Peter's Story

Sitting with a Roviana family (The Tuke family!) in Honiara, Solomon Islands.

A FASCINATION WITH LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

I attended nine different schools from kindergarten to twelfth grade. Perhaps because of my own feelings of being a perpetual “new kid,” I was very curious about the cultures and languages of others. This curiosity increased as I became an adult.

During my undergraduate studies at the University of North Texas (UNT), I became fascinated with non-Western histories. I took every class offered for Chinese and Japanese history, as well as anthropology classes focused on the indigenous cultures of the Pacific and the American Southwest. I began to look at words in different languages and concluded that some languages were “related” and that there should be a branch of history called “History of Languages.” 

In these early investigations I compared words in Japanese and Mandarin Chinese, such as 愛 ai, the word for ‘love’ in both languages (disregarding the tone). I came to the incorrect conclusion that the two languages must have come from a common ancestor at some time in the past. The reason for the similarities between so many words in Mandarin and Japanese is an extended history of contact. 

Years later I would learn that the history of language is part of the discipline of Historical Linguistics rather than history, and that linguists use the comparative method to determine whether two languages are related. The comparative method confirmed my hypothesis that some languages do share a common origin, and that that common origin is a legitimate source of similarities between some languages! I highly recommend the study of historical linguistics to any who wish to look into the relation of languages and how languages change over time.

LIFE IN A SECOND LANGUAGE

During my study of world history, I decided to minor in Japanese, which included summer study in Japan. I had grown up in mostly small, rural communities and was impressed with the sophistication of big Japanese cities like Tokyo, but what made the biggest impact on me was just living life in another language. 

When I returned from Japan, I was obsessed with the mystery of human language. I was motivated to learn any language that was spoken in my community. I was working as a waiter at a Tex-Mex restaurant and began to learn as much Spanish as I could. I met a Brazilian woman who is now my wife. When we were dating I enjoyed listening to her speak with her friends and family in Portuguese, and eventually learned the language entirely through listening and looking through dictionaries.

I enjoyed language learning so much that I decided I wanted to teach English to speakers of other languages (TESOL). Upon completion of my undergraduate degree, I enrolled in a TESOL graduate course at UNT.

LINGUISTICS

My first TESOL class  was “Introduction to Linguistics” taught by Haj Ross. After the first day of class I realized that linguistics was the field where people asked the questions that I was interested in! I immediately changed my major to linguistics, though I continued to study TESOL and started an internship teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) at UNT’s Intensive English Language Institute.

My curiosity about the nature of human language was too great to be satisfied by just a Master’s degree. I had learned that there were about 7,000 languages in the world, and that for most of these there is no reliable documentation. Worse, I learned that 90% of the world’s languages are predicted to lose all speakers within a hundred years. I decided to apply for a position focused on documentation of endangered languages and was selected for a scholarship to study with the Endangered Language Documentation Theory and Application (ELDTA) research group at the University of Newcastle in Australia. Within the ELDTA group I was selected to be part of a joint project with Harvard University, where I spent a year as a visiting fellow at the Polinsky Language Science Lab.

After my year at Harvard I left ELDTA and started a PhD in linguistics at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa (UH). My first semester I acted as co-director of the Language Documentation Training Center (LDTC), and I remained an active member throughout my PhD. After leaving my position as co-director of LDTC, I spent four years teaching an undergraduate linguistics course focused on language varieties spoken in the Pacific region at both U. of Hawai‘i and Hawaii Pacific University. These courses were writing-intensive, and there I learned nuanced approaches to teaching academic writing.

APPLICATION OF EXPERIENCE

My current research focuses on the Austronesian language family. Austronesian is a large family with over 1,200 languages. When linguists claim that a language is part of a family, we are saying that all of the modern daughter languages are descendants of a single language that existed in the distant past. In the case of Austronesian, the ancestral language is referred to as Proto-Austronesian, and it was spoken over 5,000 years ago in what is now called Taiwan.

During my time at UH, I studied and produced descriptive and documentary materials for several Austronesian languages with small communities of speakers. These include Long Wat, Long Napir, and Ga’ai in Borneo, as well as Ampenan Sasak in Lombok. My main focus was on a single language from the Solomon Islands called Roviana.

Roviana is spoken by approximately 10,000 people. I met my first Roviana speaker outside a post office in Australia by pure chance. It turned out to be very serendipitous as we eventually wrote papers together and are still great friends to this day. My work in Roviana focuses on both syntax and phonology. Syntax is the study of the organization of elements (words and phrases) within sentences and phrases. Phonology is the study of the system of sounds in a language (as opposed to phonetics, which is the study of the acoustic properties of sounds in a language).

During my PhD studies, I completed three summer field trips across a variety of sites in Australia, New Zealand, and the Solomon Islands. In the Solomon Islands, I studied with speakers living in the capital, Honiara, as well as speakers living in the Roviana homeland in the Western Province. One of my main teachers lived in the Western Province, called Tolavae (which means ‘beautiful’ in Roviana). 

As I traveled from Honolulu to Tolavae, the planes got smaller and smaller until I had to take boats which then got smaller and smaller the closer I got to Tolavae. The journey was exhilarating because the closer I got to Solomon Islands in the Pacific, the more Solomon Pijin I would hear. The first taste of Solo Pijin can usually be experienced in Fiji while waiting for a flight to Honiara in the Solomon Islands. Once you land in Honiara, you can  immediately be immersed in Solo Pijin and a mix of 75 other indegenous languages. My ears would catch words in an Austronesian language and I would look for clues as to which language it might be. In Honiara I would board a boat heading on a two-night voyage to the Western Province and stop at many villages scattered across the hundreds of islands we would pass on the way. As we traveled farther and farther West, I would hear more and more new passengers speaking Roviana. I could immediately recognize the use of the word tievaka, which means ‘foreigner,’ as passengers were discussing my presence on the ship. I had studied small elicitations of Roviana for years before ever hearing it spoken among strangers in public and it was thrilling to finally observe it being used in the real world. I would get off the ferry at the last stop and take a small aluminum boat with a 15-HP outboard motor to my final destination at Tolavae. 

A photo taken from my small boat en route to Tolavae for linguistic fieldwork.

The first time I arrived in Tolavae, the boys from the village put on traditional warriors’ garments and greeted me with a song asking if I was there to fight or be friends. Everyone around me spoke Roviana for the entire day. Some nights in Tolavae I could barely sleep because I was so excited from learning so much Roviana in one day!

Fieldwork taught me much about the nature of language and language learning. One thing I learned is that language is deeply tied to culture and people. When a community wishes to bring vitality to a language spoken by few people, one thing they do is create privileged domains of use. That is, they create social spaces where speaking the target language is encouraged. Examples of language domains might include a household where everyone speaks the target language, a cultural festival, a language group on a social media platform, even a classroom. 

The lessons that I have learned while studying language conservation have straightforward applications to language learning. Language learners have greater success in acquiring their target language when they are provided with not only the structural framework of linguistics, but also with social domains of use, both of which LanGo offers!