LANGUAGE
In these monthly discussions we answer one question about language in PNG and beyond. This Tuesday, May 5, is “World Portuguese Language Day”, so it is a good time to look at the Portuguese language and ask how it has influenced PNG.
BECAUSE of its aggressive exploration and colonial expansion beginning in the 1500s, the small European nation of Portugal spread its culture and language to many parts of the world over the next few centuries.
While even today only around 10 million people live in Portugal (about the same number as in PNG), according to Ethnologue (an SIL database of languages around the world), worldwide only English, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, and Hindi have more native speakers than Portuguese.
Today around 252 million speak Portuguese as a native language, with another 18 million people speaking it as a second language. Most Portuguese speakers are in Brazil, Portugal, and the former Portuguese colonies in Africa, but closer to us, Portuguese is also an official language of Macau and, here in Melanesia, East Timor.
Portuguese is also spoken by families in countries where it is not official, such as Australia, the United States, South Africa, and Japan, where Portuguese-speaking people have emigrated to. Papua New Guineans may often come across the Portuguese language when they go online because it is the sixth most widely used language on the internet and, after English and Spanish, the third most widely used language in YouTube videos.
Just as pidgin and creole languages based on English, such as PNG’s Tok Pisin, are spoken around the world, there are pidgin and creole languages based on Portuguese in many countries. In some countries, a creole Portuguese is the most widely spoken language, more than any indigenous language. Even if a creole Portuguese is spoken, standard Portuguese is almost always the language of schooling and writing, just as English is in PNG.
While Portuguese is not spoken in PNG, people here do use many Portuguese words every day. This is because the Portuguese were the first Europeans to establish a colony on the Chinese coast, in Macau. At that time the Chinese emperor made a law prohibiting any Chinese people teaching Chinese to Europeans, so people who wanted to trade with Portuguese in Macau had to learn Portuguese.
They rarely became fluent, so over the years, varieties of Chinese merged with Portuguese to form a Chinese Pidgin Portuguese. This became the basis for Chinese Pidgin English later on when the British established a trading colony in Hong Kong. Sailors from many countries learned these trade languages, including the English-speaking sailors who came to Melanesia.
When they tried to speak to Melanesians, they tended to use the Chinese Pidgin English they had learned in Hong Kong, which still had a number of Portuguese words in it. Eventually these Portuguese words came into Tok Pisin and then sometimes from Tok Pisin into local languages. This is why Papua New Guineans today use Portuguese words such as save (from Portuguese sabe / “he or she knows”), pikinini (from Portuguese pequeninho / “little one”), pato (duck), and atun (Portuguese atum / “tuna”).
More important than these words is the name for the country itself. The main island of PNG was given two names by the first Europeans who came here: “Papua” and “New Guinea”. Both have a Portuguese connection.
“Papua” appears on early Portuguese maps in the 1500s to designate an area in what is now eastern Indonesia near the island of Halmahera. Some scholars have said the term probably came from a local Malay word, “pua-pua”, meaning “tightly twisted”, referring to the Melanesians’ hair.
But the earliest sources for this explanation are 300 years later, so we cannot be sure if this really was the meaning in the 1500s. We do know that over the years, different areas were known as “Papua”.
Originally it referred to the area around Halmahera Island, then Biak Island, and finally to the large island that is called New Guinea in English today. In many languages, including Bahasa Indonesia, this main island of PNG is still called Papua. It was the name given to the British, and later Australian, territory in what is today the south-eastern quarter of the island.
The name “New Guinea” was given by Spanish explorers who sailed along the coast of New Guinea and thought that the tropical vegetation and dark-skinned people reminded them of the area of the West African coast that they called “Guinea”. Today that area still has three countries with this word in their names (The Republic of Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, and Equatorial Guinea). But even though it was Spanish explorers who brought the name here, the name itself came from Portuguese Guiné, which they used to call dark-skinned Africans from south of the Sahara Desert because of a local food plant with that Portuguese name.
So in the name “Papua New Guinea”, both “Papua” and “Guinea” have Portuguese connections.
In our post-colonial world, the countries that use Portuguese have formed a voluntary international association called the Community of Portuguese Language Countries. Besides encouraging cultural and economic ties among amongst themselves, these countries cooperate to standardise acceptable spelling and writing rules in all Portuguese-speaking countries and to promote the Portuguese language and literature. This includes sponsoring World Portuguese Language Day, which will be observed in many countries around the world this Tuesday.
- Prof Volker, a linguist living in New Ireland, is an adjunct professor at The Cairns Institute, James Cook University and Member of the Jawun Research Institute at CQ University in Australia. He welcomes your language questions for this monthly discussion at [email protected]. Or continue the discussion on the Facebook Language Toktok page.
