INTRODUCTION
Language use and social identity among the Rapa Nui of Easter Island
have been profoundly influenced by the events of recent history.1
Earlier encounters with outsiders nearly
devastated the Rapa Nui community. The island's population, roughly
estimated to have been about five thousand in 1860, collapsed within the
following two decades to little more than one hundred as a result of slave
raids for agricultural work in Peru, and the consequent spread of disease
(McCall 1980). Given this history, it is
remarkable that the Rapa Nui language survives today. Chile annexed the
island in 1888, and during the following two-thirds of a century it
gradually established authority over its colony, primarily by delegating
control to a private sheep ranch company aptly named the “Easter
Island Exploitation Company.” This company leased the island from
Chile between 1895 and 1955 and confined the Rapa Nui to Hanga Roa
village, leading to several revolts. The Chilean navy took control of the
island in 1953. The Rapa Nui were not granted full citizenship rights
until 1966 (El Consejo de Jefes de Rapanui & Hotus
1988; Porteous 1981). In the mid-1950s,
Chile sought ways to increase the integration of the island into the
nation-state by sending a dozen Rapa Nui children and young people to
study on the mainland. Upon their return in the mid-1960s, many of these
Rapa Nui worked in newly created civilian institutions on the island,
including the school and local government, and became important community
leaders.
Political and demographic changes since the beginning of
decolonization and the arrival of a civil administration in 1966, as well
as the opening of regular air travel and tourism to what had until then
been a very isolated island, rapidly integrated the ethnic minority group
into the national and global economy. These events and the arrival of
almost 400 new Chilean government workers and their families at first
fostered the rapid development of bilingualism among the Rapa Nui and
fortified an already established sociolinguistic hierarchy and an
associated diglossic functional compartmentalization between Spanish and
Rapa Nui in the community. Language shift from Rapa Nui to the national
language, Spanish, followed. Several factors have, however, acted as a
partial counterbalance to language shift by raising the symbolic value of
the Rapa Nui language and expanding the public spheres in which Rapa Nui
has become a legitimate language choice (
Makihara
2004). These include the Rapa Nui people's ability to dominate
the heritage tourism economy which grew rapidly in the postcolonial
period, and the important struggles and victories of an active indigenous
movement over the past decade and a half to achieve greater political
autonomy and land rights.
Nonetheless, many Rapa Nui children have grown up speaking Spanish.
Today about half of the island's 3700 residents are Rapa Nui, while
most others are Chilean “Continentals” from the mainland.
Virtually all residents speak Spanish. By my estimate, roughly two-thirds
of the Rapa Nui can speak Rapa Nui, but most of these speakers are adults.
According to studies by two resident American linguists from the Summer
Institute of Linguistics (Thiesen de Weber & Weber
1998), the proportion of local elementary school children who speak
Rapa Nui as a maternal or predominant language decreased sharply from 77%
in 1977 to 25% in 1989. Among children enrolled in kindergarten through
seventh grade in 1997, none were considered Rapa Nui-dominant, only 7.5%
(49 students) were considered balanced bilingual, and only an additional
12.3% (80 students) spoke Rapa Nui well or regularly.
My focus in this article is on the transformation of the Rapa Nui
Spanish speech style and on the role played by predominantly
Spanish-speaking Rapa Nui children in shaping it. Although definitions of
bilinguality vary widely, by most definitions Rapa Nui children would be
considered, at best, as only marginally bilingual.2
See Bloomfield 1935 for an example
of the restrictive definition of bilinguality, and Macnamara 1967 for a very broad definition which
regards minimal competence in comprehension as sufficient to consider an
individual bilingual. See Hamers & Blanc
2000 for a discussion of the conceptual range and its theoretical
and methodological implications.
Instead, these children possess
varying degrees of passive knowledge of – that is, comprehension
proficiency in – their ethnic language, but they nonetheless find
ways to employ that limited knowledge to affect their Spanish speech so as
to participate in and feel a part of the Rapa Nui language community.
Focusing on the nature and uses of Rapa Nui Spanish varieties helps us to
examine several areas of inquiry: (i) how community-wide language shift
may be accompanied by the development and transformation of multiple
speech varieties, and in particular, by stylistic innovations and the
expansion of the bilingual community's communicative style
repertoire; (ii) the importance of the process of language socialization
in shaping language use and attitudes and the community's overall
pattern of sociolinguistic variation and change; (iii) the meaning and
definitions of concepts such as bilinguality, language, code, style, and
interference; and (iv) the interplay among linguistic structure,
psycholinguistic constraints (imbalanced competence resulting in
structural variation), interactional communicative strategies,
metapragmatic awareness, and ethnic identity formation.
Studies of language shift and loss have identified three major areas
of change in declining languages: structural simplification (increased
regularity and loss of productivity), domain restriction, and style
reduction.3
These processes all point to declining
variability in language. Yet clearly linguistic innovation and
creativity can also occur in the context of language shift and loss
– both in the receding language varieties and in the development of
localized varieties of spreading languages. By “innovation,” I
mean the creation of new grammatical and “contextual rules”
(Hymes
1974a:156f.) and stylistic innovations.
Research on the loss of dialects in contact with other varieties of the
same language have noted that the features of a declining dialect may
become more distinctive even while its number of speakers becomes reduced,
for example in the case of Smith Island English (
Schilling-Estes 1997).
4 See also Kulick (1992:1–3) for
a discussion of the maintenance and divergence of dialects and languages
in Papua New Guinea despite extensive contact.
Several other
studies have examined linguistic innovation by bilingual speakers in
language shift situations.
Gal 1989 and
Hill 1989, for example, analyze creative linguistic
innovations in grammatical rules – in word formation and relative
clause construction strategies – respectively among
“narrow-users” of Hungarian under shift to German in Oberwart,
Austria, and among speakers of Mexicano (Nahuatl) under shift to Spanish
in the Malinche Volcano region of Tlaxcala and Puebla, central Mexico.
Hill & Hill 1986 further analyzed stylistic
differentiation in “power code” and “purist code”
speech styles of Mexicano.
Although a process of language shift to Spanish is advanced and
undeniable on Rapa Nui, it has been accompanied by an important and
simultaneous diversification of the local communicative style repertoire.
Significant elements of this diversification are the development of Rapa
Nui ways of speaking Spanish (or Rapa Nui Spanish speech styles) and, more
recently, syncretic ways of speaking Rapa Nui (or syncretic Rapa Nui
speech styles). These new ways of speaking have come to characterize much
of daily linguistic practice among the Rapa Nui. I use the terms
“styles” (Irvine 2001) or
“ways of speaking” (Hymes 1974b) to
describe the use of linguistic varieties in order to foreground the
speakers' role in creating their orientations toward the world and
the situatedness of performance. I will highlight the interplay between
innovations and constraints in interpreting changing linguistic practices,
in particular in the use of the spreading language in a situation of
language shift.
Locally significant Spanish speech styles are Chilean Spanish and Rapa
Nui Spanish. Chilean Spanish is a set of Spanish varieties originally
spoken in mainland Chile, particularly in the
Santiago-Valparaíso-Viña del Mar metropolitan area (see
Fig. 1). Rapa Nui Spanish originated out of
strategies of second language acquisition employed by native Rapa Nui
speakers during the initial spread of Spanish and development of
bilingualism during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, after
Chile annexed the island in 1888. Rapa Nui Spanish is characterized by
linguistic simplification and “interference” of Rapa Nui
features and other contact phenomena.5
In his
discussion of bilingualism among the Rapa Nui in the 1970s, Chilean
sociolinguist Gómez Macker described the “Island
Spanish” as one of the most “dialectalized varieties” of
Spanish spoken in Chile (1982:96).
As
initially defined by Haugen (
1956:50), the term
“interference” refers to a situation where “two systems
are simultaneously applied to a linguistic item.” Following
Woolard 1998, I adopt the term to refer to a kind of
“bilingual simultaneity” or a range of interlingual phenomena,
regardless of speakers' agentivity.
6 Thomason 2001 uses the term
“interference” as a cover term encompassing a wide range of
contact-induced change and discusses various subtypes such as
“borrowing”, shift-induced “substratum
interference” through imperfect learning,
“code-switching”, and “code alteration” (the
latter two are equivalent of Gumperz's (1982) “conversational code switching” and
“situational code switching” respectively). My use of the term
“interference” is narrower in the sense that it does not
include neither conversational or situational codeswitching, and I treat
interference and conversational codeswitching, but not situational
codeswitching, as kinds of bilingual simultaneity. I view bilingual
simultaneity as a phenomenon that is definable structurally (i.e., having
bilingual elements present simultaneously) and whether or not the
simultaneity or its indexical meaning is intended by the speaker.
This views interference not just as a result of imperfect second language
learning, but at times as “a resource for creating sociolinguistic
meaning” (
Woolard 1998:16). In this regard
it is important to note that even though, by now, a majority of bilingual
Rapa Nui adults have become mostly fluent speakers of Chilean Spanish
varieties, a large number of them have not abandoned their Rapa Nui
Spanish. The Rapa Nui continue to acquire and use local varieties of
Spanish alongside Rapa Nui. In this context, one can interpret the use of
Rapa Nui Spanish features as interactional diacritics of the
speaker's identity which serve to underline solidarity and to
authenticate Rapa Nui identity, or to polarize ethnic differences in a
community where heritage tourism and a politicized indigenous movement are
both salient (see, e.g., Text 2). These Rapa Nui Spanish features form
elements of the repertoire of speech styles which speakers shift within
and across conversational interactions to create syncretic Rapa Nui
speech.
Map: Rapa Nui in the Pacific Ocean
I employ the term “syncretism” to refer to the
relatively new ways of speaking Rapa Nui that have emerged since the 1970s
and 1980s and which characterize much of contemporary linguistic practice
among the Rapa Nui and index their new ethnic identity. Rapa Nui-Spanish
bilingual speakers use various forms of bilingual simultaneity such as
interference and frequent conversational codeswitching, “the
juxtaposition within the same speech exchange of passages of speech
belonging to two different grammatical systems or subsystems” (Gumperz 1982:59).7
Linguistic syncretism is produced by various forms of
bilingual simultaneity (e.g., interference, conversational codeswitching,
convergence, bivalency). See Hill 1989 for a
characterization of syncretic speech as an active and strategic linguistic
practice on the part of speakers. Through such linguistic choices speakers
variably highlight, suppress, or make ambiguous the oppositions found in
historical associations between linguistic materials and social meanings.
See pages 737 and 742 for examples of convergence and bivalency.
Syncretism is observable at all linguistic levels as Spanish and Rapa Nui
accents, words, grammatical elements, phrases, and genres are mixed within
and across speakers' utterances, while remaining subject to systemic
constraints of the sorts discussed by Myers-Scotton
2002. Taken together, various forms of simultaneity
are used to construct a range of intermediate usages which speakers
manage, and along which they shift. This is similar to linguistic
practices found among Mexicano-Spanish bilingual speakers in central
Mexico (
Hill & Hill 1986),
Javanese-Indonesian speakers in Java, Indonesia (
Errington 1998), Puerto Ricans in New York (
Poplack 1980;
Zentella
1997), Taiap–Tok Pisin speakers in Gapun, Papua New Guinea
(
Kulick 1992), and Urban Wolof speakers in
Senegal (
Swigart 1992). Rapa Nui Spanish speech,
which includes Rapa Nui elements, can itself be the object of alternation
within Rapa Nui utterances, in a way similar to what
Meeuwis & Blommaert 1998 call
“layered” codeswitching in their study of mixing of
Lingala-French and Swahili-French codeswitched varieties among Zairians in
Belgium.
8 Syncretic speech which constitutes
a speech style that is widely diffused in a community has been described
as a “code-switching mode” by Poplack 1980. Such characterization of “unmarked
choice” (Myers-Scotton 1988) of language
alteration suggests that the contextualization value of each individual
switch has been weakened through frequent juxtapositions. It also raises
the question of whether code distinctiveness and the speakers'
awareness of language boundaries and intention in switching are necessary
for their linguistic behavior to be called codeswitching. See Alvarez Cáccamo 1998 for a discussion of
codeswitching and language alteration, in particular how language
alteration does not necessarily constitute codeswitching. See
Gardner-Chloros's (1995) and Woolard's
(1998) critiques of focusing on and idealizing
codeswitching thereby reiterating discrete linguistic systems in bilingual
usage.
The Rapa Nui have come to view syncretic speech as such a normal way
of speaking in informal in-group interactions that they would find it
unnatural or difficult to speak Rapa Nui void of any Spanish elements. As
such, the concept of syncretism applies not only to linguistic
characteristics of Rapa Nui speech but also to the dominant interactional
norm in in-group interactions in which the language users allow and expect
bilingual simultaneities and demonstrate great accommodation toward
speakers of varying bilingual competence and preference. I have elsewhere
examined the expansion of syncretic Rapa Nui use among adult Rapa Nui in
public and political speech situations in the context of the rising
indigenous movement and political negotiations with the national
government, and the ways this has contributed to breakdown of the
previously established sociolinguistic hierarchy and of diglossic
functional compartmentalization of languages (Makihara
2004).
In the present essay, I focus on explaining the continuation and
transformation of Rapa Nui ways of speaking Spanish. The language
socialization contexts have allowed Rapa Nui children to develop and
maintain at least passive knowledge of the Rapa Nui language. They are
acquiring Rapa Nui Spanish in addition to Chilean Spanish, but they are
developing their own Rapa Nui ways of speaking Spanish, which are
structurally distinct from older Rapa Nui Spanish. To distinguish the two,
I will employ the abbreviation R2S1 – Rapa Nui as a second language,
Spanish first – to identify this newer Rapa Nui Spanish in contrast
to the older but persistent R1S2, the Rapa Nui Spanish variety spoken
mainly by Rapa Nui adults. Unlike R1S2 Rapa Nui Spanish, R2S1 Rapa Nui
Spanish is characterized mainly by the inclusion of Rapa Nui lexical
items.
A growing literature in the field of “language
socialization” (Ochs & Schieffelin
1984) – socialization through language and socialization to
use language – emphasizes the importance of the sociocultural
context in the development of children's “communicative
competence” (Hymes 1972), their ability to
use language appropriately in the community, and the importance of its
central role in the construction of selfhood and social relations.9
Parents' language practice is only one of
several factors in language development. The larger sociocultural context,
including cultural ideas about language and personhood, influences the
ways that children develop communicative competence and practice. This is
true not only in regard to which language(s) children learn but also in
regard to the development of sociocultural and
“metacommunicative” (
Bateson 1972)
knowledge of expectations and evaluations about linguistic forms and
contexts of use – for example, preference for particular
communicative styles in “framing” (cf.
Goffman 1974) and participating in interactions.
It is difficult to say with precision what people were initially
responsible for developing the R2S1 Rapa Nui Spanish speech style, because
Spanish speech with Rapa Nui lexical interference or codeswitches is used
by all of the following three groups: monolingual or predominantly
Spanish-speaking Rapa Nui (mostly children), long-term continental Chilean
residents who are familiar with Rapa Nui, and Rapa Nui-Spanish bilinguals
(mostly Rapa Nui adults). What is interesting to note is that this speech
style is emerging as one stylistically differentiated from R1S2 Rapa Nui
Spanish, in a way that I interpret to be associated with a Rapa Nui
“voice” in Spanish that is sometimes
“ventriloquated” (Bakhtin 1981) or
appropriated by fluent Rapa Nui speakers when speaking to Rapa Nui
children.
Although children's imbalanced productive competence in Spanish
and Rapa Nui motivates the structural characteristics of the new Rapa Nui
Spanish speech style they use, I argue that this alone does not explain
the reason for its usage. By taking a “discourse-centered”
approach to language, identity and culture (Sherzer
1987),10
I
propose to interpret children's use of Rapa Nui Spanish as
performance of Rapa Nui identity and as interpersonal communicative
strategies in intergenerational family interactions, albeit constrained by
their asymmetrical linguistic competence and other interactional factors.
The rise of heritage tourism and a popular and widespread indigenous
political and cultural revival movement have led to active construction
and commoditization of the Rapa Nui culture through community-wide events
and other group and family activities. Rapa Nui children participate
actively in these events, contributing not only to Rapa Nui cultural
construction and transformation but also to sociolinguistic changes
through their linguistic practices. These children's linguistic
choices are motivated by their positive identification with their Rapa Nui
identity, but by choosing Spanish they are significantly contributing to
the ongoing process of language shift away from the Rapa Nui language and
redefining the ways in which language differences are mapped onto social
and ethnic identity differences.
The present study is based on an ethnographic and linguistic analysis
of face-to-face verbal interactions recorded during three years of field
research on the island over the past decade. The article is organized as
follows. The next section analyzes the linguistic characteristics of
adults' speech styles which form part of the communicative style
repertoire of the Rapa Nui community. The third section focuses on
children's speech and the characteristics of its environment by
describing bilingual language socialization and the syncretic
interactional norm. It also discusses how the characteristics of
adults' and children's Rapa Nui Spanish speech relate to
bilingual competence and sociolinguistic change. The conclusion discusses
the social meanings of Rapa Nui Spanish speech styles and how they relate
to ethnic identity formation and language shift.
RAPA NUI SPANISH AND THE BILINGUAL
COMMUNITY'S COMMUNICATIVE STYLE REPERTOIRE
The development of a speech style involves differentiation within a
system of possibilities, linking co-occurring linguistic features to
social meanings, and constituting and indexing social formations such as
distinctiveness of individuals and groups in specific contexts of
communicative situations (Irvine 2001). To
understand the nature and social meanings of Rapa Nui ways of speaking
Spanish, it is necessary to consider how these speech styles relate to
others in the communicative style repertoire. For this purpose, I find it
useful to identify at least four speech styles: syncretic Rapa Nui, R1S2
Rapa Nui Spanish, R2S1 Rapa Nui Spanish, and Chilean Spanish. Chilean
Spanish and especially Rapa Nui Spanish speech styles intersect with
syncretic Rapa Nui as they are recruited to serve as resources for
conversational codeswitching and other forms of bilingual simultaneity.
R1S2 Rapa Nui Spanish, which originated with strategies of second language
learning, continues to be used along with the target variety, Chilean
Spanish, while an emerging new variety of Rapa Nui Spanish (R2S1) is being
added to the expanding communicative style repertoire. Below I will
describe the linguistic characteristics of the adults' speech styles
and their use, followed by children's speech styles in the next
section.
R1S2 Rapa Nui Spanish
This variety of Rapa Nui Spanish is spoken primarily by adult
bilingual Rapa Nui speakers and is characterized by simplification, or
rule-generalization, and Rapa Nui interference, originating in imperfect
second language acquisition. Linguistic simplification is a process of
rule generalization which involves “the higher frequency of use of a
form X in context Y (i.e. generalization) at the expense of a form Z,
usually in competition with and semantically closely related to X”
(Silva-Corvalán 1994:3), and it results
in simplified linguistic systems or subsystems. Although often
distinguished as external and internal factors, respectively, both
interference and simplification occur commonly in the context of language
contact – second language acquisition and shift-induced language
attrition alike – and many linguistic consequences may be
interpreted to have been caused by the combination of these two
processes.
At the phonological level, sounds that are unique to Spanish are
replaced to various degrees by Rapa Nui sounds in R1S2 Rapa Nui Spanish.
Spanish has a larger set of consonants, and those that are not part of the
Rapa Nui phonological inventory are (but not always) replaced by Rapa Nui
sounds with approximately the same place or manner of articulation, e.g.,
.
11 For example, jarro
‘jar, jug’ may be pronounced /karo/,
guitarra
‘guitar’ as /kitara/, familia
‘family’ as /famiria/, idea
‘idea’ as /irea/, sábana
‘sheet’ as /tavana/, and calzoncillo
‘underwear’ as /karsonsio/∼/kasontio/. A
range of phonological interference can be illustrated in the multiple
realizations of después ‘afterwards’:
/despues/, /despue/, /despue/,
/depue /, or /repue/, listed here in
order of increasing conformity to Rapa Nui phonology. The variant choice
is sometimes predictable from the individual's bilingual competence
and preference, but the same person may use multiple variants, which
potentially constitutes strategic interference pointing toward Rapa
Nuiness or Chileanness. Presently, the Rapa Nui speakers replace [l,
d] with
more often than [g, x] with [k], and replacing
with [t] (or even with [k] as in /fektivo/
for festivo ‘festive’) rarely occurs except in proper
nouns (e.g., /tire/ for Chile
), reflecting differential nativization or incorporation of
these sounds.
Consonant clusters and closed syllables are often
simplified by omitting a syllable-final consonant or by adding a vowel to
make them conform to the Rapa Nui (C)V syllable structure. The
syllable-final consonant reduction may be influenced in addition by
characteristics of Chilean Spanish, in which /d/ tends to be
reduced in word-final and intervocalic positions, and /s/ tends to
be aspirated in pre-consonant position, and aspirated or reduced in
word-final position.
12 For example,
canasto ‘basket’ is pronounced either
/kanasto/ or /kanato/ in Rapa Nui Spanish, and
/kanato/ has been incorporated as a loanword in Rapa Nui, leading
a semantic change in the Rapa Nui synonym kete, which has come to
denote ‘pocket’. Note, however, that the Chilean Spanish
variant for canasto involves aspiration: /kanahto/. The
word-final /d/ and the pre-consonantal and word-final /s/
are sociolinguistic markers of speakers' education and formality of
speech situation in continental Chile (Rabanales
1992).
At the morphosyntactic level, simplification, sometimes in combination
with Rapa Nui interference, is commonly observed, especially in the use of
nominal and adjectival gender, verbal conjugations, and determiners. For
example, a 75-year-old woman uttered the following while telling me a
story over her kitchen table13
Rapa Nui
elements, in italics, are transcribed using a single closing quote
['] for the glottal stop,
for the velar nasal, and a macron for the five long vowels. For Spanish
elements, a close-to-standard Spanish orthography is used except when
forms significantly diverge from standard Spanish, which is provided in
parentheses. Spanish borrowings are underlined and italicized, non-Spanish
borrowings italicized and broken-underlined. The equal sign [=]
to connect two utterances indicates that they were produced with
noticeably less transition time between them than usual. The names of all
speakers are pseudonyms.
The following
abbreviations are used in glosses: 1, 2, 3, first, second, third person;
DO, direct object; fem., feminine; ind., indicative mood; masc.,
masculine; PERS, person marker; pl., plural; pres., present tense; PRF,
perfective aspect marker; PRO, pronoun; PROG, progressive aspect marker;
refl., reflexive; RN, Rapa Nui; sing., singular; Sp.,
Spanish.
:
From the context of the story, she meant ‘he saw him’,
which would be expressed in standard Spanish as El lo vió.
The use of the feminine third-person pronoun eia (ella
‘she’) instead of él ‘he’ probably
arises from the combination of rule-generalization and the indirect
interference of the Rapa Nui pronoun system, in which gender distinction
is not made (e.g., 3 sing. ia). The substitutions of
in eia ‘she’ and [r] for [l] in
ro ‘him’ result most likely from phonological
interference from Rapa Nui, which does not have lateral approximant
phonemes
.
The subject of this sentence, a eia, shows another instance of
interference. It includes a, which is most likely the Rapa Nui
personal particle a which precedes pronouns and names of persons
and places.
14 From the context of the
narrative, the alternative interpretation, to take a to be a
hesitation marker or the Spanish complement preposition in the noun phrase
fronted for the purpose of topicalization, is less likely.
In the verbal inflections of R1S2 Rapa Nui Spanish we can observe
abundant simplification at work, possibly also resulting from indirect
interference. Unlike in Spanish, in Rapa Nui tense is not an overt
grammatical category and person is not grammaticalized in the form of
verbal inflections. In R1S2 Rapa Nui Spanish, present indicative verbal
forms are commonly used in lieu of other tenses, aspects, and moods (e.g.,
preterit, imperfect, progressive, future, conditional and subjunctive). In
addition to the preference for present tense and indicative mood, R1S2
Rapa Nui Spanish speakers also show preference for third-person singular
forms regardless of contextual person and number. For example, the 3rd
sing. indicative present verb form is used instead of the 1st sing.
indicative present (see ex. 2), the 2nd sing. imperative (3), the 1st
plural subjunctive (4), or the 1st sing. preterit (5). In (6), the verb is
conjugated in the past tense but the 3rd sing. form is used instead of the
1st plural form. The preference for 3rd sing. forms is motivated by their
higher frequency of occurrence in standard Spanish varieties, in which the
3rd sing. forms coincide with the forms required with the formal second
person pronoun usted (as opposed to the informal
tú).15
The third person
singular (rather than the infinitive) form is also the form that Spanish
verbs take when transferred into otherwise Rapa Nui utterance, and this
may also reinforce the preferred status given to this form within Rapa Nui
Spanish. Spanish verbs, predominantly in their 3rd sing. forms, are also
sometimes used as nouns in the Spanish environment or are transferred into
Rapa Nui as nouns, which seems to reflect the fluid distinction between
noun and verb in Rapa Nui and other Polynesian languages (Biggs 1971, Broschart 1997,
Tchekoff 1984). See Makihara
2001 for a discussion of the mechanisms of adaptation of Spanish
elements in Rapa Nui.
Mixed use of verbal conjugations is also
not uncommon; for example, speakers may mix verbal forms conjugated for
usted and
tú while speaking to the same
addressee, as if the two pronouns (and associated verbal forms) were
allomorphs, and in a manner that seems to stem from incomplete acquisition
of verbal morphology. Simplification and absence of linguistic concordance
is often observed not only in number and person but also in gender, as in
(7) and (8). Conditional, subjunctive, and the compound forms involving an
auxiliary verb (present perfect, pluperfect, preterit perfect, future
perfect) are less frequently used in Rapa Nui Spanish, and when used they
tend to index the formal variety of Chilean Spanish (see Text 1). Similar
processes of simplification have been also reported to occur in other
contact Spanish varieties, such as Peruvian Spanish in contact with
Quechua (
Escobar 2000).
The simplification of the linguistic system is common in change
resulting from language contact and is often accelerated by contact in
both the spreading and the receding language in situations of language
shift.16
Contact-induced change, however,
does not necessarily involve simplification. Irvine
& Gal 2000, for example, analyze the social and ideological
contexts of acquisition by Nguni speakers of clicks borrowed from
neighboring Khoi languages.
For example,
Silva-Corvalán 1994 shows how Spanish speech
among Spanish-English bilingual speakers in Los Angeles – in this
case, a receding language – is characterized by processes of
simplification. Silva-Corvalán proposes that the simplification
results from bilinguals' or language learners' lessening the
cognitive load that had been increased by the addition of a second
language system. Such an interpretation allows us to explain the
similarity in the simplification processes in second language acquisition
and shift-induced language attrition. Resulting simplified linguistic
forms may, however, become linguistic resources for creating social
meaning, as this discussion of the maintenance of R1S2 Rapa Nui Spanish
will suggest.
Language contact situations often accelerate changes that are latent
in the receding or spreading languages.17
For discussions of internally motivated and contact-induced
changes involving simplification in other languages in a language shift
situation, see Dressler 1981 and Maandi 1989.
For example, R1S2 Rapa Nui Spanish is
characterized by an almost exclusive preference for the periphrastic
future form, consisting of a conjugated form of
ir ‘to
go’, the preposition
a, and the infinitive form of the verb
(e.g., ex. 9), over the morphological form, which in Standard Spanish
requires conjugating each verb according to person and number. The
preference for analytic, periphrastic constructions (the process called
“analysis”) as opposed to morphological (inflectionally
marked) ones leads to simplification of syntactic as well as
morphophonological variation, as is commonly observed in the context of
language contact – that is, second language acquisition and
shift-induced language attrition. In fact, the morphological future form
is rare in Spanish speech among the Rapa Nui. This parallels a more
general tendency in the development of Chilean and other varieties of
Spanish that seems to be involved in increasing usage of periphrasis to
indicate future time in Spanish (
Gutierrez 1995,
Rabanales 1992,
Silva-Corvalán & Terrell 1989).
R1S2 Rapa Nui Spanish intersects with Rapa Nui through combinations of
forms of bilingual simultaneity: codeswitching (e.g., ex.10) and
convergence (11) in combination with interference. In (10), the speaker
employs the Rapa Nui ergative construction by using the agent marker
e followed by the definite article te. Equivalents in
standard Chilean Spanish can take either a passive or an active
construction. The passive construction would have required the use of a
past participle, whose subject, if a pronoun instead of a noun, must be
marked for gender and number (e.g., estos/estas tiene/tienen
que ser estudiado/a por la comisión de desarrollo). The
active construction would have required making the agent (la
Comisión de Desarrollo) into a grammatical subject to be
placed in front of the auxiliary verb tiene, and using the direct
object clitic, which must be marked for gender and number
(lo/la/los/las). Rather than explaining the resulting
utterance as resulting from extensive simplification in combination with
elements of Rapa Nui interference with e te replacing the Spanish
elements por el, it makes better sense to view this as
codeswitching after the topicalized prepositional phrase to syncretic Rapa
Nui, in which Rapa Nui provides the morphosyntactic frame. The notion of
the matrix language (Myers-Scotton 2002) –
the language that provides the morphosyntactic frame of bilingual
utterances – is useful. The switch may have been triggered by the
use of the Spanish modal tiene que, which is commonly used in
Rapa Nui speech to express obligation or necessity and is beginning to
replace the Rapa Nui construction with the prepositional imperfective
aspect particle e.18
See Makihara 2001 for a discussion of the introduction of
tiene que and its syntactic adaptation in modern Rapa Nui
speech.
Ex. (11) illustrates a case in which both Spanish and Rapa Nui
influence the morphosyntactic frame where one can speak of convergence.
Convergence is defined as the process by which certain aspects of the
grammatical systems of languages under contact become similar to one
another, which may be directly caused by interference or by internally
motivated changes accelerated by contact (Silva-Corvalán 1994). In this utterance, a
codeswitch to Chilean Spanish introduces the quoted speech. As for the
rest, although most of the morphemes come from Spanish, the utterance is
syntactically congruent in both Rapa Nui (VS basic order; subject
complement may be fronted) and Spanish (SV basic order; predicate may be
fronted), creating a “composite matrix language” (Myers-Scotton 2002). The Rapa Nui possessive
preposition ’a19
Similarly to
other Polynesian languages, but unlike Spanish, Rapa Nui has two classes
of possessives: O and A categories, whose choice is generally determined
by the given relationship that the possessor has with the possessed.
A-possession is the marked form, which indicates the active or dominant
possessor. While possessive class choice in Rapa Nui is relatively
predictable and predetermined given possession relationships (for example,
A-class for one's child), the speaker's choice of class can
alter the meaning of the nature of the possession relationship (see Makihara 2001 for examples). Here the use of the
A-class possessive possibly adds emphasis to the control and
responsibility that the possessor should have toward the possessed –
that is, the president of Chile toward his promise.
is used
(instead of Spanish
de) and the definite article (Sp.
el) and the copula (
es ‘is' or
fue
‘was') are absent. The contribution of the Rapa Nui language in
framing the morphosyntactic structure is reflected in the forms of
interference (the absence of copula, which Rapa Nui does not have, and the
use of the Rapa Nui possessive preposition). The absence of the definite
article may result from simplification in which the Spanish article was
deleted, also a characteristic of Rapa Nui Spanish. This would explain the
absence of the Rapa Nui definite article
te (modifying
compromise), a peculiar omission if we were to view the utterance
as framed solely by Rapa Nui morphosyntax. The convergence of two
languages’ morphosyntactic frames may have been triggered by the use
of the Rapa Nui possessive preposition (codeswitch or interference) which
exerts a morphosyntactic organizational force and leads to additional
structural interference – the deletion of the copula.
Chilean Spanish
There are at least two subvarieties of Chilean Spanish used by the
Rapa Nui. Formal Chilean Spanish tends to be used in interethnic
communication in state-sponsored institutional settings in written and
spoken modes, and its choice is characterized by diglossic situational
codeswitching. Informal Chilean Spanish is used in informal settings and
both among the Rapa Nui and communication with the Continentals. Its
spread was accelerated with increasing intermarriage with Continentals and
the influx of Continental residents that followed the opening of the air
route from Santiago and the arrival of television transmissions in the
late 1960s and the 1970s. Among the Rapa Nui, teenagers and young adults
tend to use informal Chilean Spanish more frequently, and it is often
embedded in syncretic interactions that involve Rapa Nui speakers. With
the arrival and spread of computer-mediated writing and communication,
young Rapa Nui have begun to write in informal Chilean Spanish more
frequently as well.
The following transcript, Text 1, illustrates the situationally
motivated choice of formal Chilean Spanish in a community meeting to
discuss the newly enacted Indigenous Law in 1994. The 55-year-old
bilingual Rapa Nui man, who runs a tourism business and is active in local
politics, is having an exchange with a Continental resident lawyer working
for the local municipality. The excerpts show a number of complex verbal
conjugational forms and syntactic constructions such as present and
imperfect subjunctive moods, pluperfect tense, and passive voice, and of
pragmatic features such as clitic-doubling for emphasis, the use of
titles, por favor ‘please,’ and requests using
conditional and subordinate clauses in imperfect subjunctive for
politeness.
Features of informal Chilean Spanish include extensive lexical items
and phrases such as pololo/polola
‘boy-/girlfriend,’ fome ‘boring’,
al tiro ‘right away,’ de acuerdo
‘OK’. At the morphological level, it includes the use of
diminutive and appreciative -it- (e.g., chiquito and
chiquitito ‘small’) and “mixed verbal
voseo” (Rona 1967, Torrejón 1991) – the use of the pronoun
tú with the verbal paradigm associated with the pronoun
vos in other varieties of Spanish, for example,
¿Cachai? ‘Follow me/Did you understand?’
from English catch, or ¿Cómo estai?
‘How are you?’. In (12a) a mother addresses her 13-year-old
niece, using andai (vos form of the verb andar
‘to walk’) instead of (tú) andas
∼ (usted) anda (see also 12b and 12c). The pronoun
vos is not used in Rapa Nui Spanish (see also Text 2).
Maintenance of R1S2 Rapa Nui Spanish and development of
syncretic Rapa Nui
Many Rapa Nui speakers who have by now acquired Chilean Spanish
continue to use Rapa Nui Spanish both in interactions with non-Rapa Nui
and among themselves. Rapa Nui Spanish is often embedded within syncretic
Rapa Nui speech styles. Imperfect Spanish acquisition (illustrated by
older speakers in exx. 1–8) is no longer the primary factor in the
continued use of Rapa Nui Spanish. Although there is a proficiency
continuum between R1S2 Rapa Nui Spanish and Chilean Spanish which broadly
corresponds to speakers' age, features such as phonological
interference and simplified verbal morphology continue to be used by
younger adult Rapa Nui speakers, suggesting maintenance of features that
originally involved “involuntary” (Thomason
2001:141) second language acquisition strategies. Simplified usage
of Indonesian pronouns among Javanese Indonesians, as another example, can
hardly be explained by a second language acquisition strategy or cognitive
load lessening. As Errington 1998 argues, such
linguistic changes need to be examined carefully for the ways in which
speakers create new social meanings using multiple speech styles, and for
how these choices relate to the larger context of the political economy
and ideology of language. With rising Spanish competence, the degree of
simplification and interference, along with variability in resulting
forms, may have been reduced, but such forms continue to be maintained
through speakers' preference for Rapa Nui Spanish, and they are
becoming what Labov 1972 calls
“markers,” which show not only ethnic but also stylistic
stratification.
For example, in a public meeting conducted entirely in Spanish between
some 200 Rapa Nui participants and eight visiting Chilean government
officials to debate the then recently proposed Indigenous Law of 1994, a
young Rapa Nui male political activist in his early thirties rose to argue
against the law. Text 2 is a brief extract from his long exposition in
Rapa Nui Spanish.
Although the speaker speaks Spanish often and I have heard him speak
with considerably fewer R1S2 Rapa Nui Spanish features, his speech on this
occasion was replete with Rapa Nui Spanish features (e.g., phonology, and
gender and number agreement). His linguistic choices served better to
establish Rapa Nui distinctiveness and underline Rapa Nui claims to
self-determination in front of Chilean government officials at a critical
political juncture. The speaker, in fact, stands out from others in his
age cohort who speak Chilean Spanish more frequently. He seems to be
actively resisting assimilating his speech toward Chilean Spanish. His
choice of the 2 pl. pronoun vosotros (line 3) is also interesting
in this regard, as the form is used almost exclusively in northern and
central Spain and contrasts with the standard (informal and formal)
Chilean Spanish form ustedes, which the speaker uses in other
parts of his speech (e.g., line 5).20
I have
observed another, female Rapa Nui political activist also employing
vosotros in a similar situation in 2003, embedding the term
within otherwise Chilean Spanish speech. She later explained to me that
she had heard this pronoun used by delegates at a UN function she had
participated in abroad. In characterizing Chilean Spanish, Rabanales
(1992:578) notes that vosotros (with
the corresponding verbal forms) is used rarely and only in rhetorical
style in the “formal educated” variety. I have not heard the
Rapa Nui use vos, the informal second person singular pronoun,
which is used along with tú in Chilean and other varieties
of New World Spanish. See Torrejón 1991
for a description of the use of pronominal voseo (vos)
and verbal voseo (e.g., tú llegái
‘you arrive’) in continental Chile.
Continued R1S2
Rapa Nui Spanish use with outsiders and among themselves – which can
highlight ethnic differences and underline ethnic solidarity, respectively
– contributes to the persistence of this local Spanish variety.
In addition to such situationally motivated choices, Rapa Nui-Spanish
bilingual speakers have come to use their bilingual semiotic resources
(languages, speech styles, and forms of bilingual simultaneity) within the
same speech situations. Based on linguistic analysis, one can establish
the “matrix” and “embedded” languages of given
bilingual utterances, the degrees and direction of linguistic integration,
diffusion, cognitive membership of items in the two lexicons, and the
levels of linguistic organization involved, in order to interpret
particular choices of linguistic elements as borrowing vs. interference
vs. codeswitching.21
The degree of conscious
and strategic awareness on the part of the speaker and the audience are,
however, difficult to be certain about, and one should use caution in
ascribing intention and meaning in individual codeswitches or assuming
salience of the distinction between the “languages” or
“codes” between which switching occurs. In discussing
“contextualization cues,” Gumperz (1982:131) notes that “[f]or the most
part [they] are habitually used and perceived but rarely
consciously noted and almost never talked about directly.” The
taken-for-granted nature of such linguistic elements is especially
pervasive for prosodic, phonological, and grammatical variants, which are
relatively nonreferential (Silverstein
1981).
Multiple prosodic, phonological, lexical,
morphological, and syntactic variants exist as potential linguistic
resources that can be mobilized to bear indexical and interactional
meanings, and they are part of speakers' tacit, practical knowledge,
or communicative competence. In some particular usages, choices among
variants can clearly be interpreted to have a greater indexical power. In
other cases they do not. Rather than assigning each variant to a separate
language variety or style, thus cataloguing all variation either as
codeswitching or style-shifting, one can think of Rapa Nui-Spanish
bilingual usage as being characterized by various forms of bilingual
simultaneity, clusters of which tend to “co-occur” (
Ervin-Tripp 1972), but the same variant may belong to
multiple styles. In syncretic Rapa Nui usage, for example, although Rapa
Nui-Spanish bilingual language alteration has been normalized, there is a
continuum of discourse strategic, code- or style-contrasting uses of
bilingual resources. Similarly, within the Spanish speech, the extent to
which speech is Chilean or Rapa Nui can be indexed by the use of features
at various linguistic levels.
Codeswitching and other forms of bilingual simultaneity in syncretic
speech style may serve a range of discourse and indexical functions as
contextualization cues. They help to signal contextual presuppositions, or
linguistically to mark changes in “footing,” or the alignment
between speaker and audience, and the “participation frame” of
a speech event (Goffman 1981, Gumperz 1982) (see Text 5 for use of codeswitching in
quoting). Text 3 below illustrates the use of codeswitching to index
reported speech, though this case is likely a non-homologous
representation of code choice (or an invented speech event), in which the
narrator strategically modifies the “original” speech act
through manipulation of language choice within the narrative reporting of
the speech event. The text is taken from a casual joking conversation
among five Rapa Nui men ranging in age from early thirties to early
forties. Manu Iri claimed that he was of English descent, implicitly
suggesting that he was a descendant of the British-Rapa Nui Edmunds
family.22
As one of the Rapa Nui kin groups,
the Edmunds family owes its name to Percy Henry Edmunds, a Scottish
administrator of the Easter Island Exploitation Company, who was on the
island between 1905 and 1929 and left eight children.
Hearing
this, another teased him by exclaiming
Manu Iri Elvis Presley!,
citing the name of a famous American singer. To this and without skipping
a beat, Manu Iri responds by reporting an exchange – which may or
may not have taken place – between his grandfather (who had a
Scottish father) and himself.
23 Paratoa is a
borrowing from French paletot ‘overcoat.’ What the
speaker meant by “the time of paratoa” was the old
time when such foreign items and words were introduced, alluding also to
his grandfather's father and other non-Chilean foreigners'
presence.
Manu Iri initiates the report in Rapa Nui: ‘Listen, my
grandfather Urupano [Rapa Nui Spanish for ‘Urbano’]
said that, he said to me’, rephrasing the Rapa Nui indirect
quotation introducer pe nei e
‘like this’ to the direct quotation structure followed by the
vocative phrase ‘Listen son’. Then he switches to Spanish to
report his grandfather's speech. The repeated term
íngris ‘English’ is a rendition of the English
word rather than of Spanish inglés. The speaker's
choice of Spanish for the quoted speeches in constructing the exchange
with his grandfather is contrasted with his use of Rapa Nui he
kı mai ‘(he) says/said to
me’ and he kı o'oku
‘I say/said’ in introducing the quoted speech. The choice
of Spanish likely is owed to the limitation of the speaker's
linguistic repertoire, which does not include English, whereas the
foreignness of Spanish is exploited. Thus the choice of Spanish in the
reported speech, as opposed to Rapa Nui – which more likely was used
in the original speech if it did occur – renders the Englishness or
foreignness of his grandfather more authentic. At the same time, his use
of Rapa Nui kin terms ata ‘eldest son’ (shortened
form of atariki) and makupuna ‘grandchild’
in the quoted speech validates his Rapa Nui ancestry. His use of Rapa Nui
Spanish and informal Chilean Spanish features – the Spanish kin term
abuero ‘grandfather’ (Sp. abuelo) and an
informal Chilean Spanish adverb po24
Po derives from the standard Spanish adverb
pues ‘then, well, well then’, and is used frequently
in informal Chilean Spanish in clause-final position, signifying something
like ‘certainly’ to underscore the point. Though semantically
related, the syntactic position of po diverges from
pues: Sí po (Chilean Spanish) vs. Pues
sí (standard Spanish), both of which mean ‘Yes,
certainly’.
– in his own speech to his grandfather
underscores his close relationship with his grandfather and brings out the
immediate presence of its consequence, his proclaimed English ancestry.
This example illustrates how speakers create additional symbolic meanings
out of the juxtaposition of available and commonly held linguistic
resources, both Spanish and Rapa Nui.
As another example of the discourse function of codeswitching, I have
elsewhere discussed an example of participant-turn-related codeswitches in
which speakers seem effectively to exploit the differences between the
Spanish and Rapa Nui grammatical systems (in that case, overt vs. covert
grammatical gender marking) in unreciprocated code choice across speakers
(Makihara 2004, Table 2). An example of less
code-contrasting but still structurally sophisticated use of interference
can be seen in the following Rapa Nui Spanish utterance, in which a Rapa
Nui grammatical morpheme – the postverbal progressive aspect marker
'a – is added at the end of an otherwise
Spanish sentence.
The particle is normally used within the Rapa Nui verbal frame, with
preverbal e for an imperfective aspect, or with preverbal
ko for a perfect aspect (e.g., Text 5, line 1), and here it
serves to emphasize the enduring visible and known quality of the
expressed state, in this case that the speaker is still young. This
element can be interpreted to have a certain “bivalent”
quality – another type of bilingual simultaneity (Woolard 1998) – because it is phonologically
similar to and syntactically congruent with the Chilean Spanish
clause-final discourse marker ah to indicate emphasis and
reiteration (Makihara, 2004, Table 1).
The above descriptions illustrate the level of linguistic
heterogeneity in adults' speech style repertoire. In the next
section, I turn the focus to contexts of family language socialization and
the characteristics of emerging subvarieties of Rapa Nui Spanish speech
styles.
CHILDREN'S RAPA NUI SPANISH, BILINGUAL
LANGUAGE SOCIALIZATION, AND INTERACTIONAL CONTEXTS
Spanish dominance and preference and Rapa Nui passive
knowledge among Rapa Nui children
Rapa Nui language socialization practices changed markedly after the
mid-1960s, when the small island community found itself at the beginning
of a period of accelerated social transition. Spanish quickly entered into
family domains, especially via increasing intermarriage with Continentals.
An intergenerational gap in bilingual competence soon developed as the
proportion of “semi-speakers” (Dorian
1981) of Rapa Nui increased in the population younger than thirty.
Today, most Rapa Nui children receive relatively greater exposure to
Spanish than to Rapa Nui in their daily life, especially through school
and TV and radio programs, as well as from their peers and siblings, with
whom they interact predominantly in Spanish. Since the mid-1970s, the
influence of Chilean television programs and videos has been intense; many
Rapa Nui residents spend several hours a day in front of the television
set. Broadcasts were predominantly in Spanish until 1999, when a local
municipal television station started also to broadcast some bilingual and
Rapa Nui programs. In all but a few Rapa Nui households, children are now
growing up with Spanish dominance, and the few Rapa Nui children who enter
preschools with Rapa Nui dominance make the shift to Spanish dominance,
often in a matter of weeks. This is partly because of preference shift
after increased exposure to Spanish and because they are teased by other
children for speaking Rapa Nui.
Local school instruction in Spanish began in 1934. The teaching of
Rapa Nui as a subject was officially incorporated into the curriculum in
1976, although the Rapa Nui have participated as teachers and directors of
the school since mid-1960s and had helped Rapa Nui students learn all
subjects using that language.25
For decades
classes were conducted mainly by Continental Chilean Roman Catholic
catechists until 1971, when the Chilean Ministry of Education began to
send teachers. The school has gradually expanded its levels, up to sixth
grade in 1953, and twelfth by 1989. Today the municipal school has about
1000 students, although many students enroll in high schools on the
mainland, aided either by governmental scholarship programs or funded by
relatives. Literacy is still associated predominantly with Spanish. While
Rapa Nui literacy practices have been on the rise in the last two decades
(e.g., Rapa Nui classes at the local school, published and unpublished
stories, poems, and songs), its orthography is still being standardized
and there are variations in orthographic systems in use.
The
enrollment of non-Rapa Nui students began in the mid-1940s and had
increased to the present-day ratio of about one quarter by the late 1960s,
reflecting the increased Continental presence.
Spanish also plays an important part in Rapa Nui family life. Young
siblings interact mostly in Spanish. I have observed some Rapa Nui parents
talking to their preverbal young children using a Spanish baby talk
register modeled after the Chilean style – simple phrases with
repetitions, in a high-pitched voice with puckered lips, expressing affect
and asking and answering questions on behalf of the babies. In one-on-one
interactions, many Rapa Nui parents often address their children in
Spanish rather than Rapa Nui. When addressed in Rapa Nui by an adult,
children sometimes remain silent, or simply respond with Spanish
¿qué? ‘what?’, perhaps not having
understood what was said or wishing to confirm what they understood by
hearing it again in Spanish. Adults tend not to repeat their exact Rapa
Nui utterances to a child, but they may accommodate and switch to Spanish.
Alternatively, they may continue in syncretic Rapa Nui. As discussed
below, such code choice is common in multiparty interactions involving
more than one bilingual adult (e.g., Text 5, lines 12, 17–18; Text
6, lines 2 and 9). The children may maintain the conversation by
responding in Spanish to adults who continue in syncretic Rapa Nui,
constructing interactions characterized by what Gal
1979 calls “unreciprocal” code choice.
Text 4 below is an example of unreciprocated code choice in a dyadic
interaction between a five-year-old child and her father, recorded in my
absence, in which the child clearly understands what is said in Rapa Nui
while insisting on her Spanish code choice.
Until three decades ago, Rapa Nui identity was associated with a
naturally expected productive knowledge and performance of the Rapa Nui
language, but it has since been reformulated to accommodate individuals
with varying bilingual competences, preferences, and actual uses of the
Rapa Nui and Spanish languages. Thus, unreciprocated language choice and
codeswitching can be viewed as a manifestation of shifting Rapa Nui
ethnolinguistic identity. Although intergenerational unreciprocated
language choice reflects changing language acquisition patterns and
language loyalties and the community-wide language shift, children
participate actively in syncretic Rapa Nui interactions through which they
develop and maintain at least passive communicative knowledge of Rapa
Nui.
There is no denying that Spanish occupies a dominant place in the
language socialization of Rapa Nui children, almost all of whom have
higher proficiency in Spanish than in Rapa Nui, but they do receive quite
rich exposure to Rapa Nui in their extended family environments.
Especially when Rapa Nui adults are already engaged in conversation in
syncretic Rapa Nui speech styles, they are likely to continue to speak
among themselves and to address children in Rapa Nui. Such multiparty
conversations are very common in Rapa Nui's extended family
environment. Text 5 below illustrates such a context (see also Text 6). It
is taken from an interaction recorded in my absence and involves a
four-year-old child, Rosa, who has been described as always dominant in
Spanish, although she receives relatively rich Rapa Nui input from her
extended family members. Grandmother Lucia sits down next to Rosa, while
continuing to talk in Rapa Nui with her co-mother26
Following a Hispanic Catholic custom, comadre or RN
komaere ‘co-mother’ refers to the relationship
between a mother and the godmother of her child.
and neighbor
Isa, Rosa's mother Florencia, and aunt Ema. Lucia and Isa are about
50 years old, and Florencia and Ema in their early thirties.
Isa tells Lucia about how she had earlier chased away Rosa, who had
been pestering her, by mockingly telling a dog to bite at her. Lucia, to
whom Rosa had run, then quotes Rosa's words in Spanish, ‘The
nua over there told the dog to eat me up!’ (line 4). The
grandmother also reports on how her adult son, Kai, had laughed out loud
upon hearing Rosa's accusation. Lucia continues to report that when
Rosa was asked ‘What happened?’ in Spanish, she answered,
‘The nua made me eat with the dog’ (line 9). The
reformulation of Rosa's report in terms of who was doing the eating,
which is possibly due to Rosa's weak comprehension in Rapa Nui,
causes further amusement among the adults. The teasing and laughter goes
on in front of this child. Most of it is in Rapa Nui except for quoted
speech in Spanish, which most likely helps draw Rosa's attention to
the fact that they are talking about her. When Rosa approaches a tape
recorder to touch it, her mother, Florencia, tries to stop her and tells
Rosa in Rapa Nui to let go of it. Rosa defends herself in Spanish
(unreciprocal language choice) by exclaiming Deja escuchar
‘Let listen’ (line 11, a nonstandard form of Déjame
escuchar). When Rosa again approaches the player, Lucia draws other
adults' attention in Rapa Nui, to which Rosa responds by saying again
‘Let listen’ in Spanish (lines 13–14). Ema proposes in
Rapa Nui to take away the recorder, to which Isa agrees, and then both
Lucia and Isa explain to Rosa in Rapa Nui that the recorder is her
mother's and she is taking it to her house (lines 15–18). The
latter part of the interaction (lines 11–18) involves the direct use
of Rapa Nui by the adults toward the child, who protests in Spanish,
constituting unreciprocated code insistence (see also Text 4).27
This contrasts with other communities, such as
Catalans, Dyirbals, or Hungarians in Austria, where code choice is
primarily interlocutor-based (Gal 1987, Schmidt 1985, Woolard
1989).
Schmidt 1985 observed among Dyirbal speakers
in the Jambun Aboriginal community of northeastern Australia that elderly,
fluent Dyirbal speakers constantly corrected younger people's Dyirbal
speech. Schmidt argued that this was a significant factor in the declining
use and ultimate obsolescence of the Dyirbal language.28
In Gapun, Papua New Guinea, Kulick (1992:220) observed that adults do not correct errors
in Tok Pisin but do correct Taiap speech by children, who conversely mock
parents' errors in Tok Pisin. For Mexicano-speaking communities of
central Mexico, Hill & Hill 1986 discuss how
the practice of purist quizzing and correctional acts by middle-aged men,
which lead speakers to question “the moral and aesthetic value of
Mexicano,” may work against the survival of the language (1986:140–41). Literature on Mexican-U.S.
borderland identity points to the role of similar kind of
“linguistic terrorism” (Anzaldúa
1987) in creating intraethnic group divisions, ethnolinguistic
identity insecurity, and accelerating language shift to English in
Hispanic communities in the United States.
Rapa Nui adults do not
usually correct word or code choices or mistakes that children make in
using Rapa Nui or Spanish, though they often show amusement and tease them
about their speech acts. Even in the relative absence of correction,
however, teasing may have an inhibiting effect on children and other
nonfluent Rapa Nui speakers, who may develop linguistic insecurity in ways
that negatively influence their acquisition and development of productive
competence in Rapa Nui. Many children then prefer to speak in Spanish to
their parents and siblings while maintaining some Rapa Nui-speaking
relations with other adult relatives, especially their grandparents.
The extended family is an important environment for language
socialization in Rapa Nui for children, especially those who have a
Continental parent or dominantly Spanish-speaking Rapa Nui (often young)
parents. Many young adults and their children live within the same
compound or neighborhood as the adults' Rapa Nui parent(s) and
frequently spend time with their extended family, especially the
children's grandparents and aunts (see Text 4). In the warmer
seasons, and particularly during the school summer vacation between
December and March, extended families and friends take their children to
spend time away from the village by the coast, fishing, cooking,
re-creating, and camping.
Development of R2S1 Rapa Nui Spanish in syncretic
interaction
Rapa Nui children's preference for Spanish is not categorical:
They prefer to use their dominant language, Spanish, in a way that marks
it as Rapa Nui Spanish. The way in which these predominantly
Spanish-speaking Rapa Nui children incorporate features of Rapa Nui into
R2S1 Rapa Nui Spanish differs fundamentally from how Rapa Nui features are
incorporated into the R1S2 spoken primarily by fluent Rapa Nui speakers.
As discussed above, R1S2 Rapa Nui Spanish is characterized by grammatical
features (e.g., phonological and morphosyntactic interference and
simplification) and conversational codeswitching. R2S1 Rapa Nui Spanish,
in contrast, is characterized predominantly by lexical interference or
borrowing from Rapa Nui.
Text 6 illustrates the syncretic interactional context in the extended
family, out of which new R2S1 Rapa Nui Spanish has developed. The
transcript is taken from a conversation among members of a large extended
family gathered in preparation for the annual Tapati Rapa Nui cultural
festival (Makihara 2005). Children helped as
adults prepared the bark of a type of banana tree called maika
ri'o to make cloth (kahu) for the festival costumes.
Just prior to the transcribed segment, Elena, her cousin Laura, and I had
been talking in Rapa Nui about the breakdown of the truck that had
transported the bark. The transcript begins as six-year-old Felipe, who
had just overheard our conversation, asks his aunt Laura in Chilean
Spanish to explain what has happened. The middle column identifies the
speech styles used in each speech turn or segment.
The text illustrates the stylistic multiplicity of syncretic
interaction in which the new R2S1 Rapa Nui Spanish is embedded. Laura
explains to her nephew in Rapa Nui that the truck's
‘neck’
or motor hose was “ripped apart” (more) (line 2).
Mariana, a six-year-old niece who understands more Rapa Nui than Felipe,
adds in Chilean Spanish ‘Yeah, your car is broken’, and
switches to R2S1 Rapa Nui Spanish for ‘The neck got cut’,
using the Rapa Nui terms for ‘neck’ and ‘to cut’
(hore):
This utterance rephrases Laura's earlier Rapa Nui utterance
([15]):
It is also equivalent to the following Spanish sentence, which would
involve the use of the reflexive verb cortarse ‘to
cut’. This may explain Mariana's choice of the Rapa Nui word
hore ‘to cut’, or its relatively earlier acquisition
in comparison to more ‘to rip apart’.
The nonstandard use or, more frequently, the deletion of the reflexive
pronoun is also observed in adults' Rapa Nui Spanish (e.g., exx. 4,
19) and in children's Spanish (e.g., Text 5, lines 11 and 14). Amused
by Mariana's use of the term hore ‘to cut’ (14),
her other aunt, Elena, didactically rephrases ‘the neck was
ripped’ in R2S1 Rapa Nui Spanish, correcting only the choice of verb
while following the R2S1 Rapa Nui Spanish construction as formulated by
Mariana:
Here, in order to rephrase the perfective aspect of Laura's
utterance (expressed in Rapa Nui with ko + verb +
'a construction), Mariana uses the Spanish verb
hacer ‘to do/to make’, conjugating it for past
tense and thus using it as a carrier of tense+aspect in an auxiliary
construction. In fact, such a ‘do’ construction is a common
way to translate Rapa Nui verbal frames that involve pre- and post-verbal
morphology into R1S2 Rapa Nui Spanish.29
Although Spanish is the receding language among
English-Spanish bilinguals in Los Angeles, Silva-Corvalán 1994 observes that the similar
construction with hacer in which hacer serves as a
carrier of tense-mood-aspect occurs in their Spanish speech. Myers-Scotton
(2002:134ff.) discusses how the ‘do’
verb construction which carries inflection (as required by the matrix
language frame) is a common means for introducing a verb from another
language (the embedded language) in codeswitching, attested in
typologically diverse languages.
Toward the end of the transcript, Mario, also six years old, yells out
to his grandfather sitting on the bench several meters away in R2S1 Rapa
Nui Spanish, using Rapa Nui terms for ‘grandfather’ and
‘inland’:
30 Koro and nua
are Rapa Nui terms for respected man and woman respectively. Although
newer kin terms which derive from Spanish are often used to designate
one's parents generation in Rapa Nui speech –
‘father’, mama
‘mother’,
mama-tia
‘aunt’, and
papa-tio
‘uncle’ (from Spanish papá
‘father’, mamá ‘mother’,
tio ‘uncle’, and tia ‘aunt’),
the Rapa Nui terms koro and nua are retained and often
used to refer to grandfather, grandmother, and other older Rapa Nui
persons in Rapa Nui as well as Rapa Nui Spanish speech. See Texts 5 and 6
for uses of mama, nua,
koro, and komaere ‘co-mother’.
Mario's use of uta ‘inland’ with the
word-initial glottal stop (a phoneme in Rapa Nui but not in Spanish) is
deleted points to Spanish interference, similarly to the case of
Mariana's word choice of hore, possibly influenced by her
knowledge of Spanish. The word-initial glottal stop is undergoing a
process of allophonization and is often dropped by those speaking Rapa Nui
as a second language, particularly those with lower productive competence.
Similar influence from Spanish phonology occurs in the realization of the
velar nasal
as a combination of alveolar nasal and velar stop, [ng], for
example in the main village's name, usually written Hanga Roa.
Similarly, but to a lesser extent, the Rapa Nui phonemic distinction
between short and long vowels is allophonized. These changes are made more
frequently by monolingual Spanish speakers or semi-speakers in Rapa Nui,
but I have also observed them among bilingual Rapa Nui, especially when
the Rapa Nui terms are embedded within otherwise Spanish discourse. These
linguistic changes are thus apparent in synchronically observable
variations.
Knowing that the truck was broken, Mariana quips in Chilean Spanish
that going to inland will have to be ‘by foot!’, causing a
round of laughter. Mariana's speech acts in this short excerpt
reflect her highly developed passive knowledge of Rapa Nui. Furthermore,
she is able to use Rapa Nui words to create Rapa Nui Spanish utterances
and to use style-shifting much in the same way that adults codeswitch
between Rapa Nui and Rapa Nui Spanish.
Bilingual competence, speech styles, and linguistic
change
The asymmetry in bilingual acquisition patterns and competences that
exists between R1S2 and R2S1 learners provides an obvious starting point
for explaining the differences between R1S2 and R2S1 Rapa Nui Spanish.
Thomason & Kaufman (1988:14) argue that,
although “any linguistic feature can be transferred from any
language to any other language,” the characteristics of interference
(structural vs. lexical) between two languages in contact depend on
speakers' relative degrees of competence in the two languages. Just
as in first language acquisition, in second language acquisition lexicon
comes before grammatical structure, and thus structural (or grammatical)
interference – such as transfer of grammatical morphemes and word
order – requires greater knowledge of the language from which
features are transferred (the “donor” language). Two types of
relationship between the donor and the recipient languages can be
distinguished. First, in the transfer of features from the speakers'
dominant language (L1) to the second language under acquisition (L2),
structural transfer tends to precede lexical transfer. Second, in the
adaptation of L2 features into L1, lexical transfer precedes structural
transfer. Rapa Nui interference in R1S2 Rapa Nui Spanish exemplifies the
first type: Structural features of the speakers' L1 (Rapa Nui) are
transferred into their L2 (Spanish), originally owing to their imperfect
learning of L2 (e.g., phonological interference; see ex. 1). Rapa Nui
interference in R2S1 Rapa Nui Spanish exemplifies the second type, where
lexical but not structural features of the speakers' L2 (Rapa Nui)
are transferred into their L1 (Spanish). Spanish structural interference
(e.g., phonological) within the Rapa Nui lexical transfers in
children's R2S1 Rapa Nui Spanish illustrates the first type. The
kinds of interference in syncretic speech styles also exemplify the second
type, where lexical as well as structural features are involved,
reflecting the high level of competence in L2 held by the current native
Rapa Nui speakers, the R1S2 speakers (e.g., exx. 10, 11, and 13).
Research in sociolinguistics and language acquisition has highlighted
age and linguistic competence as factors in structural changes of a
language in a contact situation. In a range of processes of language
change, such as koineization (dialect leveling), second language
acquisition, and creole genesis, the researchers point to adults as more
likely to be “innovators” of new forms and children as
“restructurers” (Slobin 1977:205)
who tend to choose the less marked options available and thus regularize
innovations through “linguistic focusing” (Kerswill & Williams 2000) or homogenization.31
The ways in which R1S2
Rapa Nui Spanish is characterized by wider variability of forms of
bilingual simultaneity than is seen in R2S1 Rapa Nui Spanish resonates
with that claim. The persistence or maintenance of Rapa Nui Spanish in
this community can be interpreted to involve adult R1S2 Rapa Nui Spanish
speakers who continue to use its features as variables, resisting
homogenization or assimilation toward Chilean Spanish and maintaining R1S2
as an additional speech style. Predominantly Spanish-speaking children,
however, are adopting their version of Rapa Nui Spanish (R2S1)
characterized by lexical transfers, and only at best developing
comprehension proficiency in Rapa Nui.
The ways in which R1S2 Rapa Nui Spanish speakers often engage in
codeswitching behavior are characterized structurally by having Rapa Nui
commonly as the main matrix language.32
In
relatively fewer cases, a “composite matrix language” can be
observed, as illustrated in (10) and (11).
In contrast, most Rapa
Nui children are using Spanish as the matrix language. This reflects a
rather rapid “matrix language turnover” (
Myers-Scotton 1998) in the language shift process, in
which the declining language (Rapa Nui), which has until now served as the
matrix language in codeswitching speech, has been replaced by the
spreading language (Spanish), which used to serve primarily as the
embedded language. The turnover reflects rapid changes in the
sociolinguistic profile of the community, where there are very few people
who are in between R1S2 and R2S1 learners. There are very few who acquired
Rapa Nui and Spanish simultaneously and developed balanced competence in
both languages. While many R1S2 learners relatively quickly developed a
certain level of competence in Spanish, most R2S1 learners are developing
very little competence in Rapa Nui; that is, there are few competent
bilinguals or semi-speakers of Rapa Nui. Furthermore, there seems to be an
emerging style (or substyle) differentiation, reflected in choice or
shifting between R1S2 and R2S1 Rapa Nui Spanish speech styles among the
bilingual R1S2 speakers, where R2S1 is developing as a contrastable style.
I will return to this below.
Everyday performance of Rapa Nui identity
Children are encouraged to participate in Rapa Nui cultural and
community activities and do so actively. The number and the scale of
cultural activities has been increasing steadily in recent years in this
community where heritage tourism and indigenous movements are important.
The most important event for Rapa Nui cultural and linguistic maintenance
and innovation, and the major tourist event of the year, is Tapati Rapa
Nui (‘Rapa Nui Week’), celebrated annually since the late
1960s. Its success has led the event to become ever larger and more
complex, and it is now celebrated with over two weeks of nonstop
activities. Although originally modeled after a Chilean town festival,
Tapati has since become distinctively Rapa Nui in its character. It
involves hundreds of competitions in sports, music, and crafts such as
singing riu (‘song’), performing kaikai
(‘string figure poems'), weaving pe'ue
(‘totora mat’), exhibiting takona
(‘tattoo’), playing ’upa'upa
(‘accordion’) and dancing the Rapa Nui-style tango. All are
carried out to support and gather points for the two or three candidates
for Rapa Nui queen of the year. An important qualification of a queen
candidate is her Rapa Nui linguistic and cultural skills. Verbal arts in
Rapa Nui are included, and the event encourages young people to learn Rapa
Nui language and traditions. Planning and preparation take place months if
not a year ahead of time and require a great deal of human and material
resources which can be gathered only by mobilizing entire extended-family
networks. Kinship and family ties are renewed and obligations are
renegotiated among the participants, hundreds of whom must be recruited
for each candidate to prepare for, and participate in, the competitions
and presentations.
In addition, an increasing number of public events in the community
include presentations by local school students, such as the annual
national independence day parades, the local school's “day of
the Rapa Nui language,” and musical troops' performances for
tourists. Many of these presentations feature young children's
performances in dance, song, and other Rapa Nui cultural performances.
Even those performances that feature only adults are rehearsed in family
compounds, with children typically involved. Such events are also shown on
the local television station, along with images from other Polynesian
islands. Through such active environments of Rapa Nui cultural
construction, children directly and indirectly participate in the Rapa Nui
community. Yet although they are adept and eager dancers and even singers
in Rapa Nui performative arts, younger children tend to shy away from
speaking in Rapa Nui.
Social and pragmatic meaning of features of
children's R2S1 Rapa Nui Spanish speech style
Unequal linguistic competence in the two languages obviously
constrains the kinds of bilingual simultaneity used by individual speakers
and provides an explanation for the origin of the characteristics of
speech styles. Such cognitive constraints alone do not, however, fully
explain the actual use of bilingual simultaneities, since R1S2 features
have persisted and spread beyond the removal of these constraints.
Similarly, cognitive constraints do not explain children's choice of
R2S1 Rapa Nui Spanish over Chilean Spanish when speaking to other Rapa
Nui. Rather than debate whether the Rapa Nui elements in R2S1 Rapa Nui
Spanish are instances of codeswitches or borrowing,33
The distinction between borrowing and codeswitching in
characterizing singly occurring lexical elements in bilingual and
multilingual utterances has been a subject of extensive debate in the
linguistics literature, with the corollary evaluation of speakers'
levels of bilingual competence, activation processes, and the status of
the items within each language's lexicon (e.g., Myers-Scotton 2002; Poplack
1980). Codeswitching and borrowing form a diachronic continuum over
which a word is adopted initially by a bilingual speaker and, through
linguistic and social integration, becomes nativized to belong to the
lexicon of the recipient language and is used by monolingual speakers of
that language, while synchronic variation likely exists across instances
of usage in a community where bilingualism is developing or language shift
is occurring.
it makes better sense to see them as part of a new
communicative style (or substyle) characterized by a kind of bilingual
simultaneity – lexical syncretism – and then to ask how its
pragmatic and social meaning is constructed in interactional contexts.
The ways in which adult bilingual speakers mix R1S2 Rapa Nui Spanish,
Chilean Spanish, and Rapa Nui in conversations involve various forms of
bilingual simultaneity: grammatical interference, and what Muysken 2000 calls “alternation” as well
as “insertion” types of codeswitching. Rapa Nui speech
includes numerous Spanish words from legal, technological, and emotion
terminologies and other semantic fields, whose borrowing and nativization
is facilitated by the existence of a lexical gap (Makihara 2001). In contrast, children's R2S1 Rapa
Nui Spanish is limited to lexical insertions, primarily content morphemes
(sometimes referred to as “open-class” words) and, in
particular, nouns.34
The difference in
language processing between content and system morphemes (also referred to
as lexical and grammatical morphemes) is reflected in a wide range of
language processes: their different statuses in first and second language
acquisition order; their becoming the object of purism and other language
planning efforts; and their frequency in language contact phenomena such
as borrowing, codeswitching, and dialect-shifting. See Levelt 1989, Muysken 2000,
Myers-Scotton 2002, Prince
1987, Silverstein 1981, and Thomas 1991.
These insertions include not only
“cultural” words that fills lexical gaps – the absence
of semantically equivalent terms – in Spanish, such as names of
local natural resources, but also those that do not. Relatively basic
words such as ‘neck’ or ‘cut’ (Text 4), whose
Spanish equivalents are likely to be known to the speakers, are primary
elements of this speech style. Such lexical items have been called
“core” forms; their borrowing is often characterized as
“unnecessary” (
Weinreich 1953:60),
“redundant”, or “gratuitous” (
Mougeon & Beniak 1989). The Rapa Nui core forms
that characterize R2S1 Rapa Nui Spanish, however, are better understood
for their pragmatic and social functions in speech acts. The transferred
core forms compete with the forms in the recipient language, and thus
language choice contributes increased pragmatic force in indexing a social
category. In terms of the linguistic process, the insertions of Rapa Nui
words in R2S1 Rapa Nui Spanish are modeled after Spanish and Rapa Nui
lexical items used in syncretic Rapa Nui and in R1S2 Rapa Nui Spanish,
respectively, although the direction may be reversed. Spanish-dominant
Rapa Nui children's linguistic practice reflects their highly
developed “indexical sensitivities” (
Ochs
1995).
35 Psycholinguistic research in
bilingual language acquisition has also found that children in a bilingual
environment develop an early metalinguistic awareness (e.g., Hakuta & Diaz 1985).
By mobilizing
elements originally belonging to Rapa Nui to reside within the Spanish
environment, these children are evoking a Rapa Nui voice and indexing Rapa
Nui identity.
36 See Makihara (2005) for a discussion of the ways in which Rapa Nui
words in children's Rapa Nui Spanish serve as contextualization cues,
or “nonreferential and creative indexes” (Silverstein 1981), to establish their Rapa Nui voice
and identity. Non-Rapa Nui long-term residents also engage in similar
attempts at using a solidarity code, since the majority of them are not
able to speak Rapa Nui at all but interpolate a few words that they know
in their Spanish speech.
The syncretic Rapa Nui interactional norm and Rapa Nui
Spanish substyle differentiation
Rapa Nui children contribute to the construction and transformation of
syncretic norms of interactional language use through unreciprocated
language choice (e.g., see Text 5) and through their use of R2S1 Rapa Nui
Spanish, influencing the present and future characteristics of the
community's speech style repertoire more broadly. Fluent Rapa Nui
speakers (R1S2 speakers) have started to differentiate R1S2 and R2S1 Rapa
Nui Spanish in their linguistic repertoire. For example, in Text 6 above,
the adult Rapa Nui speaker adopts R2S1 Rapa Nui Spanish in her
interactions with R2S1-speaking children, demonstrating speech
accommodation and codeswitching. Upon hearing her niece's R2S1
utterance (line 4, which rephrases her cousin's previous Rapa Nui
utterance on line 2), the speaker offers a repair in R2S1 (line 5) (see
exx. 14, 15, and 17). Text 7 below provides another example of the use of
R2S1 Rapa Nui Spanish by a bilingual adult speaker addressing an
R2S1-speaking young child, although this case involves more than mere
rephrasing.
The conversation took place as four-year-old Uka, who has some passive
knowledge of Rapa Nui, had been closely watching as her aunt Rotia combed
and braided an older girl's hair before school. Adults around them
had been speaking in syncretic Rapa Nui. Noticing Uka's curiosity,
Rotia lovingly teases Uka by telling Uka's grandmother in Rapa Nui
that Uka is standing like a guard watching to make sure she combs properly
(line 1). As Uka leans forward and gets in the way, Rotia scolds her
mildly in R2S1 Rapa Nui Spanish, using Rapa Nui terms hahari
‘comb,’ pu'oko ‘head, hair,’ and
‘name’ (here ‘godchild’).
Lexicon is an area of language that is highly surface-segmentable and
most available for metapragmatic awareness. This seems to explain the
readiness with which Rapa Nui-Spanish bilingual adults adopt this style in
addressing predominantly Spanish-speaking children, expecting perhaps that
these children will understand their utterances better or that its use
will contribute to teaching them the Rapa Nui language. Such a high degree
of metalinguistic awareness of the distinctiveness of R2S1 Rapa Nui
Spanish is leading to substyle differentiation of this newer Rapa Nui way
of speaking Spanish.
CONCLUSION
An important element in understanding younger Rapa Nui children's
choice of Spanish in their performance of Rapa Nui identity is to see that
their “acts of identity” (Le Page &
Tabouret-Keller 1985) are shaped in part by their own assessment
and evaluation of “communicative resources, individual competence,
and the goals of the participants” (Bauman
1977:38) in formulating interpersonal communicative strategies
within the context of particular speech situations. The target audience of
the children's speech acts in R1S2 Rapa Nui Spanish are the Rapa Nui
adults present, and more generally the imagined audience of the Rapa Nui
community. Ethnic identity formation and an active indigenous movement
among old and young adults have clearly affected these children's
awareness of shifting and permeable social and linguistic boundaries.
Although they are constrained by lack of bilingual competence, they are
able to approximate the symbolic function of Rapa Nui as the ethnic
language (or its use in syncretic speech styles) by using Rapa Nui
Spanish, thus appropriating Spanish as a vehicle of ethnic
solidarity-based participation. The use of R2S1 Rapa Nui Spanish speech
styles as “a solidarity code” (Hill
1989) can be interpreted as what Bucholtz &
Hall 2004 call “tactics of adequation,” which serve to
establish sameness in terms of identification. Ethnic identification, in
this case, is being established across a language-based
distinction that had previously served to separate Chilean from Rapa
Nui.
It is important to children that their messages be heard. Thus they
prefer to speak Spanish. Even those few who are able to speak Rapa Nui
prefer to use Rapa Nui Spanish instead of their nonfluent Rapa Nui to
establish or retain authority to be heard and believed within family
contexts. Instead of interpreting their preference for and choice of
Spanish as reflecting a negative attitude toward Rapa Nui culture and
language (particularly since there is little evidence to suggest such an
attitude), I view the children's Rapa Nui Spanish choice as stemming
out of locally managed conversational contexts and interpersonal power
struggles within them. By marking their Spanish with Rapa Nui, these
children are at the same time using and investing in their competence and
constructing and claiming as theirs one of multiple Rapa Nui
“voices” (Bakhtin 1981; see also
Hill 1985), credibly foregrounding and
performing their ethnic identity, and this in turn is transforming the
ethnolinguistic identity of Rapa Nui. Their “speaking Rapa Nui in
Spanish,” to borrow from Alvarez Cáccamo's (1998) phrase “speaking Galician in
Spanish,” is an act of expression and participation, a display of
their Rapa Nui identification and solidarity.
Meanings of linguistic elements and social identities are socially
constructed and jointly produced. Accordingly, these children's
speech acts are subject to the addressees' and other audience's
evaluation. Positive evaluation, although largely implicit in bilingual
Rapa Nui adults' continued inclusion of these children in Rapa Nui or
in syncretic speech style interactions, leads to positive motivation for
the children to cultivate their Rapa Nui Spanish. What might be called an
ideology of inclusiveness in Rapa Nui identification is practiced in terms
of language skills through the everyday inclusion of these children in
linguistically syncretic interactions. Adults' own adoption of R2S1
Rapa Nui Spanish speech styles in interactions with these children
constitutes an explicit positive evaluation, acknowledging its unique
linguistic characteristics, its social meaning, and the children's
authorship. Adult Rapa Nui are aware of the ongoing language shift whereby
many children are unable to speak Rapa Nui. Rather than essentializing
their identity to the Rapa Nui language, the Rapa Nui are cultivating
multiple voices of “identity work” – including those
expressed in Spanish in communicating not only with outsiders but also
among themselves.
The choices these children are making between linguistic varieties and
their adoptions of new speech styles are helping transform the ways in
which language differences are mapped onto social and ethnic identity
differences. Language shift is a complex social process to which children
actively contribute. Passive knowledge of Rapa Nui and the positive
symbolic value placed on it are crucial to understanding these
children's speech behaviors, which, albeit indirectly, contribute to
authorize and legitimize the Rapa Nui and the Spanish languages in a new
way.
I cannot yet predict if this new way of speaking Rapa Nui Spanish will
stabilize, but an examination of its linguistic, cognitive, social, and
interactional dimensions is important in understanding the complex process
of linguistic and cultural change occurring in this community. An observer
of the macro-sociolinguistic change that has taken place on Rapa Nui might
remark on the ironic and “contradictory” way in which these
children's linguistic choices, motivated by their wish to belong to
their ethnic language community, are nonetheless contributing to the loss
of their ethnic language. Yet, at the micro-interactional and semiotic
level, these children are making rational choices to use their dominant
language, Spanish, in interactions and in the performance of their Rapa
Nui identity. When they become older, they may come to regret their weak
Rapa Nui language ability, may wish to (re)claim it, and may realize that
in order to make that happen they must make conscious efforts to speak
Rapa Nui. Some older teenagers and young adults who grew up speaking
Spanish and have become vigorously engaged in cultural revival movements
are making that conscious effort.37
Similar
patterns of the development of language loyalty among adolescents and
young adults who relearn their parents' language have been discussed
by Timm 2003 for “neo-Breton”
speakers in France, by Dorian (1981:106–10) for East Sutherland Gaelic in
Scotland, by Hill & Hill (1986:121–22)
for Mexicano, by Waterhouse 1949 for Chontal
Hokan in Mexico, by Hinton 1994 for indigenous
languages in California, and by Garzon 1998 for
Isletan Tiwa in New Mexico.
Numerous groups such as dance troops
and popular music bands have emerged in recent years, some involving both
young and older generations, and almost all of their performances are in
Rapa Nui. The Rapa Nui language immersion program, which began in 2000 and
has been gaining wider support from parents and the local community, is
giving a new generation of children new opportunities to build Rapa Nui
language skills. Together with these changes in language ideology and
linguistic practice, these developments will contribute to yet further
transformation of the local language community, perhaps slowing or even
reversing language shift and loss.
