Why is Rabaul Creole German dying?

Unserdeutsch (Rabaul Creole German) is a dying language. In this respect, it's not unique—languages around the world are dying. See, for example, http://www.endangered-languages.com/. By the end of this century, I would be very pleasantly surprised if half of the languages spoken today still have native speakers.

We use a language because it has a purpose. Among the purposes are:

- to communicate within our group, be it the family or the ethnic group
- to communicate with others outside our group (many people learn English for this reason)
- to access formal or informal education (many people used to learn Latin for this purpose)
- to revere the Divine (many Hindus learn Sanskrit for this reason)

When these purposes no longer exist, people stop learning or using the language, even if it is their native tongue.

In the case of Unserdeutsch, the small community of speakers was always at least trilingual in Tok Pisin (New Guinea Pidgin English) for communication with others, as well as English and/or German for communication with others, education, and religious worship. The only real purpose of Unserdeutsch was for communication within their group and as a badge of ethnic identity.

When the colour bar was lowered in the 1960s, and mixed-race persons could take Ausralian citizenship and move to Australia, most families sent their children to school in Australia. At Independence, most made plans to move permanently to Australia, where they saw their future as being more secure. Many, perhaps, most, young people from the 1960s on married outside their small community, so that their children did not identify primarily as mixed-race Germans and did not learn to speak Unserdeutsch.

Because the language no longer has a purpose, younger members of the community, now dispersed along the Australian eastern seaboard, grow up with English as their dominant language. while they may know some phrases from a grandparent, they are not fluent speakers of the language. The youngest fluent speakers of the language are now in their sixties. The language is therefore unlikely to survive as the language of native speakers for more than a few decades. The challenge to linguists and members of the community now is to document the language so that future generations will have access to this unique language whose birth and death symbolise the turmoil of European colonialism and the emergence of the modern nation-state of Papua New Guinea.

How I got to know about Unserdeutsch

I was lucky enough to be the first linguist to document Rabaul Creole German/Unserdeutsch. In the late 1970s I was teaching German at Miami State High School on the Queensland Gold Coast in Australia. A new student, Yvonne, came to be registered at the school who wanted to take German. As usual, I spoke with her in German to see just how much German she spoke-- foreign language teaching standards varied greatly in Australian schools. I was surprised at how fluent her accent was and how comfortable she was trying to speak German, but how unusual her grammar was. When I asked where she had studied German, she said she had never studied it, but that her family spoke it "at home".

As she was a Black girl and "at home" was Papua New Guinea, this was a big surprise. I was a masters student in German at the University of Queensland with a strong interest in German dialects spoken by European emigrants in places like North America and Australia, but I had never heard of a German settler dialect spoken in Papua New Guinea.

As I got to know Yvonne and her family, I learned that this was a language very similar to Tok Pisin (PNG Pidgin English). They were kind enough to introduce me to other members of their community and to prepare me for a visit to Rabaul for fieldwork. I knew I had a topic for my thesis. I did not know how meeting Yvonne would change my life, as PNG became my home and the focus of my professional and personal lives.

Unserdeutsch / Rabaul Creole German

One of the most interesting languages I have worked with in Papua New Guinea is Rabaul Creole German, which its speakers call Unserdeutsch ("Our German"). The language arose at the end of the nineteenth century in German New Guinea when Catholic missionaries at Vunapope, near Rabaul in what we now call East New Britain established an orphanage for mixed-race children. The education at the mission was all in Standard German, but the children played with the language, using German words to make sentences based on the early form of Tok Pisin (New Guinea Pidgin English) used as a common language in the German colony.

As these children became adults and married each other, this new language became the mother tongue of their children in many families. For several generations, and even after the Australian conquest of the German colony in WWI, it was one of the main languages of the small multilingual mixed-race community centered around Vunapope and Kokopo (formerly called Herbertshöhe). When most of the community dispersed and emigrated to Australia with Papua New Guinean independence in 1975, the language ceased to be learned by a new generation of speakers. Today only a few dozen speakers remain, the youngest in their sixties. It is perhaps the only language of Papua New Guinea to face extinction through emigration. It is also the only known example of a creole language based on German.

Friedel Martin Frowein, a German linguist and doctoral student in Australia, has made a website where a number of articles and recordings about the language can be accessed: http://www.uni-koeln.de/gbs/unserdeutsch/index.html

Vernacular, pidgin, and creole languages in Papua New Guinea

Papua New Guinea has more languages than any other country on earth; of the 6909 languages listed at www.ethnologue.org, 841 are in this relatively small country with only six million people. The overwhelming majority are vernacular languages, that is, the indigenous languages of the aboriginal people, usually called "tok ples" in Papua New Guinea. A few are introduced languages, such as English.

The rest are pidgin and creole languages, including two of the three national languages, Tok Pisin and Hiri Motu. Pidgin languages arise when people of different languages come together for work or trade who have no common language. They often come about as a result of colonisation. Sometimes these languages become the mother tongue of young children, in which case they are called creole languages these creole languagess must be develop into full languages as the children grow and express themselves in the creole

In later posts I'll talk about the two Papua New Guinean pidgin and creole languages I've worked with, Unserdeutsch (Rabaul Creole German) and Tok Pisin (New Guinea Pidgin English).

I am fortunate to live and work in two extremes-- Japan and Papua New Guinea. In every possible way they are exact opposites. One is technological, reserved, monolingual, highly educated, and very first-world. The other is traditional, out-going, multilingual, poorly educated, and very third world. Both are fascinating, professionally, culturally, and socially. In this blog I will share some of the professional, cultural, and social insights of life in my homes, with a particular emphasis on language and its interplay with culture and society.