Posted by Alexandre François on June 9, 2011
 
Dr Alexandre François, LACITO-CNRS ; Australian National University

Alexandre François – Fieldwork

Located in the South Pacific, Melanesia is a vast region that includes the huge island of New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, New Caledonia and Fiji. It stands out for its extreme linguistic and cultural diversity, as its 9 million inhabitants – the equivalent to the Swedish population – speak as many as 1,300 different languages.
 
A linguists’ paradise in the heart of Melanesia…

The archipelago of Vanuatu is quite typical of this linguistic fragmentation: 106 languages are spoken by only 240,000 inhabitants. These figures make the country home to the highest linguistic density in the world, that is, the greatest number of languages per capita.
The linguistic landscape of Vanuatu is thus extremely fragmented. Each language is spoken by an average of only 2,000 people; in the northern area where I’ve worked, this average even drops to 600 speakers per language (16 languages for a population of 9,400). Each of these languages is spoken by a small population, shared over two or three villages. It is also common for several languages to be spoken on a single island: for example, the island of Malekula alone is home to a good thirty of them.
 
A gradual process of linguistic fragmentation

In many parts of the world – such as the Caucasus, or South-East Asia – linguistic diversity owes mainly to the coexistence of populations of different origins, brought together by the accidents of history. Vanuatu, though, does not fit into this classic scenario. The hundred languages spoken there all descend from the same ancestor, known as Proto-Oceanic. Around 3,000 years ago, the first inhabitants of Vanuatu began with a period of linguistic homogeneity. Later along the following three millennia, processes of diversification led to the linguistic mosaic we witness today – in much the same way as Latin diversified into countless Romance languages and dialects.
 
A non-hierarchical, diversity-oriented society

Linguistic fragmentation here is essentially due to highly decentralized political structures; they define a network-like society, without a capital or central power, where every group is equal to the other.
There are no prestigious social groups, whose language or customs one would feel compelled to imitate. Instead, local cultural and linguistic innovations are respected and even encouraged as they provide each community with its own peculiarities, which everybody likes to notice and comment upon.
The people of Vanuatu enjoy being surrounded by a patchwork of well differentiated languages and cultures – quite the opposite to our modern world, and its massive tendency towards cultural standardization.
Incidentally, the case of Vanuatu is not unique: all Melanesian societies are traditionally marked by a form of “egalitarian multilingualism”, as the linguist Haudricourt also observed in New Caledonia.
 
Pervasive multilingualism

Traditionally, far from being isolated, the various communities in Vanuatu always maintained contact with each other, whether to exchange goods or to get married. Traveling was always on foot then, or on small canoes. Individuals would typically interact with the four or five communities around them, and master their languages. This is how most people grew up in a multilingual environment – including, sometimes, within their own household. Even today, it is not uncommon to meet people who speak four or five languages fluently, on a daily basis.
Nowadays, even though multilingualism is still the norm among neighboring communities, modern life has also widened the circle of social interaction. Someone from a northern island might go study in the city and meet people from islands further south, whose languages can be very different. In that case, communication will take place in the national language of Vanuatu, Bislama, an English-based pidgin which was born from the contact with Europeans.

And indeed, the linguistic landscape of Vanuatu is changing. While the use of Bislama is increasing among the population, some vernaculars are becoming vulnerable.
 
For more information:
Alexandre François’ personal website: http://alex.francois.free.fr/