(B+)Being Able to Speak with Each Other Helps: Fiji's Several Languages

Building a modern, harmonious nation of people who can't even speak with each other, except perhaps in English, the mutually foreign language, has not been easy for Fiji.

When Ratu Cakobau ceded Fiji to the British in 1879 most Fijians couldn't even talk with each other. The languages of the western half of Viti Levu and those of the east have about as much in common as German with Dutch or Portuguese with Spanish. The western language family is divided into 12 major groupings and the east into 15. In turn, these are further divided into about 300 communalects or dialects, many of which were unintelligible to each other. Cakobau's conquests and colonial prerogatives led to the "adoption" of Cabokabau's Bauan as standard Fijian, and the decline -- but not the extinction of the languages and major communalects. Today, Standard Fijian is the language taught in Fijian primary schools and spoken by most urban Fijians.

Indian intra-ethnic communication was even more difficult. The first Indian indentured labourers, recruited from many parts of northern India (a country with over 1,500 languages and dialects) who arrived in Fiji on the Leonidas in 1879, communicated in a Hindi-hybrid language born on the ship and developed with later arrivals, and the arrival after 1902 of Dravidian speakers (mainly Tamil, Telegu and Malayalam) from South India, and small additions of Fijian and English. This new language, Fiji Baat or Standard Fiji Hindi, is the main language spoken by Indo-Fijians today but purists, who consider it a bastardised form of Hindustani, oppose its official recognition. Indian languages brought by independent migrants include Gujarati and Urdu (initially mainly merchants and shopkeepers), and Panjabi, the language of Sikhs.

Rotuman is spoken on Rotuma and by dwindling numbers elsewhere. Banaban, Tuvaluan, Chinese (once Cantonese, now mainly Mandarin) and a number of Fijian and Hindi pidgins also have local or communal importance.

At Independence in 1970, the British left a situation where educated people could only speak with each other in English. Divided by history, very different impacts of colonial rule, race, religion, culture, cultural values, employment, and residence, they were further divided by language. The civil service and the courts spoke English; most primary schools were either Fijian or Indian, secondary schools taught in English. No attempt was made to help Fijians speak Hindi or Indo-Fijians Fijian. Where ordinary people had to speak with each other -- in markets, towns and the the sugarcane belt -- they spoke pidgin Fijian and pidgin Hindi.

The 1970 Constitution was not even translated into Fijian! The 1997 Constitution gave equal recognition to English, (Standard) Fijian and Hindustani (spoken and written only by educated Indo-Fijians) but this could only be token recognition if it was not followed up with practical measures to use the languages, with provisions made for the teaching of the major languages to all ethnic groups.

It is against this background and the Government's stated intentions to remove race as the key ingredient of Fiji's politics and build a united Fiji, that I am a little perplexed by Education Minister Filipe Bole's announcement that knowledge of a vernacular language will be compulsory requirement to enter Lautoka Teachers' College. The Minister, if reported correctly, spoke of one of four languages he called vernacular. Applicants, he said, "must be competent in at least one of the four vernaculars --Fijian, Hindi, Urdu, Tamil or Rotuman -- up to Form 4 level." He could, of course, have meant one language in addition to one's mother tongue but this is unlikely because most applicants would already speak English and Fijian or Hindi. Surely he meant two.

The Government's Language Policy announced in August 2007 stated: "Government will adopt a language policy based on the use of Fijian, Hindustani and English as a long-term and sustainable strategy for peaceful and stable multiethnic and multicultural living in Fiji." And earlier this year (February 23. "Fostering Understanding Between Fiji's Main Ethnic Groups") I reported on an initiative where primary schools and civil servants were to be taught a second language. Three of the five mentioned by the Minister -- Urdu, Tamil, Rotuman -- were not mentioned in the Government announcement. I suspect they are there to appease these three groups, as was the mention of Hindustani in the language policy announcement. I have no problem with the teaching of these less spoken languages, or the desirability of North Indians being able to speak and write Hindustani, but of far more pressing importance at this point in Fiji's history is the need for the majority of Fiji's people to be able to hold an ordinary, simple, relaxed conversation with each other in Fijian and Fiji Baat. Had they been able to do so twenty or so years ago, it would have been far more difficult to use race to promote the selfish interests of sections of the Fijian and Indo-Fijian elites.

Source on the languages: Geraghty and Mugler in Walsh Fiji: an Encyclopaedic Atlas 2006. Photo: Filipe Bole Radio Fiji.