Today’s blog post is written by Laura Arnold, a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh and a recipient of an FEL Grant in 2017.  

Waigeo is the northernmost island in the beautiful Raja Ampat archipelago, just off the Bird’s Head of New Guinea. Nowadays famous as a diving hotspot, the archipelago has long been a place of movement and contact between different population groups, lying as it does at the crossroads between insular Southeast Asia to the west, and Melanesia to the east. Today, Raja Ampat is home to several tribes, including the Maˈya, the Matbat, the Ambel, and the Biak. I’ve just finished a project documenting the language of the Ambel  –the Foundation for Endangered Languages  funded the printing of a trilingual dictionary (Ambel-Indonesian-English), based on material in the documentary corpus, for presentation to the Ambel community. My primary aims in recording the corpus were to collect linguistic data in order to analyse Ambel; and to create a permanent record of the language, should it become extinct. However, in this post I’ll show that the cultural information and oral history contained in the corpus provide important details that allow us to draw back the proverbial curtain, and peer into the deep history of Raja Ampat, specifically Waigeo. There’s nothing concrete – but there are lots of tantalising glimpses.

According to tradition, the Biak migrated to Raja Ampat around 500 years ago, from Cenderawasih Bay on the other side of the Bird’s Head. The other tribes, however, have been around for much longer. But not forever – at least, not in their current form. All of the languages spoken in Raja Ampat today belong to the Austronesian language family, the second largest language family in the world by number of languages. The Austronesian homeland is thought to have been Taiwan; Austronesian speakers began migrating from Taiwan through the Philippines and insular Southeast Asia some 5,000 years ago, eventually settling as far afield as Madagascar in the west, and Easter Island in the east.

Austronesian speakers first turned up in Raja Ampat around 3,500 years ago. When they arrived, they came into contact with whoever was already living in the archipelago – speakers of so-called ‘Papuan’ languages, a term used to refer to the non-Austronesian languages spoken on and around New Guinea. New Guinea was first colonised by humans at least 45,000 years ago, if not earlier – some of the Papuan languages spoken in the region today are perhaps descendants of the languages spoken by the original migrants. Papuan languages are incredibly heterogenous: today, there are over 800 languages belonging to around 60 distinct language families, with many isolates.

No Papuan languages, however, are spoken in Raja Ampat today. But evidence shows that there once were – and that, over time, the Papuans shifted to use the language of the Austronesian incomers. This evidence comes in the form of features found in the present-day languages of Raja Ampat that are more typical of Papuan than of Austronesian languages – remnants of the original languages of the archipelago that were transplanted into the Austronesian languages when the Papuans switched from their own language to another. One example of this is the presence of tone in Maˈya, Matbat, and Ambel – the use of pitch to distinguish different words. For example, in Ambel, there’s a contrast between the following two words (accents are used to mark syllables with High tone):

yun, meaning ‘I know’, which has rising pitch; and

yún ‘I pick [something] up’, which has falling pitch.

Tone is very rare in Austronesian languages, but fairly common in Papuan languages – so the presence of tone in the languages of Raja Ampat is thought to have been caused by contact with a now-extinct Papuan substrate. This linguistic evidence suggests that contact between the Austronesians and Papuans in Raja Ampat was generally stable, involving intermarriage between the groups, and lasted for a long time – long enough, at least, for a feature such as tone to be integrated into Maˈya, Matbat, and Ambel.

Besides the linguistic evidence, the Ambel corpus contains many other clues about the identity and culture of the pre-Austronesian groups of Waigeo, as well as the relationship between the Austronesian incomers and the Papuan residents. This is what I’ll be talking about for the rest of the post.

Two of the most exciting recordings in the Ambel corpus are of a reenactment of the Bintaki ritual , and a dance and song associated with the ritual. The Bintaki is a traditional fish-poisoning ritual, performed in the Ambel settlement of Darumbab on the north coast of Waigeo. There hasn’t been an ‘authentic’ performance of the Bintaki for several decades, and the elements of the ritual are nowadays remembered only by a single man, Alec Sosir. During my time with the Ambel, I was lucky enough for Alec to arrange a stylised performance of the ritual, so that I could record it.

In an authentic Bintaki performance, the male participants spend the whole night pounding the bark of a bintakí tree, an icthyotoxin, into a river. One of the chief participants is the bintaya, who is symbolically married to the bintakí tree during the ritual. While the men mash the bark into the water, they sing a song – ayo bintaki, kiyaaa yeee, ayo bintaya, yaaa… The women and children of the village are not allowed near the river while the men are pounding and singing, as it’s believed their presence will disrupt the ritual, and the fish will not die. At the break of dawn, a conch shell bugle sounds to signify the end of the ritual, and the bintaya beats the river with a branch from the bintakí tree. At this point, the women and children come to join the men at the river, to help collect the stunned fish. The fish are taken back to the village, and a big feast is held.

There are many differences between an ‘authentic’ version of the ritual, and the one I was able to record – for example, the recorded ritual doesn’t last all night, as an authentic one would (more like ten minutes in the middle of the day); both men and women are participants; and no fish were actually killed in the recording. However, despite these differences, there are a couple of clues from the recording that point to an ancient origin of the Bintaki.

The first clue comes from the mythological history of the ritual. According to oral tradition, the Ambel only learnt the Bintaki several generations ago. Two Ambel men were out in the forest one night, going about their business, and happened across a group of evil kábyo spirits. These kábyo were doing something very strange: beating a drum and singing a song, standing on a platform over the river and thrashing the water with long sticks. The men stopped and watched the spirits all night long. In the morning, they saw that the fish in the river were dazed, and that the kábyo could pick them up effortlessly. The men returned to their village, and told everyone what they had seen. They had memorised the song that the kábyo were singing, and taught it to the other Ambel.

Which brings us to the second clue: the words of the Bintaki song. The origin and meaning of this song is obscure. Some words are found in present-day Ambel (for example, koránu, an archaic word for ‘king’ or ‘ruler’), but most are not. Alec was able to give the gist of what some of the lines mean (the first lines, for instance, salute the bintakí tree, the bintaya, and the ritual equipment) – but for the others, even he does not know. It’s my suspicion that the kábyo that the Ambel men watched were actually a pre-Austronesian population group, and that the song that the Ambel men learnt was sung in a Papuan language, spoken by the earlier inhabitants of Waigeo. The hunt is currently on to see if there are any similarities between the words in the Bintaki song, and any of the Papuan languages spoken nearby – if there were, this might help us to identify some of the pre-Austronesian inhabitants of Waigeo.

The kábyo in fact turn up in many other Ambel myths and folktales. Several of the narratives in the corpus tell stories about the interactions  between humans and the kábyo , and they play an important role in some of the clan histories (for example, in the history of the dispersal of the Kein clan). While they are spirits, the kábyo only ever manifest in human form in these narratives: typically, they take the shape of one of the Ambel villagers, and then lure other people away from the village in order to kill and eat them. If these stories of the kábyo really are memories of an earlier population group on Waigeo, this suggests that they were aggressive, and possibly cannibalistic – and that relations between the Ambel and the kábyo group were antagonistic, at least some of the time.

Another curious hint about the pre-Austronesian inhabitants of Waigeo comes in the form of the stories one occasionally hears about the ‘little black people’ who are said to live in the interior of the island, the orang gi (‘Gi People’ in the local variety of Malay – the gi element is probably related to the Ambel word for betel nut, gíy). The orang gi are the subject of much discussion in Thomas Schultze-Wistrum’s 2003 documentary Waigeo: Insel der Magier (currently available on YouTube in German; a French version was also made), which focusses on the syncretism between Christian and pre-Christian beliefs in Lupintol, a nearby Maˈya village on Waigeo. In this documentary, the orang gi are said to be a group of spirit-like people who live in the interior of Waigeo. When quizzed, most of the Ambel I asked said that the orang gi were the stuff of fairy tales. Others, however, claimed to know people who had seen the orang gi. The accounts of the orang gi are all similar: they are said to be very short, with very dark skin.

Again, while there is no direct evidence, I suspect that the stories of these orang gi refer to a now-disappeared population group who once lived on Waigeo. The orang gi appear to have been distinct from the group remembered as the kábyo – both in terms of their physical characteristics (recall that, in stories of the kábyo, they are often said to manifest as Ambel villagers, suggesting they are quite similar physicaly to the Ambel themselves); and their shadowy and shy, rather than aggressive temperament. In fact, the physical characteristics described for the orang gi are reminiscent of the Negrito populations found throughout South and Southeast Asia – for example, the Semang of Malaysia  and the Aeta of the Philippines. Could the stories of the orang gi have developed from reminiscences about a now-extinct Negrito group on Waigeo?

Individually, these speculations don’t amount to much. But taken together, they suggest interesting future avenues for research. Note, for example, how the linguistic and the cultural data don’t quite match up – while the linguistic data suggest that contact between the Austronesians and Papuans was friendly, the stories about the kábyo eating human flesh suggest a more antagonistic relationship. Future work may shed some more light on some of the speculations discussed here – in particular, a proposed archaeological project involving Dr Daud Tanudirjo from Universitas Gadjah Mada might turn up something more concrete. Research looking at the population genetics of the archipelago would also be very welcome, to determine the extent to which the Austronesians and Papuans intermarried. For the time being, however, the information I’ve talked about here shows how important it is for a documentation to include as much cultural detail as possible. Without the information contained in the Ambel corpus, at this stage we couldn’t begin to make even these tentative speculations. Ayo bintaki, kiyaaa yeee…

Laura would like to thank Dylan Gaffney for feedback on an earlier draft of this post.

Today’s blog post comes from the editor, Dr. Cassie Smith-Christmas, associate fellow for the Scottish Gaelic language research network Soillse. Cassie is currently on an Irish Research Council-funded fellowship ‘The Challenges of Minority Language Maintenance:  Family Language Policy in Scotland and Ireland’ at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and is also a principal investigator on the project ‘The Intersection of Language and Community in Corca Dhuibhne’ with the Smithsonian’s SMiLE (Sustaining Minoritized Languages in Europe) initiative.

As most of us who work with endangered languages know, every once and a while there are just those days.  Those days where you just can’t believe that someone would say that about a language and its speakers.

Last month it was one of those days for Scottish Gaelic—the language I’ve had the privilege of working on and speaking for nearly a decade now—with an article  describing the language as ‘“sounding like someone gargling with Irn Bru’” and referring to a sign in Gaelic as ‘nice for tourists to think they’ve arrived in Brigadoon.’

Now, anti-Gaelic articles in mainstream papers are nothing new.  This time, however, the backlash to the article was something I had never before witnessed, with some excellent counter-posts, letters to the editor, and the hashtag #ismiseGàidhlig, circulating. Then another inflammatory article was written (which seemed to be inflammatory simply for the sake of being inflammatory), and which was similarly rebutted by poet Marcas Mac an Tuairneir, among others. (But, to the first columnist’s credit, he actually attempted to understand the original backlash by interviewing Professor Wilson McLeod of the University of Edinburgh in another article).

I have taken great interest in reading the many excellent responses and in reflecting on how to explain the value of minoritised languages to people who just don’t understand.  I suppose in a way this a long comeback to the times I have been interrogated on the value of minority language revitalisation and was initially blindsided, because to me, it felt like having to explain that the sky was blue.

The first time this happened I was in an interview for funding.  I don’t remember exactly what I said in relation to the question ‘why would someone want to preserve a language like Gaelic?’ (or the approximate thereof) but whatever it was, one of the panel members suddenly thought of her husband’s underwear and quipped, ‘But my husband’s underwear are old, should we hang onto those?’

(Note:  I have said a lot of things I later regretted in the heat of an interview, but I know I didn’t just say ‘because it’s old’ in my previous answer.  I think my response was something like, ‘well, it’s like anything of cultural heritage, we want to preserve it.’  Perhaps I threw in ‘old building’ instead of the saying ‘listed building’ as I should have.  I don’t know.  But whatever it was, it somehow evoked images of this woman’s husband’s underwear).

After the underwear comment, I said, ‘Pardon me, but I think that any Gaelic speaker would take grave offense at having their language compared to your husband’s old underwear.’

Needless to say, I didn’t get the funding. But this question has come up time and time again in my professional and personal life, and like the newspaper articles mentioned beforehand, is always along the lines of the underwear comment.  So this is what I would like to say to the ‘underwear crowd’:

When you tell someone (either explicitly or implicitly) not to speak their language, you are passing judgment on them. In a Sapir-Whorf sense, you are telling them that the very shapes of their thoughts are wrong.  You are telling them that the way they put their being into the concrete form of words is wrong.  In essence, you are telling them that their existence is undeserved.

And that is exactly what is implied by  trotting out ‘only 1% of the population speak the language’ and the mention of ‘Brigadoon’—that these people shouldn’t exist.  Indeed, as anyone working in endangered language revitalisation will know, for most of these language communities, hegemonising forces have tried their upmost to ensure that these people don’t exist, and perhaps the 1% is still a thorn in the side of polities with a long history of imperialism in its various guises.  In the Gaelic case, these are the people who were once cleared off the land, who have had a constant struggle to stay in the place where they and their families are from—even today.  But thankfully they still exist, and as my colleague from on the Isle of Lewis puts it, ‘I don’t see why I have to justify my identity to anyone.’

So know this, underwear crowd: when you lay into the value of minority languages, you are perpetuating imperialism, again and again. And so, the next time you question the value of minority languages, I will respond with:

What gives you the right to question another human being’s existence in this world?  Why should their existence be questioned and yours remain indubitably beyond reproach?

Today’s FEL blog post, written by Ben Ó Ceallaigh, a final year PhD student in the University of Edinburgh, looks at the connections between economics, language vitality, and resistance efforts. Ben’s thesis is provisionally titled ‘Language shift and neoliberalism: The Irish economic crisis and the sociolinguistic vitality of Gaeltacht regions 2008-2018’. He is also the national secretary for radical activist group Misneach.

For almost one hundred years now, the Irish state has afforded special protection to those areas in which the county’s first, but minoritised, language remains the everyday community language. Despite this, the Irish language is still seriously endangered in these Irish-speaking communities, collectively known as “the Gaeltacht”. In 2007, a large scale report demonstrated that Irish was unlikely to remain the dominant community language in even the strongest Gaeltacht areas for more than 15-20 years if radical action was not taken.

The timing of the 2008 economic crisis and the enormous cuts to state spending it caused was, then, devastating for the Gaeltacht, with such peripheral areas being in no small part dependent on the state support which was cut so heavily during the crisis.

Having lived in a Gaeltacht community where Irish is now effectively moribund throughout most of the recession, and subsequently spent the last several years doing a PhD on the effects of this period on the Gaeltacht, I have seen many examples of how this large-scale international event has effected language vitality at the community level.

The examples are many, but perhaps the starkest illustration of the effects of the crisis is to be seen in the extent to which state provision for the Gaeltacht has been drastically reduced over the last decade. For example, the Gaeltacht development authority, Údaras na Gaeltachta, had its budget cut by 73.7% between 2018-15 and in a classic example of the neoliberal “rolling-back” of the state, the Gaeltacht Act, 2012 saw much of the responsibility for language planning transferred to voluntary community groups which are operating with only minimal resources.

The consequences of these cuts and other effects of the crisis for language use may be inferred from the 2016 census, which showed a dramatic drop of 11.2% in the number of daily Irish speakers in the Gaeltacht since 2011. As well as significant reductions to language support schemes, many Gaeltacht areas suffered large-scale emigration during this time.

These challenges to Gaeltacht life have not gone unopposed, however. Since 2009 several groups and campaigns have emerged in opposition to state policy and budgetary decisions regarding the Gaeltacht.

In 2009 the campaign group Guth na Gaeltachta (“voice of the Gaeltacht”) was founded in Donegal and became one of the most important Gaeltacht-based mobilisations since the Gaeltacht Civil Rights Movement of the 1970s. While the group had wound down by 2013, amidst threats of legal action against its spokespeople by the state, it laid important ground work and helped politicise Irish speakers, who, like much of Irish society, had been largely de-politicised during the “Celtic Tiger” boom years. While relatively short-lived, Guth na Gaeltachta served as an important inspiration for other campaigns which have emerged over recent years.

During my PhD fieldwork I had the opportunity to witness and take part in several of these campaigns. While my research topic was oftentimes depressing (as work in the area of language endangerment and loss so often is), on a personal, level these grassroots efforts provided me with an enormous source of inspiration and hope.

In 2014 Irish speakers from both within and outside the Gaeltacht mobilised to resist the proposed amalgamation of the Language Commissioner’s office with that of the state Ombudsman. This was to take place as part of a much wider process of public service rationalisation, reforms which themselves have been deeply neoliberal. The ensuing Dearg le Fearg (“red with anger”) movement saw a number of marches take place in Dublin, Belfast and in the rural Galway Gaeltacht. Well over ten thousand Irish speakers took part in these protests, with the government ultimately abandoning the proposed merger as a result.

Taking many of their cues from the 2014 movement, An Dream Dearg (“the red group”) have run a vibrant campaign over the last year and a half demanding a language act for the North of Ireland. Unionist opposition to such an act is a key obstacle to the reinstatement of power-sharing in Belfast – creating a very unusual case whereby minority language policy is responsible for a government’s collapse!

In 2015 the inhabitants of the Aran Islands in Galway organised a vocal campaign to oppose a proposal to replace islands’ aeroplane service from a nearby airstrip with a less reliable and less suitable helicopter service from a much further away airport. Many–including, I was told, the former minister for the Gaeltacht who supported the campaign–felt that this change was being proposed to open the way for discontinuing the air service altogether at a later date. Such was the scale and sustained nature of the community’s resistance efforts, however, that the recommendation became politically impossible and was eventually shelved by the government.

More radically still, several of the communities in which I conducted fieldwork physically blockaded their areas against the police and agents of Irish Water, the semi-state body which was charged with installing water meters throughout the country. These meters were widely understood as paving the way for later privatisation of the sort the International Monetary Fund had recommended while directing Irish state finances from 2010-13. One informant from a strongly Irish-speaking area in west Galway who I met on an anti-water charges protest in Dublin in 2015 stated that the frustration he felt at being forced to leave his home to search for work in Dublin had boiled over at a previous protest and prompted him to lead a spontaneous sit-down blockade of a main road in Dublin city centre. Faced with such acts of civil disobedience throughout the country, the government has since abandoned the proposed water charges.

More recently there have been a number of protests against the replacement of the ferry to Toraigh Island in the Donegal Gaeltacht with a much older and less seaworthy craft. In February 2018 the islanders and supporters of their cause organised a series of pickets outside state buildings to voice their anger at the way in which they, one of the strongest remaining Irish-speaking areas, are being treated by a state which is ostensibly committed to the maintenance of the Gaeltacht. They have publically stated they will blockade their pier and prevent what they deem as a potentially dangerous boat landing on their island, and are looking for support in doing so when the new service begins in early April.

While, then, the economic and political turmoil of the last ten years has had significant detrimental effects for the vitality of Irish and the communities that speak it, state policies entrenching neoliberalism have met with significant resistance. Although there is certainly much cause for concern regarding the language’s future, recent grassroots mobilisations of Irish speakers contains much that is both encouraging and inspiring to those interested in maintaining linguistic diversity. Although the Leviathan-like forces amassed against minoritised languages can often seem overwhelming, they are not undefeatable. These examples from the Gaeltacht show that these forces can be challenged and that, as in other areas of social justice campaigning, people power can prevail in favour of endangered language revitalisation efforts.

Welcome to our blog.  The aim of FEL is to support, enable and assist the documentation, protection and promotion of endangered languages. We envision this site as a dynamic space where those involved in endangered language research and activism can share ideas and experiences.  Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments sections.  If you have an idea for a blog post, feel free to contact Cassie Smith-Christmas at cassie@ogmios.org.