-0022-3B76-9

Metadata

Title: "Don't talk to him! His family speaks a bit mixed." Multilingualism from the perspective of the documenter)

CD-20130302-Multilingualism

Morehead: Languages of Southern New Guinea

Contributor (researcher): Christian Döhler

Coverage: Papua New Guinea

Date: 2013-03-02

Description: Paper presented at the 2013 ICLDC conference, Honolulu, HI This paper will describe the frustrating situation of starting a documentation project within a multilingual community, where informants would characterize other speakers as "speaking a bit mixed". From the perspective of a linguist carrying out a documentation, this leads to a continuous stream of conflicting evidence. Speaker A would correct one day’s findings and Speaker B would re-correct them the next day. The paper will suggest strategies of how to deal with this problem. Since 2010, the author has been working on Kmnzo, a language spoken in Rouku village, in the extreme South West of Papua New Guinea. Kmnzo belongs to the Morehead Upper- Maro family. The language family is believed to divide into three subgroups by Gordon (Ethnologue 2005): Yei in the West, Nambu in the East, and central Tonda. Kmnzo is a Tonda language, which includes about ten varieties. With the exception of Sarsa (2001) and Bouvé & Bouvé (2003), little has been published on these languages. In order to understand the "mixed up" situation today, one has to reconstruct the past. Ayres (1983: 16ff.) describes that in the 60’s the government undertook a policy of consolidating small hamlets into larger villages. This is against the traditional way of life, which involved non-permanent hamlets with no more than a clan or family. Nowadays, villages range between 150 and 300 inhabitants. In the case of Kmnzo this has had a double impact. On the one side, speakers are distributed across the village of Rouku, which lies in the center of the language area, and Morehead, where the regional primary school is situated. On the other hand, a significant part of the population of Rouku is starting to shift to the neighboring variety Wára. The connection between village consolidation and language shift is less direct here. The Morehead people practice direct sister exchange. A woman moves to her husband’s village and henceforth starts speaking the local variety. The men enforce their language over "mother’s language". In larger villages, this enforcement can fail and create a situation where children grow up speaking "mother’s language". For an outsider, who enters the scene at this point, the situation is rather confusing. There are two closely related varieties of a dialect chain spoken in the same village. One of the two is referred to as the "bad mother’s language". Informants are discouraging the documenter from working with "those people" for reason of linguistic purity. However, the very same informants are characterized by others as "speaking a bit mixed". The tedious work of pulling the varieties apart without interfering in language politics, require some ad-hoc solutions which will be described in the paper. URI/DOI: http://hdl.handle.net/10125/26087

This project focuses on collecting multimedia documentation of multiple undescribed Papuan languages – Nen and Nambu (Morehead-Maro) and Kmntso (Tonda). Other nearby languages will have varrying degrees of description, including Idi, Nama, and Neme. All of these languages belong to an almost completely unknown family in Southern New Guinea. Based at the Australian National University in Canberra, plus collaborations with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, and the PNG National Herbarium, the project will embed a German PhD student (Christian Döhler) in a team including a seasoned field linguist (Nick Evans) and a post-doc (Julia Colleen Miller), two Germany-based typologists (Bernard Comrie and Volker Gast) from the FAUST (Future Archive User Simulation Team), plus participation on targeted fieldtrips by ethnobiologist Chris Healey (ANU) and botanist Kipiro Damas (PNG National Herbarium, Madang). Particular foci of the documentation will be the natural world (especially ethnobotany and ethnoornithology), swidden cultivation, fire management and ethnoecology, mythology, auto-ethnography, ethnomathematics, and microvariation in language use in a situation of daily multilingualism.nichola

This paper will describe the frustrating situation of starting a documentation project within a multilingual community, where informants would characterize other speakers as "speaking a bit mixed". From the perspective of a linguist carrying out a documentation, this leads to a continuous stream of conflicting evidence. Speaker A would correct one day’s findings and Speaker B would re-correct them the next day. The paper will suggest strategies of how to deal with this problem. Since 2010, the author has been working on Kmnzo, a language spoken in Rouku village, in the extreme South West of Papua New Guinea. Kmnzo belongs to the Morehead Upper- Maro family. The language family is believed to divide into three subgroups by Gordon (Ethnologue 2005): Yei in the West, Nambu in the East, and central Tonda. Kmnzo is a Tonda language, which includes about ten varieties. With the exception of Sarsa (2001) and Bouvé & Bouvé (2003), little has been published on these languages. In order to understand the "mixed up" situation today, one has to reconstruct the past. Ayres (1983: 16ff.) describes that in the 60’s the government undertook a policy of consolidating small hamlets into larger villages. This is against the traditional way of life, which involved non-permanent hamlets with no more than a clan or family. Nowadays, villages range between 150 and 300 inhabitants. In the case of Kmnzo this has had a double impact. On the one side, speakers are distributed across the village of Rouku, which lies in the center of the language area, and Morehead, where the regional primary school is situated. On the other hand, a significant part of the population of Rouku is starting to shift to the neighboring variety Wára. The connection between village consolidation and language shift is less direct here. The Morehead people practice direct sister exchange. A woman moves to her husband’s village and henceforth starts speaking the local variety. The men enforce their language over "mother’s language". In larger villages, this enforcement can fail and create a situation where children grow up speaking "mother’s language". For an outsider, who enters the scene at this point, the situation is rather confusing. There are two closely related varieties of a dialect chain spoken in the same village. One of the two is referred to as the "bad mother’s language". Informants are discouraging the documenter from working with "those people" for reason of linguistic purity. However, the very same informants are characterized by others as "speaking a bit mixed". The tedious work of pulling the varieties apart without interfering in language politics, require some ad-hoc solutions which will be described in the paper. URI/DOI: http://hdl.handle.net/10125/26087

Format: application/pdf

Identifier: oai:www.mpi.nl:1839_00-0000-0000-0022-3B76-9

Publisher: Professor Nicholas Evans

The Australian National University

Subject: Secondary document

Wára language

Kómnzo

English language

Subject (ISO639): tci

eng

OLAC Info

Archive: The Language Archive at the MPI for Psycholinguistics

Description: http://www.language-archives.org/archive/www.mpi.nl

GetRecord: OAI-PMH request for OLAC format

GetRecord: Pre-generated XML file

OAI Info

OaiIdentifier: oai:www.mpi.nl:1839_00-0000-0000-0022-3B76-9

DateStamp: 2017-02-14

GetRecord: OAI-PMH request for simple DC format

Search Info
Citation: Christian Döhler (researcher). 2013-03-02. Professor Nicholas Evans.
Terms: area_Europe area_Pacific country_GB country_PG iso639_eng iso639_tci

Inferred Metadata
Country: United Kingdom Papua New Guinea
Area: Europe Pacific

http://www.language-archives.org/item.php/oai:www.mpi.nl:1839_00-0000-0000-0022-3B76-9
Up-to-date as of: Wed Apr 12 2:39:38 EDT 2017

Metadata
Title:		"Don't talk to him! His family speaks a bit mixed." Multilingualism from the perspective of the documenter)
		CD-20130302-Multilingualism
		Morehead: Languages of Southern New Guinea
Contributor (researcher):		Christian Döhler
Coverage:		Papua New Guinea
Date:		2013-03-02
Description:		Paper presented at the 2013 ICLDC conference, Honolulu, HI This paper will describe the frustrating situation of starting a documentation project within a multilingual community, where informants would characterize other speakers as "speaking a bit mixed". From the perspective of a linguist carrying out a documentation, this leads to a continuous stream of conflicting evidence. Speaker A would correct one day’s findings and Speaker B would re-correct them the next day. The paper will suggest strategies of how to deal with this problem. Since 2010, the author has been working on Kmnzo, a language spoken in Rouku village, in the extreme South West of Papua New Guinea. Kmnzo belongs to the Morehead Upper- Maro family. The language family is believed to divide into three subgroups by Gordon (Ethnologue 2005): Yei in the West, Nambu in the East, and central Tonda. Kmnzo is a Tonda language, which includes about ten varieties. With the exception of Sarsa (2001) and Bouvé & Bouvé (2003), little has been published on these languages. In order to understand the "mixed up" situation today, one has to reconstruct the past. Ayres (1983: 16ff.) describes that in the 60’s the government undertook a policy of consolidating small hamlets into larger villages. This is against the traditional way of life, which involved non-permanent hamlets with no more than a clan or family. Nowadays, villages range between 150 and 300 inhabitants. In the case of Kmnzo this has had a double impact. On the one side, speakers are distributed across the village of Rouku, which lies in the center of the language area, and Morehead, where the regional primary school is situated. On the other hand, a significant part of the population of Rouku is starting to shift to the neighboring variety Wára. The connection between village consolidation and language shift is less direct here. The Morehead people practice direct sister exchange. A woman moves to her husband’s village and henceforth starts speaking the local variety. The men enforce their language over "mother’s language". In larger villages, this enforcement can fail and create a situation where children grow up speaking "mother’s language". For an outsider, who enters the scene at this point, the situation is rather confusing. There are two closely related varieties of a dialect chain spoken in the same village. One of the two is referred to as the "bad mother’s language". Informants are discouraging the documenter from working with "those people" for reason of linguistic purity. However, the very same informants are characterized by others as "speaking a bit mixed". The tedious work of pulling the varieties apart without interfering in language politics, require some ad-hoc solutions which will be described in the paper. URI/DOI: http://hdl.handle.net/10125/26087
		This project focuses on collecting multimedia documentation of multiple undescribed Papuan languages – Nen and Nambu (Morehead-Maro) and Kmntso (Tonda). Other nearby languages will have varrying degrees of description, including Idi, Nama, and Neme. All of these languages belong to an almost completely unknown family in Southern New Guinea. Based at the Australian National University in Canberra, plus collaborations with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, and the PNG National Herbarium, the project will embed a German PhD student (Christian Döhler) in a team including a seasoned field linguist (Nick Evans) and a post-doc (Julia Colleen Miller), two Germany-based typologists (Bernard Comrie and Volker Gast) from the FAUST (Future Archive User Simulation Team), plus participation on targeted fieldtrips by ethnobiologist Chris Healey (ANU) and botanist Kipiro Damas (PNG National Herbarium, Madang). Particular foci of the documentation will be the natural world (especially ethnobotany and ethnoornithology), swidden cultivation, fire management and ethnoecology, mythology, auto-ethnography, ethnomathematics, and microvariation in language use in a situation of daily multilingualism.nichola
		This paper will describe the frustrating situation of starting a documentation project within a multilingual community, where informants would characterize other speakers as "speaking a bit mixed". From the perspective of a linguist carrying out a documentation, this leads to a continuous stream of conflicting evidence. Speaker A would correct one day’s findings and Speaker B would re-correct them the next day. The paper will suggest strategies of how to deal with this problem. Since 2010, the author has been working on Kmnzo, a language spoken in Rouku village, in the extreme South West of Papua New Guinea. Kmnzo belongs to the Morehead Upper- Maro family. The language family is believed to divide into three subgroups by Gordon (Ethnologue 2005): Yei in the West, Nambu in the East, and central Tonda. Kmnzo is a Tonda language, which includes about ten varieties. With the exception of Sarsa (2001) and Bouvé & Bouvé (2003), little has been published on these languages. In order to understand the "mixed up" situation today, one has to reconstruct the past. Ayres (1983: 16ff.) describes that in the 60’s the government undertook a policy of consolidating small hamlets into larger villages. This is against the traditional way of life, which involved non-permanent hamlets with no more than a clan or family. Nowadays, villages range between 150 and 300 inhabitants. In the case of Kmnzo this has had a double impact. On the one side, speakers are distributed across the village of Rouku, which lies in the center of the language area, and Morehead, where the regional primary school is situated. On the other hand, a significant part of the population of Rouku is starting to shift to the neighboring variety Wára. The connection between village consolidation and language shift is less direct here. The Morehead people practice direct sister exchange. A woman moves to her husband’s village and henceforth starts speaking the local variety. The men enforce their language over "mother’s language". In larger villages, this enforcement can fail and create a situation where children grow up speaking "mother’s language". For an outsider, who enters the scene at this point, the situation is rather confusing. There are two closely related varieties of a dialect chain spoken in the same village. One of the two is referred to as the "bad mother’s language". Informants are discouraging the documenter from working with "those people" for reason of linguistic purity. However, the very same informants are characterized by others as "speaking a bit mixed". The tedious work of pulling the varieties apart without interfering in language politics, require some ad-hoc solutions which will be described in the paper. URI/DOI: http://hdl.handle.net/10125/26087
Format:		application/pdf
Identifier:		oai:www.mpi.nl:1839_00-0000-0000-0022-3B76-9
Publisher:		Professor Nicholas Evans
Publisher:		The Australian National University
Subject:		Secondary document
		Wára language
		Kómnzo
		English language
Subject (ISO639):		tci
Subject (ISO639):		eng
OLAC Info
Archive:		The Language Archive at the MPI for Psycholinguistics
Description:		http://www.language-archives.org/archive/www.mpi.nl
GetRecord:		OAI-PMH request for OLAC format
GetRecord:		Pre-generated XML file
OAI Info
OaiIdentifier:		oai:www.mpi.nl:1839_00-0000-0000-0022-3B76-9
DateStamp:		2017-02-14
GetRecord:		OAI-PMH request for simple DC format
Search Info
Citation:		Christian Döhler (researcher). 2013-03-02. Professor Nicholas Evans.
Terms:		area_Europe area_Pacific country_GB country_PG iso639_eng iso639_tci
Inferred Metadata
Country:		United Kingdom Papua New Guinea
Area:		Europe Pacific