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A Range of Languages Disappeared in the Caribbean Region As a Result of the Arrival of the Europeans

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A Range of Languages Disappeared in the Caribbean Region As a Result of the Arrival of the Europeans THE LANGUAGE HERITAGE OF THE CARIBBEAN: LINGUISTIC GENOCIDE AND RESISTANCE Hubert Devonish University of the West Indies ABSTRACT The tactics may have changed. However the end results remain the same. Linguistic Genocide is no newcomer to the Caribbean. In the early stages of European colonization of the Caribbean, many indigenous languages disappeared due to widespread physical elimination of the populations speaking these languages. Today the danger is either one of hostile language policies or just plain indifference. New generations are no longer transmitting the language(s) of the communities into which they were born and more than ever community languages are disappearing on a large scale. A language will not survive if the older generation does not use it with the younger generation. With the disappearance of domains within which indigenous languages would naturally be used, opportunities for cross-generational transmission disappear. This paper will discuss the process by which Caribbean indigenous languages disappear and the forces favouring language preservation. Keywords: European, colonization, indigenous, community, transmission, disappearance, cross - generational, preservation 1 RESUMEN ABSTRACTO La tácticas pueden haber cambiado, sin embargo, el resultado final permanece igual. El Genocidio Linguístico no es nuevo al Caribe. En las primeras etapas de la colonización europea del Caribe muchas lenguas indígenas desaparecieron debido a la amplia eliminación física de la población linguística. Hoy día el peligro es uno de políticas linguísticas hostiles o mera indiferencia. Las nuevas generaciones ya no están transmitiendo el lenguaje(s) de la comunidad en la cual nacieron y más que nunca los lenguajes comunitarios están desapareciendo a gran escala. La conexión entre cada nueva generación y la transmisión y sobrevivencia del lenguaje es una de dependencia. Este trabajo discutirá la resistencia y el proceso de desaparición del lenguaje. La discusión se llevará a cabo a través de un análisis profundo de la situación del lenguaje a lo largo de la región y un estudio de las características internas de uno de los lenguajes que sobrevive en el Caribe isleño: Garifuna. Palabras clave: europea, colonización, indígena, comunidad, transmisión, desaparición, Garifuna Hubert Devonish is a Professor of Linguistics, and currently the Coordinator for the Jamaican Language Unit (JLU). He works in the area of Creole vernacular languages and language rights. He is also the Chief Researcher of the Bilingual Education Project (BEP), previously serving as Head of the Department of Language, Linguistics & Philosophy at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus. Introduction Every new generation is a link in the transmission of the language(s) of the community into which they are born. Each generation does this by naturally acquiring, through exposure, the knowledge and use of language(s) of the community within which they live. Language transmission in the Caribbean was a problem, as we shall see, even before the arrival of the Europeans in the late 15th century. However, this has been transformed into a crisis in the post- Columbus Caribbean. There has been a massive disappearance of languages previously in use. In effect, the European presence produced a huge deterioration in the conditions that existed for 2 transmitting these languages to new generations of children. There has, of course, been resistance to this process. Evidence of this resistance survives in the language situation and the languages which currently exist within the Caribbean. We shall, in the course of this paper, trace this process of language disappearance and the resistance to it which emerged. This will be carried out through an examination of the language situation across the region and via a study of the internal features of the one surviving language of the island Caribbean, Garifuna. The Slaughter of Languages In the earliest stages of European colonisation of the Caribbean, indigenous Caribbean languages disappeared as a result of the widespread physical elimination of these languages. In such cases, no adults survived to transmit the languages and there were no children around to acquire them. Many languages destroyed in this way have left behind sometimes just a language name and a word list recorded by some curious literate European. According to Taylor (1977), the dead languages include the probably Cariban languages, Nepuyo and Yao, spoken in Trinidad as well as the Arawakan language Shebayo. Igneri, an Arawakan language spoken in the Lesser Antilles and the language now labeled by scholars Taino, spoken in the Greater Antilles, also disappeared early in the colonisation process. In the present day Caribbean, the physical extermination of members of indigenous people is no longer fashionable. However, the surviving indigenous language speaking communities are still faced with prospect of ongoing language loss. This can be attributed to the language policies and practices of the Caribbean states within which these communities live. Colonial and post-colonial states of the Caribbean are hostile or, at best, indifferent to the use of indigenous languages within communities and the transmission of these 3 languages to new generations. Current official language policies originate in the colonial conquest of the region. These seek to replace indigenous languages with the dominant, official European languages of the colonially created states of the Caribbean. The results of these policies can be seen in the statistics which follow. Table 1.1 shows data on the indigenous languages associated with Belize, Dominica, Guyana, St. Vincent and Suriname. It has been relatively easy to obtain statistics about the numbers of people who are members of the ethnic group linked to these languages. The figures for these have, in the main, been derived from Ethnologue (Grimes, 1997). It is much more difficult to discover how many people actually speak the language, with what level of competence, and to what extent the language is being passed on to children. Ethnologue (Grimes, 1997) is sometimes helpful, but has had to be supplemented using several other sources, including the UNESCO Redbook on Endangered Languages (2003), as well as Forte (2003) and Melville (2003) for Guyana, Carlin (2002), Carlin and Boven (2003), and Taylor (1977) for Dominica and St. Vincent, and Langworthy (n.d.) for Belize. In all cases of indigenous languages still in use listed in Table 1.1, the number of persons identifying themselves as members of an ethnic group is significantly larger than those who speak the language of that group. A glaring example is that of the Arawaks, the largest indigenous ethnic group in Guyana. They make up 33% of the indigenous population of that country. However, no more than 10% of the group is reported to be speakers of the Arawak (Lokono) language. Some languages in Table 1.1 appear as being transmitted to children. However, almost invariably the proportion of children within the particular indigenous community acquiring the language is falling with each passing generation. This has important implications 4 for the preservation of the linguistic heritage of the region. With the exception of the relatively large population of speakers of Yucatán Mayan and Kekchi in Mexico, all of the languages listed in Table 1.1 can be considered to some degree endangered. One explanation for the endangerment of indigenous languages is the need felt by members of the indigenous communities to engage with the wider society. They have to do so via either the official languages of the respective countries, English, Dutch, Portuguese or Spanish, and / or the Creole vernacular language widely used in the country. At first, this leads to transitional bilingualism at the community level. Almost inevitably, in two or three generations, however, the external language replaces the indigenous language as the medium of communication within the community. Again excluding Yucatán Mayan and Kekchi for the moment, Garifuna, spoken now only in Central America, would appear to be the healthiest of the indigenous languages. However, some estimates suggest that only about half of the ethnic Garinagu speak the language. Also, even though the language is reportedly being transmitted to children, this appears in the case of Belize, to be happening in only one of the five Belizean ethnic Garinagu communities (Langworthy, n.d.). In Hopkins, the one community where transmission is claimed to be taking place, children are bilingual in Belizean Creole and Garifuna. However, my observation on two field trip visits to Hopkins in 2001 and 2002 is that Belizean Creole is the language of choice of the playground and in the community primary school. This is true even though the vast majority of the children are ethnically Garinagu. If we move along the scale of levels of endangerment, there is the case of Arawak in which only 10% of the ethnic Arawak (Lokono) community is estimated to be able to speak the language. As with Garifuna, however, the level of endangerment varies from community to 5 community. In Tapakuma, on the West Coast of the Essequibo in Guyana, for example, out of a population of several hundred, only 5 persons, all over 65, could speak the language. In another community up the Wakapau Creek on the Pomeroon River, much more remote than Tapakuma, most persons over the age of 50 were speakers of the language in 2003 (Robertson, p.c.). There are finally those cases of endangered languages where speakers number in the tens or fewer, rather than hundreds and are all over 60. Three languages, Tunayuna, Akurio and Sikïïyana, have fewer than a hundred speakers. One of the languages above, Karifuna of Dominica, is listed as extinct, its last remaining speaker having died in the early decades of the 20th century. The Implications of Linguistic Genocide in the Caribbean Skutnabb-Kangas (2000) points to Article II(e) of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This forbids acts which lead to “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” (p.
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