"What do they speak over there?" - said everyone to me before we shipped out for Vanuatu. I knew that the answer was Bislama (many pronounce it "biz-llama" and others "bish-llama"), but didn't know too much other than the name. I had also read on Wikipedia that Vanuatu is the worlds most language diverse country in the world, with over 110 local vernaculars spoken amongst only approximately 250,000 people. We came here totally unprepared, but thankfully Peace Corps makes you sit through roughly 10 weeks of grueling language lessons, so once we headed out to site we felt a bit more comfortable with Bislama.
Bislama is the national language listed in the constitution of Vanuatu, but English and French are also recognized as primary languages. England and France held a condominium government here together up until independence in 1980, so each government founded and funded their own schools teaching their language. During pre-independence time, Bislama was not well known in the rural regions of the country (which there are plenty of!). Back then, and even today, travel among islands is difficult, so many places and people remained isolated and primarily communicated in local language.
Our Peace Corps language textbook references D.T. Tryon's book on Bislama for a short history of the language. To summarize, Bislama as a language is the outcome of the people from this country being recruited (or enslaved as indentured laborers, depending on the circumstance) to work in the whaling, sandalwood, trepang, sugar cane, copra, and cotton industries, among other short lived economic booms in this side of the world. People from all over Melanesia were brought together to live and work on plantations, and communicated using previously developed jargon and broken English from earlier whalers, traders and workers. Fast forward to the early 1900's, and Bislama's vocabulary and grammar had been established, along with similar languages spoken in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands (Tok Pisin and Pidjin, respectively). In 1981, after independence, Bislama was accepted by the many churches of Vanuatu, which were still administered by foreign religious missionaries. This was a major step for the language, and from that point forward it began to be used (alongside English and French) as the language of administration and in government.
Bislama is probably 85% broken English, with 5% French influence, 5% slang...and the other 5% extremely broken English! You will find very few to zero synonyms. Instead of great, awesome, super or tremendous, in Bislama it is just "gud". And instead of bad, terrible, horrible or awful, it is just "no gud". I was reading George Orwell's 1984 during our second week of Bislama classes, and came across a fitting paragraph that I shared with everyone. It's about the destruction of English ("Oldspeak") into a simpler version ("Newspeak").
"...It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other words? A word contains it's opposite in itself. Take 'good', for instance. If you have a word like 'good', what need is there for a word like 'bad'? 'Ungood' will do just as well--better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of 'good' what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like 'excellent' and 'splendid' and all the rest of them? 'Plusgood' covers the meaning, or 'doubleplusgood', if you want something stronger still..."
Maybe that won't resonate with you, but to me it makes a lot of sense. To many people here, there aren't numerous types of birds, there are just pidgins. When I ask what kind of fish we are eating, it's just fish. It's a simpler way to think for sure, and many people just aren't taught a whole dictionary worth of different words to express their thoughts.
I don't know all that much about local languages, but as I mentioned there are between 110-120 still in Vanuatu. Some are spoken by roughly 10,000 people, while quite a few are only known by some 100-500 people. In our bush village of Narango in south Santo, they speak Farsaf. Up the hill, 45 minutes walk away, they speak a totally different language, and down the hill towards the ocean, there are many more languages spoken by a couple hundred people. This causes many problems in regards to an acceptable national education curriculum, and is the topic of debate and reform in the Ministry of Education right now. How can you develop a one-size-fits-all education plan with materials and workbooks for young students when they speak over 100 different languages? It's a fine line between preserving unique, and dying, languages and developing a modern education program. Just for fun here are a few words in Farsaf, for those of you interested: Good morning is 'Lolotalnam', good afternoon is 'Ruffruffnam', good night is 'Talcharoof' and thank you is 'nokorpay' (I have no clue how to properly spell them - another issue with Bislama and local vernacular: there is no nationally accepted spellings of many words!).
To summarize my rambling topic of language written from my hammock on another rainy day, I'll just say that Bislama is an expressive language that allows people of this country - spread across 80 islands, each with a totally different culture - to communicate. I'm grateful to have learned it, and practice speaking it every day. While it will prove of nearly zero use anywhere else in the world, it will be a fun secret language that Caroline and I can use to talk about you all right in front of your faces! I plan to take French classes in Luganville in 2016, so hopefully I'll come home speaking two new languages.
Some simple Bislama below. Come visit and you can practice it:
My name is Cole. - Nem blong mi Cole. (think 'belong' - the name belonging to me...)
What is your name? - Wanem nem blong yu?
Where are you from? - Yu blong wea?
How many children do you have? - Yu gat hamas pikinini?
I believe I have diarrhea. - Mi think se mi gat sitsitwota.
A cat bit my nipple! - Wan puskat kakae ae blong titi blo mi!
Tankyu tumas lo ridim blog post blong mi,
Kol
