Biak in Nijmegen
For two semesters the amazing language of Biak has been being studied at the Catholic University of Nijmegen in a linguistic fieldwork course conducted with the aid of a native speaker. The language is typologically extraordinary in that it has grammatical gender, but only in the plural, not in the other numbers (singular, dual, trial). But this is not all that is amazing.
By HEIN STEINHAUER
Biak is an Austronesian language which is spoken in various dialects in the Schouten Islands, in parts of the Raja Ampat archipelago, and in settlements along the north coast of the Bird's Head Peninsula of West New Guinea. The estimated number of speakers must be well over 50,000, which makes it one of the biggest languages in that part of Asia. Yet it is under pressure from the language of school, church, government, and television, Indonesian. As a result a clear shift towards Indonesian (or rather a local variety thereof) can be observed in the more urban environments: outside the market in the district capital of Biak on the island of the same name, it is rare to hear this language spoken.The first reports on the Biak language date from the middle of the 19th century. The missionary Van Hasselt published a grammatical sketch in 1905. A short dictionary appeared posthumously (1947). The missionary-anthropologist Kamma published quite a lot about Biak customs and the messianistic movements which were prevailent among the people, but nothing about the language. He did collect heaps of Biak stories, typewritten by Biak informants and/or by himself, single-spaced and without margins (paper wasn't easy to get in the field in those days), all dated prior to the mid-1950s. His unordered archives were inherited by the Dutch anthropologist Jelle Miedema and are kept on the premises of the IIAS.
Van Hasselt was still the most recent source for the language when the Indonesian lexicographer Soeparno, working with students from Biak in Yogyakarta, wrote a Biak-Indonesian dictionary (1975). It was his findings which put me on the track of the gender phenomenon.
In the early 1980s several Indonesian anthropologists studied in Leiden in one of the sandwich programmes which were still in full swing at that time. With one of them, Johsz Mansoben, a native speaker of Biak, I started to work out Soeparno's findings. However, both he and I had to meet deadlines. His resulted in a dissertation on the traditional political systems in Irian Jaya. Mine in a paper on number in Biak, which left many problems undecided, but which made one thing clear: Biak did have a gender opposition in the plural whereas in the singular, dual and trial it had none.
One illustration may suffice. From the nominal bases in 'fish' and rum 'house' the following noun phrases can be formed:
-- in i 'the (one) fish',
rum i 'the house'
-- in sui 'the two fish',
rum sui 'the two houses'
-- in skoi 'the three fish',
rum skoi 'the three houses', but
-- in si 'the (many) fish',
rum na 'the (many) houses'.
That Biak had a gender opposition at all was unusual: grammatical gender is not a feature of Austronesian languages so far west.
Most unusual, however, was the curious distribution of the opposition, which was a counter-example to the alledged (and indeed plausible) language 'universal' that a language must have at least as many gender oppositions in the singular as it has in the non-singular. Since then more counter-evidence has been reported, much of it derived from Berber languages, but the Biak pattern seems to be parallelled only by one other Austronesian language, Marshallese. Further research into the question whether this is a case of parallel development or of common origin (less likely) is needed.
More research was needed for Biak into the meaning of the grammatical gender, into the extremely complicated deictic system, and into the structure of noun phrases in relation to that deictic system. Only when I was asked to do a linguistic fieldwork class at the Catholic University of Nijmegen did the opportunity present itself. With five dedicated students and the help of the unsurpassed Zacharias Sawor as a native speaker, we have been studying the language since January last year. Several of the texts from the Kamma archive were analysed. With the aid of discovery tools, developed by the Nijmegen-based Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, we have been trying to tackle the problem of the deictic system. Many problems remain. One example will illustrate the nominal phrase structure and definiteness marking.
The phrase 'the fish which swims under the house' (traditional houses are built off-shore) is: in ve-bur ro rum-ya vavn-di ni (fish which-swim in/at house-the space.below-the/its the), whereas 'the (many) fish which swim below the two houses' becomes: in ve-bur ro rum-su-ya vavn-su si (fish which-swim in/at house-DUAL-the space.below-the.DUAL the.PLUR).
The semantic difference between the 'si' and the 'na' class of nouns is not yet clear. What are obviously animals (including human beings) belong to the 'si' class, but so do things which in the common European perception are 'inanimate', such as spoons, plates, stars, drums, bananas, and oranges, whereas comparable objects such as knives, cups, trees, and fruit belong to the 'na' class.
One more finding is worth mentioning. Biak presents one of the rare examples of a sound change in progress. It distinguishes a voiced bilabial stop [b] and a voiced bilabial fricative [v]. To the Dutch ears of the Protestant missionaries this could not be true, and they wrote b for both sounds and pronounced them as [b] in their sermons. Today it is for native speakers a sign of cultivated language use if one does not make the difference.
Biak shows features of Austronesian languages further to the west, but it also has characteristics of Oceanic languages. It is highly likely that there have been mutual influences between Biak on the one hand and the various Non-Austronesian languages of the Bird's Head and North Halmahera. The future of most of these languages is bleak. (Further) research is urgent. *
Professor Hein Steinhauer is affiliated with the Catholic University Nijmegen for Ethnolinguistics of Southeast Asia and Universiteit Leiden for Austronesian linguistics. He holds the IIAS Extraordinary Chair for 'Ethnolinguistics with a focus on Southeast Asia'. He can be reached at: E-mail: steinhauer@let.leidenuniv.nl