Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald (Jawun Research Centre, CQUniversity, Cairns, Australia)

Dare to be different: linguistic diversity and change in the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea

The island of New Guinea displays a high degree of linguistic diversity, with over 900 distinct languages. The Sepik River Basin (which includes East Sepik and West Sepik, or Sandaun, provinces, within the former German New Guina) is linguistically complex, with about 200 languages from at least twenty different families, and unparalleled language density. Geopolitical factors, including the size of speaker communities and frequent migrations, time depth of human habitation, geographic features of the terrain, means of subsistence, and patterns of ritual and day-to-day multilingualism each play a substantial role in the maintenance of linguistic diversity and fragmentation. Shared patterns of ritual and material exchange go hand-in-hand with a tendency towards differentiation between closely related languages and speaker norms (or ‘schismogenesis’ – a term coined by Gregory Bateson). Drawing on my long-term research in the area, I focus on the rapidly changing dynamics of language across the Ndu family (the largest in terms of speaker numbers in the region). A telling example of a divergent development resulting in the emergence of a typologically unusal phenomenon comes from Yalaku, a Ndu language, where commands can be expressed in a non-main clause, as a consequence of independent innovations and language contact.