#bislama

(poll at the end)

Rub'eyna'oj (Kaqchikel)

[ɾuɓejnaʔox]

Translation: cognition (lit. "your internal wisdom")

Kaqchikel or Caqchikel Maya is a Mayan language spoken by 411 000 people in Guatemala. It is a threatened language and one reason is that some parents choose to speak Spanish in the home so that their children can start school with Spanish as a first language, which means that the language doesn’t get passed down to the next generation in all families. This is a common reason languages become endangered. Kaqchikel uses many glottalised sounds, which means that some sounds are partly articulated with the vocal folds. This sounds a bit like a pop of air. English only has the glottal stop [ʔ], which is the sound of the little pause in the middle of uh-oh, when the vocal folds close entirely and cuts off air. Kaqchikel on the other hand, also has sounds like glottalised k or glottalised ts.

Motivation: This word did not exist in historical Kaqchikel but was created as an intentional neologism (among many others) in order to prevent the necessity of Spanish in Maya communities. "Your internal wisdom" is a beautiful way to think about cognition and thoughts in general.

Aftarem (Bislama)

Unable to find IPA

Translation: Pursue, seek

Bislama is an English-based creole with around 14 200 speakers. It is spoken in Vanuatu, where it’s the national language and used as a lingua franca to facilitate communication between speakers of the 110 living languages. Bislama emerged in the late 1800s due to the practice of “blackbirding”, aka deceiving or kidnapping Pacific Islanders and taking them to work as indentured labourers on plantations, mainly in Australia and Fiji. Due to everyone speaking different languages, a pidgin emerged that later became a creole. This language was taken to Vanuatu when labourers returned and spread because it could be used as a lingua franca. Most of the vocabulary is English-based with some French, but the grammar is typical of local languages.

Motivation: Literally “after him”. Plus it’s fun to say

What is the language called in English and the language itself? The language is called Bislama in English and Bislama. It is sometimes also known as Bichelamar, its French name.

Where is the language spoken? Bislama is spoken in Vanuatu.

How many people speak the language? 10 000 people speak Bislama as their first language, and 200 000 people speak it as a second language. It is the most widely spoken language in Vanuatu.

Which language family does it belong to? What are some of its relative languages? Bislama is an English-based Pacific creole. The vocabulary is largely of English and French origin, while the grammar is more influenced by Oceanic languages.

What writing system does the language use? Bislama is written in the Latin script, or in the Avoiuli writing system used on Pentecost Island.

Language of the Week:

🇻🇺🇻🇺Bislama 🇻🇺🇻🇺

This is the first in our series of Indigenous languages. For API (Asian-Pacific Islander) Month, we start in Melanesia with the Creole language Bislama.

Bislama, also known as Bichelamar in French, arose via the Blackbirding trades of the mid to late 1800s in Oceania.

This period of human trafficking and enslavement of numerous Melanesian peoples led to the creation of a variety of Creole languages spoken throughout Melanesia, Bislama being one of them. (Others being Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea, Pijin in the Solomon Islands and Yumplatok in the Torres Strait Islands.)

Bislama was originally developed and spoken by enslaved Melanesians on the Sugar plantations of Northern Australia and throughout Oceania. In the late 1800s/early 1900s at the advent of the "White Australia" policies, numerous Melanesian descendant laborers were deported to Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands despite being stolen a half century before. This lead to Bislama being spread throughout Vanuatu as descendants returned to their homelands. Soon after Bislama was adopted as a Lingua Franca by ni-Vanuatu or the Vanuatu people. This helped in organization and communication as Vanuatu's indigenous non-Creole languages number in the 100s, being one of the most language dense places in the world.

Bislama is spoken as a first language by many urban ni-Vanuatu people while it is spoken as a second language by many rural ni-Vanuatu people complimentary to their own Indigenous language.

Numbers:

~10,000 1st language speakers

~200,000 second language speakers

~210,000 all together

As a language, Bislama is an English-Based Creole. With a majority of its lexicon being derived from English and its grammar being distinctly Melanesian.

Distinct features of Bislama include:

The use of "long" and "blong" in place of standard English prepositions.

Long replacing: "next to", "beside" and "by" as well as "at", "to", and "in".

Example: Mi stap long stoa. Translation: I am at the store.

Blong replacing "of". This is a very important and widely used word in Bislama as it indicates "belonging" and can indicate a wide variety of things.

Example: Buk blong mi. Translation: "The book that belongs to me."

Example: Man blong Amerika. Translation: "Man from America/American."

Plurals: Plural nouns in Bislama are created by placing the word "ol" at the front of a word rather than the plural suffix "-s".

Example: ol buk Translation: "books"

"Ol" is derived from the word "all".

For more information on Bislama, check out these videos below.

Also, FYI: This Blog ABSOLUTELY considers Creole languages and even variant Vernacular forms (AAVE, Black British English, Aboriginal Australian English, etc.) of colonizer languages as Indigenous languages. It is not the fault of the enslaved and the colonized that their connections to their mother languages were wiped out.

This one is a presentation from a White woman presenting on the language after visiting and living in Vanuatu for a time. Warning: though she gives a pretty decent presentation in terms of explaining the basics, it is uncomfortable to hear the audience laugh at some of the phrases she presents. Like many Black English-Based Creoles, Bislama is seen and degraded as a "broken English" by Colonizers. There's a whole discussion that can be had on Colonizers discussing and educating on Indigenous languages (including Black Creole languages) to other Colonizers.

Language shelf #1:

Afrikaans Ainu Akkadian Albanian Amharic Armenian Aymará Azerbaijani Bengali Bislama Bulgarian Burmese

(poll at the end)

Sikmun (Bislama)

Unable to find IPA

Translation: Menstrual period

Bislama is an English-based creole with around 14 200 speakers. It is spoken in Vanuatu, where it’s the national language and used as a lingua franca to facilitate communication between speakers of the 110 living languages. Bislama emerged in the late 1800s due to the practice of “blackbirding”, aka deceiving or kidnapping Pacific Islanders and taking them to work as indentured labourers on plantations, mainly in Australia and Fiji. Due to everyone speaking different languages, a pidgin emerged that later became a creole. This language was taken to Vanuatu when labourers returned and spread because it could be used as a lingua franca. Most of the vocabulary is English-based with some French, but the grammar is typical of local languages.

Motivation: Sick moon???? That’s such a rad way of describing it, it sounds so cool…

(note: the original submission said sigmun, sikmun was the spelling I found in the Bislama spelling dictionary as well as in text examples)

爆炸, bào zhà (Mandarin Chinese)

[paʊ ʈʂa]

Translation: explosion

Chinese is a Sino-Tibetan macrolanguage (a dialect continuum consisting of different varieties that are distinct languages based the criterium of mutual intelligibility, but commonly referred to as a single language) with around 1 350 300 000 speakers that consists of 16 recognised languages, often referred to as dialects. Out of these, Mandarin Chinese is the largest, as 70% of Chinese speakers have it as their native language. The Beijing dialect of Mandarin forms the basis of Standard Chinese, which is the national language and taught in schools all over China.

Motivation 1: Super fun to say (BAO ZHA allows for some intense chest yells!!), lovely meaning, has become a joke among my friend group and our Chinese teacher thinks it's very funny

Motivation 2: Explode is an inherently funny word. Also me and my friends learned this word back in like Chinese ii (super early on, we were still learning basic grammar) and our Chinese teacher does not like it very much. Once they got in trouble for putting it in a presentation that was being graded for our ib myp certificate (international baccalaureate; bigshot honors program).

Note: This was submitted as Mandarin Chinese by at least one of the four submitters of this one word (thank you for sparing me the detective work). The two best motivations were put on the post

Toktok (Bislama)

Unable to find IPA

Translation: Speak

Bislama is an English-based creole with around 14 200 speakers. It is spoken in Vanuatu, where it’s the national language and used as a lingua franca to facilitate communication between speakers of the 110 living languages. Bislama emerged in the late 1800s due to the practice of “blackbirding”, aka deceiving or kidnapping Pacific Islanders and taking them to work as indentured labourers on plantations, mainly in Australia and Fiji. Due to everyone speaking different languages, a pidgin emerged that later became a creole. This language was taken to Vanuatu when labourers returned and spread because it could be used as a lingua franca. Most of the vocabulary is English-based with some French, but the grammar is typical of local languages.

Motivation: I literally just think it’s cool. In Bislama there aren’t a lot of specific words because, of course, Vanuatu is the most language dense area in the world so there’s not much room for the native language to be that elaborate, but I thought I’d submit this cute little word anyways because <3

Bettseechesch (Luxembourgish)

[ˈbætˌzeːχeʃ]

Translation: Dandelion (literally it means "bed wetter" because dandelions have a diuretic effect, it's also called Pissblumm, which literally means piss flower)

Luxembourgish is an Indo-European language belonging to the Germanic branch, spoken by half a million people, most of them in Luxembourg. It is part of the Continental West Germanic dialect continuum, but also influenced by French.

Motivation: French, Dutch, German, Italian all have a similar name about pissing the bed for this plant and that's just the ones I'm aware of, I'm sure there's more. It's funny to me that apparently so many people wet their beds after eating dandelions that people decided that that's what this plant should be called lol Plus look at it, it's a bonkers word to look at!