Yu No Kick Part 7: Samting Ia

Vanuatu is a country with far too many languages than is good for it. There are three national languages: English, French, and Bislama, which means that whenever someone posts a public notice, they usually end up posting three copies of it, one in each language. For a lot of Ni-Vans, their command of English and French is a little shaky, so it's not uncommon for a notice to end up saying completely different things in each language. As if this weren't confusing enough, each island is also home to several indigenous languages that predate the arrival of Europeans to the country. There are over two hundred of these local languages and many of them are drastically different from each other. In some places the local language is still used as a main form of communication. It's retrofitted with western vocabulary and concepts and made to function in the modern world like a tired old suitcase held together with crude stitches and duct tape that's still being forced into service. In practice, the borrowed English words will often far outnumber the traditional vocabulary in a given sentence: “blah blah Peace Corps blah Nokia phone charger blah blah Toyota Landcruiser blah blah Rambo.” More often, however, these custom languages are shelved in favor of the more modern European ones and soon begin to yellow and rot until only a few stray words remain, relics from a not-so-distant past. Some see this as sad, and perhaps it is, but the fact is that these traditional languages are often only valuable in the same way that antique cars are valuable, they're cool to show off to your friends and remember times gone by, but if you're actually trying to get somewhere you need something newer. These are languages that developed in small island villages and are well suited to village life, but they're not particularly useful for conducting international business, for example. It's not just that almost no one outside of Vanuatu knows these tribal languages, which is a pretty big problem in and of itself, but rather that they lack the ability to express concepts and ideas important in the modern world (Tautu's local language, for example, lacks the ability to talk about time). Linguists and Bible translators love Vanuatu. They like to move into a village for five or ten years, learn the local language, and then spend many hours painstakingly writing out a local language-English dictionary or wondering how to translate the book of Psalms into a language that has no word for God. The problem that they face, of course, is that they're Bible translators and linguists. They can learn all the vocabulary they want, but they will never really understand a Vanuatu language because Ni-Vanuatu do not translate bibles or write dictionaries, their languages are not outfitted for such tasks.

Bislama is Vanuatu's black sheep of a language that tries to bridge the gap between the village and the wider world. Bislama is named after a sort of sea slug that the French were apparently really into back in the 1700's and 1800's. The fact that Bislama is named after a sea slug makes about as much sense as anything else in Bislama. Bislama originated in the plantations of Australia and PNG which used to kidnap Ni-Vanuatu and force them to work. The people doing the kidnapping, of course, were rarely considerate enough to take all of their stolen workers from the same village, or even the same island, so the chances were that, if you were a plantation worker, you had no language in common with the other workers. In order to communicate, they cobbled together words and phrases from the languages of their overseers, French and English. Of course, these humble, exploited originators of Bislama had no idea that their tentative pidgin would one day have the distinction of being one of the most ridiculous languages on the planet. While the vast majority of Bislama's vocabulary originates in English, English speakers tend to find it totally incomprehensible when they first hear it. I remember my first experience with the language, at LAX when we were checking in for our flight to Vanuatu. We had all been given the address of the Peace Corps office in Port Vila to be written on our luggage tags. The address included the phrase “Nambatu District.” Nambatu sounded like a pretty exciting and exotic island word to me. Of course, I soon learned nambatu is actually pronounced numba-too, as in “number two.” Number Two District, not nearly as original.

Nowadays I find it hard to believe that an English speaker can't understand Bislama, it just seems like it's staring them right in the face. I mean, hemi klosap tumas lo English, mi tingse ol man bae i kasem olsem nomo, right? Peace Corps volunteers, being native English speakers, tend to catch onto Bislama pretty quickly (like, in a matter of weeks), but I can't help feeling sorry for the Japanese volunteers who, since they usually don't already know English, spend their two years in Vanuatu struggling with Bislama only to be rewarded with moderate fluency in a language that's more to less completely useless anywhere else. We, on the other hand, get to brag about being completely fluent in a new foreign language on our resumes, safe in the knowledge that no potential employer could possibly know that Bislama really doesn't count as a foreign language.

Learning Bislama is about learning how to let go. In fact, that's a good first Bislama word, “lego” (as in “lego my eggo”). Just let go, don't worry about it. Grammar, pronunciation, spelling, structure, just let it all go. We speakers of Romance and Germanic languages love our rules and so we look for them in Bislama, write them down and memorize them, and end up with convoluted and confusing lists of linguistic ordinances. Far easier is to start with the realization that there are no rules, just the occasional guideline. Bislama is all about being good enough. If you can cobble together some words and maybe a few wild gesticulations and get someone to understand that you want a shell of kava, then you're already fluent. None of the spellings are standardized either, and it not uncommon to see a piece of written Bislama where the same word is spelled three different ways in the same sentence (Bislama Scrabble is absurdly easy). Just as important as learning all the rules not to follow is learning all the things you can't say. Question: how would you translate the following sentence into Bislama? “With the money I earned from my job I could have bought a new stereo, but instead I deposited it in my bank account.” Answer : You would never, ever, say this in Vanuatu. In our language classes during training we'd constantly bombard our language instructors with such questions, determined to master the ins and outs of Bislama's present conditional, and we'd receive vague confused answers, which we tried to make sense of. It took a while for us to put together the fact that there often just isn't an answer. Mastering Bislama is more about learning a culture than learning a new vocabulary. Although we don't often think about it, English is much more to us than just a method of communicating with each other. Our language guides the way we look at the world and governs the things we choose to talk about and think about. So, to speak Bislama well you have to stop thinking like an educated American and start thinking like an island villager. Thoughts about truth, meaning, and Halo 3 need to be replaced with thoughts about where various other people in the village are walking to and what kind of yams are in season.

Bislama is a language that values talking over communicating. In English, it is considered proper to speak precisely and concisely until you reach your point, and then stop talking. In Bislama it is custom to speak vaguely and verbosely about something unrelated to your point until it gets to be around kava time and you and whoever you're talking to have a few shells. Thus, while English sports a myriad of vocabulary words that allow one to make nice, succinct arguments, Bislama boasts a tiny vocabulary of words with uncertain meanings to ensure vagueness and overly long conversations. One of the few nouns, for example, is “samting,” from the English word “something,” meaning thing. A variation is “samting ia” from the English “something here,” this thing, or thing-y, if you will. As in “yu bin karem samting ia?”, did you bring that thing-y? Or “yu save samting ia we yumi bin tokabaot?”, you know that thing that you and I were talking before? It's entirely possible to have a long conversation with someone in Bislama and come out of it having absolutely no idea what the other person was talking about. You see, in the village, it just doesn't matter if you get a point across. It's not like there's any sort of vital information that needs to be passed along, people are just trying to pass the time by talking at each other about nothing. Also, when vagueness and misunderstanding fail to generate enough conversation, exaggeration and outright lying are also acceptable. And don't worry about contradicting yourself, that's all part of the fun.

The problem, of course, comes on the other end of the bridge, when people attempt to use Bislama to actually communicate with each other and get things done. Businessmen and government officials in Vila often try to expand the usefulness of Bislama by creating more Bislama words by sticking an “em” onto the end of English words. When used properly, this technique produces a sort of strangely accented English that's slightly more understandable than straight-up Bislama. Often, however, it falls into the wrong hands and English office jargon is mixed with Bislama's incomprehensibility to produce nonsense the likes to which the world has never seen (ie: bae yumi amalgamate-em ol processes blong yumi blong facilitate-em ol business mo utilize-em ol niufala synergy). In the end, however, there's a reason why all Ni-Vanuatu students are required to learn either English or French (strangely, the French schools are far better at teaching French to the Ni-Vans than the English schools are at teaching English, despite the fact that Bislama so closely mirrors English). English and French offer more than just a means of communicating on the international level, they provide a framework for understanding and explaining all sorts of concepts and ideas that are impossible to convey in Bislama or any of the traditional languages for that matter. Unfortunately, many students don't become sufficiently fluent in English to benefit from this. Often, they only learn the English equivalents of the concepts and vocabulary they already know from Bislama, and never use the other 98% of the language, which is kind of like purchasing a supercomputer and using it to surf the web; you're missing out on a whole lot of potential. And so I find myself explaining optical refraction and sound propagation in Bislama in my science class, which is quite simply absurd; when it's put into Bislama, I barely understand it myself. Without a some level of English proficiency, there are some topics that will always remain beyond my student's grasp, Bislama simply does not provide the tools needed to convey them. While it works fine for chatting with people around the village, it is not a language powerful enough for more advanced learning. It's like trying to build a skyscraper with a hammer, while the hammer may have worked well for putting a chair together, in order to tackle a skyscraper you're going to need something a little more high-tech.

And so slowly you resign yourself to the fact that there are certain things that you'll never be able to explain to the people in your village, certain things that they lack the language to understand. Slowly you grow comfortable chatting for hours about someone's new truck or who drank kava where the previous night. But every now and then that sense of stubbornness seizes you and you grow determined that, just this once, you're going to really just take the time to really explain the difference between 50 hertz and 60 hertz current, and everyone's just going to GET IT this time. And you find yourself crouched over on the ground drawing sine curves in the dirt with a stick and saying “you see this thing-y, it goes up on top and then comes back down fifty times in one second and this other thing-y, it's kind of like the first thing-y but different, and it goes...”