Part I before the arrIval of JaPanese Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/91/1/3/452327/PADS91.01.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/91/1/3/452327/PADS91.01.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 1. the lInGUIstIC hIstorY of the bonIn IslanDs It is a little known linguistic fact that among a group of Western Pacific islands English is maintained as a community lan- guage of the indigenous population. These are the Bonin Islands. Today, these islands (also called the Ogasawara Islands) are part of Japan and their population, Japanese citizens, but the English language has survived there, as both a tool of communication and a marker of their unique identity. This book attempts to provide an outline of the English of the Bonin Islands in its various forms and incarnations from 1830 to the present. I begin in chapter 1 with a sketch of the islands’ history. Throughout their history, English has existed on the islands as a language system unto itself and as a contributing portion of other language systems. I outline these language varieties in chapter 2. Chapter 3 examines historical and social factors behind the evolu- tion of the pidginized English that served as the local lingua franca among early-nineteenth-century settlers and proposes that a creo- loid developed from this unstable pidgin into the first language of island-born speakers. Chapters 4 and 5 examine varieties of English used on the Bonins in the late nineteenth century subsequent to the arrival of the Japanese language on the islands. In the former, I exam- ine the historical state and social role of the creoloid English that evolved during this period and came to be used diglossically with Japanese as bilingualism progressed. The latter chapter presents a linguistic analysis of late-nineteenth-century Bonin English in the form of a case study. Chapters 6 and 7 parallel these chapters, with the former providing an examination of the sociohistorical issues behind Bonin varieties of English in the early twentieth century, as Japanese began to usurp the role of English in one domain after another, and the latter coordinating the available information con- cerning linguistic features of the English of this period. Chapters 8–10 deal with the U.S. Navy Era. I begin this section with an over- 3 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/91/1/3/452327/PADS91.01.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 4 pads 91: english on the bonin islands view of the historical and social background of the era. Chapter 9 provides a description of the English of speakers raised during this period. Chapter 10 analyzes the processes by which the English of the twentieth-century Bonins became intertwined with Japanese to form a mixed language. Chapter 11 looks at English and other island language varieties following the reversion. Finally, chapter 12 puts the Bonins in context by comparing and contrasting them with other island language communities. 1.1. languaGe ContaCt termInology Before starting our examination of the Bonin Islands, let us clar- ify the meanings of several terms used in the study of language contact: pidgin, pidginized, creole, creoloid, and abrupt cre- olization. 1.1.1. pidginization and pidgin. A pidgin is a language system that evolves when speakers of two, three, or more languages come into contact with each other and cannot understand one anoth- er’s language. Typically, the language of the people with “power” (through economics, technology, warfare, sheer numbers, etc.) is learned imperfectly by the other groups. These groups acquire lexical morphemes from the powerful lexifier (or superstrate) language, but their understanding of grammatical morphemes and syntax (the way words are joined together to make meaningful sentences) is influenced by their various native languages (thesub - strate languages). Their misinterpretations (reinterpretations) of the grammar of the target language result in the grammatical simplification and restructuring of the language. In the early stages of pidginization, differences are seen among speakers of different native languages. For example, in Hawaii a Tagalog speaker (think- ing in verb-initial syntax) might say Work hard des people ‘These peo- ple work hard’, while a Korean or Japanese speaker may tend to put the verb at the end of a sentence as their native languages dictate, as in Name me no like ‘I don’t like the name” (Carr 1972; Bickerton and Odo 1976; Bickerton 1981). As pidgins develop, they become more homogeneous with less drastic variation among users; a pro- Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/91/1/3/452327/PADS91.01.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 Linguistic History of the Bonin Islands 5 cess that Thomason (2001, 169) terms “crystallization.” Thus, pid- gins come to have definable grammatical rules. As Sebba (1997, 15) says, “They have vocabulary and grammatical structures, how- ever basic, which are accepted by their speakers. It is not the case that ‘anything goes.’” Some scholars (e.g., Sebba 1997) use the term “stable pidgin” for pidgins that have achieved some degree of homogeneity, while other scholars (e.g., Winford 2003) avoid this redundant terminol- ogy. Some researchers use terms like “prepidgin” or “jargon” to distinguish early unstable contact varieties. Holm (2000, 5) writes: “Although individuals can simplify and reduce their language on an ad-hoc basis (for example New Yorkers buying sunglasses in Lis- bon), this results not in a pidgin but a jargon with no fixed norms.” However, these distinctions are not always clear, and Holm (2000, 69) and other contact linguists speak of “prepidgin continua.” Hymes’s (1971, 84) archetypal definition is still current (as evidenced by its inclusion in Winford 2003, 270): “Pidginization is that complex process of sociolinguistic change comprising reduc- tion in inner form, with convergence, in the context of restriction of use. A pidgin is the result of such a process that has achieved autonomy as a norm.” In this book I speak of the development of a simplified variety of English through its long-term use by a com- munity of largely nonnative speakers as “pidginization” following Hymes’s usage. There is no evidence that the Bonin contact variety of English reached the level of stable pidgin before it began to be nativized. However, it is clear that the Bonins community fulfilled one of the central criteria for the development of a simple jargon into a sta- ble pidgin: tertiary hybridization (Holm 1988, 5; Sebba 1997, 103). This means, in short, that the pidginized English was used not just by nonnatives and native English speakers to communicate but as a third-party means of communication between two differ- ent nonnative language groups as a form of communication. (This is discussed at length in section 3.2.) I refer to that contact variety throughout this book as “Bonin Pidgin English.” I am not claiming that there was a stable pidgin and in this sense the label may be misleading; “Bonin Early Pidgin Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/91/1/3/452327/PADS91.01.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 6 pads 91: english on the bonin islands English” or “Bonin Unstable Pidgin English” might have served equally well, but the fact is that there is little information on which to base specific labeling anyway. One thing contact linguists do agree upon is that pidgins have no native speakers. A user of a pidgin is by definition a native speaker of some other language. A nativized pidgin is a creole. When speakers use a pidgin to communicate, there may be many complex relationships that the speaker can conceive of (in her mind, in her native language) but cannot verbalize in the pidgin due to its grammatically limited nature. Pidgins are good at expressing ideas like ‘I’m tired and hungry’ or ‘Shut up and work! I’ll hit you!’ but when the pidgin user conceives of a complex thought like ‘Hey, do you think he would threaten to hit me even if I were to tell him I was too hungry to lift these anymore?’ she may just have to continue working in silence. 1.1.2. creole, creoloid, and abrupt creolization. This gap between what a person can think and what she can say does not exist for children who have acquired a pidgin as their native (and often only) language. They expand the grammar of the pidgin and recycle its parts, changing simple words into complex grammati- cal features, so that, for example, s’pose becomes the grammati- cal feature to make conditional sentences (where the superstrate language English would have used if ). This developing complex- ity (not as the result of borrowing from some other language but within the heads of the children) is termed “noncontact induced expansion,” (Trudgill 2002, 69–70). Creolization is expansion through the nativization of a pidgin, and the creole language that the children create is a full-fledged language in which there are grammatical structures to express the cognitive relationships that their minds come up with. In the past, much attention was focused on children nativizing a stable pidgin (a process that has come to be known as “gradual creolization”), but recently another scenario has received much attention. Sebba (1997, 134) writes: “just as we know that children are likely to be born into a settled community where a stable or expanded pidgin is spoken, we can also be sure that children will not wait to be born until a rudimentary pidgin has become a sta- Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/91/1/3/452327/PADS91.01.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 Linguistic History of the Bonin Islands 7 ble one.