In these areas I’m always discovering something new.

With language as a distinctive feature

Text: Johannes W. Løvhaug

They live on small islands, often with only a kilometre’s distance between them. For centuries they have exchanged wives and quarrelled about fishing grounds. Nevertheless they speak languages that are just as different as Norwegian and Chinese. What does this tell us about the relationship between language and identity?

FIELDWORK: Language researcher Even Hovdhaugen is working on the Reef Islands. Photo: Even Hovdhaugen ©

Professor Even Hovdhaugen in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Oslo has specialised in some Pacific languages with few speakers that were totally undescribed until he and a couple of colleagues started working on them five years ago. Now Professor Hovdhaugen is going back to the islands to gain a deeper knowledge of these languages, but also to study the relationship between language and identity.

His research is part of the so-called Oceania Project which is a co-operation between the University of Oslo and the Kon-Tiki Museum. The linguistic part of the Oceania Project is being carried out in the Reef Islands, which lie to the extreme east of the Solomon Islands. This is an area of the Pacific Ocean that has not been explored to any great extent and it contains numerous islands with from 60 to 3000 people living on each of them. Yet even though there is little available knowledge about this remote area, the islands were described by Spanish explorers as early as the end of the 16th century, which means that there is a very special historical perspective.

The languages in these islands are called Pileni and Ayiwo and belong to totally different language groups. Professor Hovdhaugen and his colleagues have already published the first collection of texts in Pileni, with translation, comments and vocabulary list. ?shild Næss has published a grammar of the language. The aim now is to get more thorough documentation of Pileni and Ayiwo with all their dialects.

A unique situation

Apart from describing “blank patches” on the language map, Even Hovdhaugen feels that the most exciting thing about the project is the study of long-lasting and close contact between two totally different types of language in a very isolated area.

“This is a unique situation in a world perspective. The population is scattered over numerous small islands, and we know the history of these people going back at any rate between 500 and 600 years in time. It’s not only the case that people speak totally different languages in this area, but there are also great cultural differences between the population groups. This applies among other things in relation to marriage, the role of women, and violence and conflicts. But how is the understanding of identity influenced when people live in such close contact with one another for several hundred years?” asks Professor Hovdhaugen, stressing that a great deal of research remains to be done before he dares to give any clear answers to these questions.

“In these areas I’m always discovering something new. I can wake up in the morning with a hypothesis in my head, have it confirmed by lunchtime and reject it in the evening. Nevertheless I’m willing to stick my neck out on a working hypothesis: the population groups are surprisingly little influenced by one another in these closely knit societies. The understanding of identity seems to have remained relatively constant for several hundred years, but their identity is linked to their language and culture, not to the place,” says Professor Hovdhaugen.

Belonging together

As an example he points out that people take their place names with them when they move. “An important difference from our western understanding of identity is that they don’t link their perception of themselves to a concrete geographical place. Identity is linked in their world to language, but also to social structures, an easily recognisable form of life and family constellations. Identity is also in addition to a certain degree a matter of closeness. People who speak the same language, travel between the islands and renew their feeling of belonging together through parties and dances,” Even Hovdhaugen explains.

In the islands the most important form of entertainment consists in telling stories. The language is important as a narrative medium and as a medium for maintaining the feeling of belonging together. However these languages are not completely devoid of any influence from one another. The population groups understand one another passively, that is to say that they understand what the neighbour says without themselves being able to speak his language.

“What words do people borrow from one another? What does one want to protect in one’s own culture? It’s important to find answers to such questions,” says Professor Hovdhaugen.

Vulnerable societies

Since there is an extensive exchange of wives between the islands, it is perhaps not so surprising that many of the loan words are connected with the preparation of food. Concepts within flora and fauna are often also things they have in common. The latter point is something that puzzles Even Hovdhaugen, given that fishing grounds have been a central bone of contention between the islands. For that reason one might think that it was important to maintain a linguistic separation here, but in fishing there are many concepts in common.

“However, words connected with cultural things seem to be totally different. This may have a functional cause. These societies are small and vulnerable, and it may be important to mark difference vis-à-vis the others. But this is a terribly complicated game, and in two or three years’ time I may perhaps give completely different answers,” says Even Hovdhaugen.

A difficult subject to approach is the role of women. Professor Hovdhaugen has the impression that the women who are bought as wives from the neighbouring culture, are considered second class and that there is in this way a great deal of hidden discrimination in the islands.

“It’s quite clearly not the done thing to speak the neighbour’s language,” says Professor Hovdhaugen.

The Oceania Project: www.museumsnett.no/kon-tiki/Research/Oceania/

Copyright: Apollon. Research Magazine from the University of Oslo. Last updated 01.02.2004 by SAS
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