PNG languages at risk

Transcript

Papua New Guinea is highly regarded for its diversity of languages, but one of the country's foremost linguists says about half of the country's 800 languages are at risk of becoming extinct in the near future.

Dr Sakarepe Kamene, who is the head of languages at the University of PNG and one of the country's longest-serving academics, says the government is not placing enough value and priority into protecting the languages.

He told Jamie Tahana he fears nothing will be done until it's too late.

SAKAREPE KAMENE: Because the problem is that we haven't got a language policy or strong cultural policies to really take care of what we have got as a heritage. And that is an issue now at the moment.

JAMIE TAHANA: How threatened would you say the languages are? Just give us an idea of the situation?

SK: Well we are in a dilemma here at the moment where you have lots of giant developments taking place, particularly in rural areas where these languages and cultures exist.  And they can't process this rapid huge development that hits them against their face and therefore they seem to run into these seem to run into these projects instead of keeping their traditional languages or cultures. And that's the danger.

JT: Okay, so is it kind of say we take the LNG or agriculture projects for example..

SK: That's right yes

JT: Is it a case of these big western projects and sort of English and stuff becomes a dominant language kind of thing?

SK: That is right yes. Increasing pressure is so great, so that might really be a factor that might cause languages to disappear.

JT: You say here out of 800 languages half of that number have fewer than 2000 speakers?

SK: That is right yes, so that is the real danger if we don't look after them, you know. You know these languages, capture all kinds of information you know. So if we don't look after them they will go and they will go with all the information with them. Like genealogical information, historical information, traditional lifestyle information and all sorts of information. So that is the concern. It is not just losing language but also the kinds of information that language codes and expresses we might lose all those things.

JT: How should the government begin to help these languages?

SK: Well the first thing is the view about all those languages and cultures. We haven't got strong views about ourselves, our languages, to preserve or to revitalise them. So these are issues, so again it is about our views, we undermine our own cultures and languages and we look up on other peoples languages and cultures. So that becomes dangerous so attitude becomes a problem from the government down to the grassroots level. People want more of english rather than their vernacular languages. So again the attitude becomes an issues which we really need to address. One thing I am suggesting is we look at our major principles of traditional societies and maybe have them as curriculum in the school system. To introduce vernacular at an early age and keep it up until maybe grade two or something. So they learn their vernacular languages and then move on to English. In that sense we might keep the languages going.