Progression and Regression in Language

This paper summarizes some of the results of a study that has dealt with language shift in a rural Papua New Guinean village called Gapun. Gapun is a small village with a population which in 1986–7 fluctuated between 90–110 people. It is located about ten kilometres from the northern coast of Papua New Guinea, roughly midway between the lower Sepik and Ramu rivers. Gapun is an isolated village. It is surrounded on all sides by rain-forest and sago swamps, and is connected to other villages (the nearest of which is about a two hour journey away) and to the outside world only by narrow, choked waterways and slim bush paths subject to flooding. Between March 1986–July 1987, I spent 15 months in Gapun conducting anthropological fieldwork, trying to discover why this isolated jungle community, far away from urban centres and experiencing none of the oft-cited pressures of industrialization, market-economy penetration, out-migration, or influx of non-vernacular speakers, was abandoning its vernacular language.

Most villagers in Gapun speak a language which they call Taiap mer (Taiap language). The language exists only in Gapun, and was, in 1987, spoken actively and fluently by exactly eighty-nine people. Even by the somewhat extreme standards of Papua New Guinea, where over 700 languages are spoken, many of them by fewer than 1,000 people, this is a small language.