Abstract
Yalaku is one of the smallest members of the Ndu language family of the Sepik region of New Guinea. Spoken in a hilly area off the Sepik river, Yalaku has been in intensive contact with the unrelated Kwoma for several generations. Comparison between Yalaku and closely related Manambu shows the presence of a number of grammatical patterns borrowed from Kwoma, alongside a number of loanwords. Tok Pisin, the lingua franca of Papua New Guinea, is known to every speaker of Yalaku, with the two languages in a diglossic relationship. Lexical loans from Tok Pisin are avoided; however, Tok Pisin impact is being felt in the pronunciation patterns by younger speakers, calques, and the presence of two borrowed grammatical forms—the possessive verb and the negator. Cultural and linguistic factors suggest an explanation for this seemingly curious development.
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Notes
- 1.
The Yalaku language has never been previously described (more information and a typological profile of the language is in Aikhenvald 2015, 2018, 2020, based on the author’s original fieldwork 2013-present; Laycock (1965) misheard Yalaku as ‘Yelogu’ during a few hours of work with one speaker and gave the people an incorrect name). Invaluable information on Yalaku ethnic history and their contacts with the neighbouring Kwoma comes from Bowden (1997: xx-xxiii). The exonym Kaunga (or Kawoga) is used by the Kwoma (see Bowden 1997: xxiii).
- 2.
Kwoma is spoken by all generations of speakers in the Washkuk Hills and the adjacent low country to the east of the Yalaku village (Bowden 1997: xxi–ii), with many speakers preserving their cultural knowledge (Thomas Yati and Ross Bowden, p.c., pace Lambert-Bretière 2018). Materials on Kwoma are limited to a partial grammatical study in Kooyers (1974) and a comprehensive and informative dictionary by Bowden (1997), which contains a number of grammatical forms. A number of formal similarities shared by Kwoma with Ndu languages result from intensive lexical diffusion over hundreds of years of language interaction (along the lines of Heath 1981; see the discussion in Aikhenvald 2009).
- 3.
- 4.
Abbreviations: 1 first person; 2 second person; 3 third person, COMIT comitative; DECL declarative; du dual; EXIST existential; fem feminine; FOC focal; GEN genitive; LK linker; masc masculine; NEG negation; pl plural; REC recipient; sg singular; SS: COMPL completed same subject form.
- 5.
Similar phenomena have been noted for Paluai (Schokkin 2017), Lele (Boettger 2015), and Tigak (Jenkins 2005). Tok Pisin loans in Iatmul appear to be restricted to nouns only (Jendraschek 2012: 471–3). With Tok Pisin currently becoming more and more anglicised (as part of its de-creolization; cf. Zimmermann 2010 and Jenkins 2005: 200–3), distinguishing between Tok Pisin and English loan forms is often problematic.
- 6.
- 7.
The use of the Tok Pisin negator i no in Yalaku is reminiscent of the negative proclitic ina in Yimas, from Tok Pisin i no. Traditional Yimas has a very complex negation system, and in the 1970–80s young people and sometimes speakers of older generations used the Tok Pisin form (Foley 1991: 263). Nowadays, all speakers of Yimas, with the exception of some older women, use the Tok Pisin form ina instead of the most frequently used negative prefix ta-.
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Aikhenvald, A.Y. (2020). Language Contact and Language Change in the Sepik Region of New Guinea: The Case of Yalaku. In: Allan, K. (eds) Dynamics of Language Changes. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6430-7_14
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