Amerindian Heritage Month was opened with the usual fanfare by a befeathered President Irfaan Ali, who addressed the Indigenous gathering as he would any coastal group. He made the customary promises about housing, economic development and the like, and warned about politicians who were really wolves dressed in sheep’s clothing. Nothing of significance was said about Indigenous cultural contributions, which are what give not just the Amerindians, but also this country so much of its unique identity.
Central to that identity is language, which encapsulates a people’s worldview, and in the case of our Indigenous nations also provides the avenue to knowledge about the environment, particularly the forest environment, as well as the traditions, skills and beliefs which define them as a group.
Guyana is fairly unusual in the world in that it is home to a number of distinct languages despite its tiny population. In addition to English and English Creole, there are those spoken by Arawaks, Caribs, Warraus, Akawaios, Patamonas, Wapishanas, Macusis, Wai-Wais and now Trios – ten in all. There have been other Amerindian languages here in the past which have become extinct mostly because the speakers have moved out or been driven out, as the Iaos were from Moruka by the Arawaks in the early Contact period, or the Paravihanas by the Caribs in Dutch times.
In the 19th century Schomburgk mentions members of several nations he encountered who are no longer here, but whether these were just passing through or became absorbed by larger groups or fell victim to European diseases is not known. One nation once domiciled here is thought by some historians to be the final victims of the international influenza epidemic which followed World War One. This was the Taruma, who lived in the very south of Guyana near the Kassikaityu river, which the Wai-Wai refer to as the River of the Dead. The few who survived were absorbed by the Wapishanas, but their language and culture have gone.
With the advent of indentureship any number of new languages made their appearance in this country, more especially from the Indian sub-continent. The magistrate’s courts, for instance, had to have recourse to a variety of interpreters, but while there may nowadays be individual speakers of one or two of these tongues, as group languages they have not survived. Portuguese lasted longer, reinforced perhaps by the publishing of local Portuguese language newspapers for a considerable time.
Then there were the African languages which did not endure for any time in the slave environment. But what did survive for centuries in the Berbice river at least, but also in Essequibo for a shorter space were the Dutch Creoles. We know about Berbice Dutch, as it was called, because it still had two speakers in living memory, and Dr Ian Robertson spent years working on it, in addition for a brief period a Dutch linguist called Silvia Kouwenberg.
While the language once spoken by Africans, Dutch and a limited number of Amerindians is now extinct, we have a vocabulary for it (according to Dr Robertson it had a high lexical input from Ijo in Nigeria) and know what it sounded like. Not so with Skepi (Essequibo) Dutch, which sources say was not mutually intelligible with Berbice Dutch and for which no vocabulary has ever been found. It is simply a historical reference without substance.
In short, many languages have come and gone here in the past, and those we have now are by no means safe. According to Ethnologue, around 44% of all languages in the world are now endangered, although other organisations put the figure higher at more than 50%. Unesco’s Atlas of World Languages lists all of our Indigenous languages as being at risk to some extent or another. There are different degrees of vulnerability when assessing languages, ranging from vulnerable to definitely endangered to severely endangered and then to critically endangered. After that extinction is reached.
Unesco and others calculate the level of risk by what they call intergenerational transmission, i.e. whether parents and grandparents pass the language down to children, and not just in terms of the total number of speakers. That said there are some very small groups here, such as the recently arrived Trio, who consist of just one village, while the bulk of their population is in Suriname. Even there, however, their language is in the risk category. Nations like the Pemon-speaking Arecuna, can be found mostly in the single village of Paruima, but the majority of that nation still lives in Venezuela. In the case of the Wai-Wai based in Masakenari they have speakers in Brazil as well.
That so many of our Indigenous languages survived nearly 350 years of colonialism owes nothing to any concentration of numbers, which did not exist, but to the fact that in the first instance the Dutch had no interest in religious conversion or imposing a change of lifestyle. The nations in the interior also had the benefit of comparative, albeit not total, isolation.
With the coming of the British the interior was subject to greater invasion from the Coast including by miners and woodcutters. Along with them came the Christian missionaries. Much has been written about the damage they are claimed to have done to the Indigenous way of life, but paradoxically they also performed a great service where languages were concerned, because they converted them into written form and translated biblical texts. The new religion therefore was accessed through the native language, and not a foreign one.
It was Lokono or Arawak which was the greatest beneficiary having been worked on by various missionary linguists over the centuries, including the German-speakers Theophilus Schumann and Theodor Schulz. The written forms which will be familiar to Arawaks today came from the work of W H Brett and his committee of male native speakers in the 19th century, along with a woman who would make ingenious suggestions relating to new concepts after the committee had left. The Arawak scholar Fr Bennett described Brett’s work as “classical Arawak.”
From 1902 onwards the British also created ‘reservations’, which shielded the Indigenous population from the intrusions of Coastlanders and also incidentally helped preserve their languages. Nowadays all of these languages are under assault from modern technology in its varied forms, and the homogenization of culture which comes with it.
A recent Diaspora Voices column summarises the importance of the retention of Indigenous languages, but there needs to be discussion among the different nations and groups about how best to achieve this. The answer may not be the same for all communities. There would first need to be intra-Indigenous discussion, following which the nations should be in a position to decide on a policy or policies, as well as tell the government what they need at an official level.
Other parts of the world are facing similar issues. In the case of the Celtic languages on mainland Britain, the answer has been to create schools which teach in the languages concerned. It is too early to say how successful this will turn out to be. The Ministry of Education here had a pilot project for primary schools among the Wapishana, although nothing much has been heard about its progress. Whatever the case, the onus is on the various nations to start a conversation urgently among themselves about what needs to be done as a first step, because once a language is extinct there is no coming back.
Discussion