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 Ske (Seke) languageLanguage code: ske Ske is a small and endangered language spoken in south-western Pentecost. Officially the language has around 600 speakers, although local chiefs consider this an overestimate since many young people in the Ske area are not actually fluent in the language. Because the Ske area is very small, most local men marry women from other areas, who then bring up children whose first language is Apma or Bislama. Ske is a curious and innovative language. (The language has a habit of dropping vowels, which may lead its name to be rendered as either "Ske" or "Seke".) Although it is closely related to its neighbouring languages, people from other areas of Pentecost find it difficult to learn and speak. The Ske community is proud of its distinctive language, and speakers lament its ongoing decline. Until recently most were pessimistic about the chance of their language surviving into the future, but the work currently being done by linguist Kay Johnson to produce materials in Ske language has given them some cause for hope. Dialects and rangeThe official Ske area encompasses fourteen small villages in south-western Pentecost, extending from Levizendam in the north to Hotwata in the south, although in fact Apma and Bislama are the main languages heard in some of these villages today. The hub of the Ske community is the large coastal village of Bwaravet, and the Ske area also includes Lonoror Airport. In historical times the language's area extended to the east coast, but this part of the island has now been depopulated. Ske language has only a single dialect, with no identifiable regional variation, although there are noticeable differences between the Ske of older and younger people. This is partly, though probably not entirely, due to corruption from other languages. Doltes, the extinct language of Hotwata (in the modern Ske area), was probably a dialect of Sa language. LiteracySke is a difficult language to write down, and there is no tradition of writing in the language. An orthography was developed by linguist Catriona Hyslop during a brief visit in 2001, and is now being tested and refined by Kay Johnson. Since there is no primary school in the Ske area (local children attend primary school either in Apma-speaking Ranmawot or Sa-speaking Rangusuksu), introducing vernacular literacy teaching of the sort now being encouraged by the Vanuatu government will be virtually impossible in Ske language. However, the church provides a possible means through which literacy in Ske can be encouraged, and work is currently underway to produce prayer books and Sunday school materials in the language. Research and documentationWhen I began researching Ske language in 2007, the only sources available in the language were an incomplete word list in Darrell Tryon's 1976 survey of Vanuatu langauges (Hebrides Languages: An Internal Classification) based on earlier notes by David Walsh, and some picture books produced by Catriona Hyslop for the Vanuatu Cultural Centre in 2001. For reasons that were not entirely the fault of their authors, both these sources contained considerable errors. In October 2008, linguist Kay Johnson from SOAS (with support from the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project) arrived in Bwaravet to begin the much-needed task of documenting this unusual and endangered language. Her aim is to produce a sketch grammar of Ske, a thesis investigating spatial terminology in the language, and literacy materials for local use.
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<< Languages of © Andrew Gray, 2008 |
