Tropicalities

Tongues May

Tell A Story

Carbon dating, ocean currents, pottery and artifacts have all been used in the probe into the origins of the peoples of the Pacific Islands.

Now language is yielding more clues.

The Australian National Univer sity’s Department of Linguistics is making a study of the languages of the Islands in an attempt to trace migration patterns in the prehistory of the Islands’ peoples.

Hot on the scent, Professor S. A.

Wurm, the department’s head, believes that results already achieved by the study seem certain to shed new light on the history of the migration of man into the Islands.

Dr. Wurm explained that three types of language had occupied the Pacific area. They were Papuan, Australian and Austronesian, the last embracing such languages as Indo nesian, Polynesian, Melanesian and Micronesian. (These titles are used by linguists to refer to types of lan guage; they do not refer to the countries or areas of the same name).

Until recently it had been thought

that the Southwest Pacific had been occupied by several hundred varieties of language which could have some relationship to the Austronesian group of languages. But the issue was con fused by the strangeness of some of the languages—a strangeness possibly due to the languages being a mixture of many different elements.

A more thorough study led to the thought that perhaps many of them were not independent languages within the Melanesian group but were in fact more normal Austro nesian languages than was at first thought, possibly deriving from the one common ancestor.

Clues seem to have yielded many facts including one which appears to upset previous beliefs about who was first to arrive in the South Pacific Islands. The dark-skinned people were thought to have been first comers, but it’s now apparent from a study of the Austronesian-type of language, spoken by the comparati-

vely light-skinned people, that the dark-skinned, Melanesian-speaking people came thousands of years after, not before, the light-skinned people and that Austronesian was the first language and culture in the area.

Professor Wurm said there were still hundreds of languages to be studied in an attempt to find answers to all the questions raised by the department’s project which got under way about 18 months ago. A pattern of migration appeared to be emerging from the studies which would be pursued for some years to come.

Dr. D. T. Tryon, a Research Fellow in the department, recently returned after 10 months in the New Hebrides. His preliminary survey indicated that the languages there — and there seemed to be well over 100 of them—were affected by two distinct migrations, one 5,000 to 3,000 years ago, and the other only about 1,000 to 2,000 years ago.

The first migration was thought to have come from an area far to the wes t—possibly Indonesia. The second could have left the same area at the same time but got caught up on the way, possibly in New Guinea, where the language became mixed with Papuan. The resultant cultural mix was then taken on to the New Hebrides.