Seminar Series: Abstract

Lexical divergence and structural parallelism across the languages of north Vanuatu: two pressures in conflict
Alex Francois (CNRS / Linguistics, RSPAS)

The small Torres and Banks islands of northern Vanuatu are impressive for their linguistic richness, with seventeen distinct languages for just 5,000 people. Depending on the perspective adopted, one may be impressed by the degree of formal heterogeneity that makes these languages so distinct, or by the functional similarities that unite them.

Genetically, these seventeen languages are all narrowly related, and historically they have been involved in ongoing cultural contact for centuries. Interisland marriages have always been practised (Vienne 1984), and bilingualism with one's neighbours was generally the norm. However, despite the existence of such a social network defined by trade relations and cultural contacts for the whole Banks and Torres area, the situation one finds today is that of a mosaic of seventeen clearly distinct languages. Each of these is spoken by a small community of a few hundred speakers – sometimes much less – whose social life develops in relative independence from their neighbours. Rather than a matter of pure geography (the distance between two villages is sometimes less than half-a-day walking), this tendency towards cultural and linguistic differentiation reflects a behaviour that is socially encouraged in Melanesia.

Seen from the individual's perspective, this twofold social ecology of northern Vanuatu island results in a form of cognitive conflict. On the one hand, each child grows up in a given community driven by a pressure towards cultural and linguistic differentiation from their neighbours. But the same individual is also caught, whether consciously or not, in a wider and deeper pattern of exchange and contact that also has a reality of its own, resulting in a contrary push towards cultural and linguistic similarity.

This particular social configuration has had complex effects on the modern languages. Despite being all clearly cognate, they do differ quite drastically in their phoneme inventories, in the details of their morphology, and more generally in the form of their grammatical or lexical words (their “lexification”, Grace 1981). These differences make them mutually unintelligible, and reflects historically the push towards heterogeneity. However, also impressive is the extreme degree of structural isomorphism one finds throughout this area: the semantic units that make up the grammars and lexicons appear to be narrowly parallel – with only a few exceptions – from one language to another. For example, all these languages have an aspect marker – formally very different from one language to the other – which can encode both future and immediate past, and is used in some focus constructions… This strong parallelism of structures is the result of an ongoing contact situation, and a constant pressure towards the full translatability of concepts (Gumperz 1971).

Overall, the contrast between the formal heterogeneity and the functional isomorphism of these languages reflects the two different scales of “linguistic community” individuals belong to: respectively, the narrow scale of one's specific community, and the wider scale of the archipelago's cultural and linguistic network.