Introduction
The Bariai language community
Speakers of the Bariai language live on the northwest coast of the island of New Britain in the West New Britain Province of Papua New Guinea. (See map 1.) At a population of approximately 1,400, Bariai speakers principally inhabit ten coastal villages between Borgen Bay on the west and Rottock Bay on the east, between 10 and 25 kilometres east of Gloucester government station. (See map 2.) The population is growing and has nearly doubled in the last 25 years.
The Bariai area features a large coastal mangrove swamp at its centre, spanning approximately five kilometres of coastline between Bambak and Niuniuiai. Among the numerous coral reefs which mark the coastline, the largest and most notable is located directly north of the mangrove swamp between Akonga and Niuniuiai, covering an area of about six square kilometres. The interior terrain is tropical, wet lowland and heavily forested, gradually sloping upward to Mt. Sakail, a peak of 1,335 metres, which is about eight kilometres from the coast toward the southern interior. The interior south of Bariai is a vast uninhabited area.
Like most Papua New Guineans, the Bariai people practice slash and burn agriculture. Over the last hundred years or so, sweet potato has replaced taro as the primary staple crop. Sago is also an important staple which carries them through brief periods of seasonal non-productivity of gardens. Although the Bariai raise pigs, pork is not a regular part of their diet, since it is usually only consumed at special feasts. See Scaletta (1985) for a thorough description of such feasts. Numerous species of fish and shellfish are the most regular source of protein. Wild pigs, wallabies and birds also occasionally supplement their diet. Due to their remoteness from towns and the fact that there is no road access to the area, economic opportunities are somewhat scarce for the Bariai. While they are generally not dependent upon a cash economy, they do sell copra, cacao, and sea cucumbers to pay for children's school fees, outboard motor fuel, and a few trade store items.
Bariai History
The first European contact was made with the Bariai people near the end of the 19th century. The area was under the German colonial government until the end of World War I, when Australia assumed this role. Roman Catholicism was introduced and embraced by Bariai society as a whole in 1932. Today Catholicism is still the only religion formally practiced in the area. During World War II the Japanese invaded the area, temporarily gaining control over it until allied forces recaptured the area and the war ended. The Australian colonial government resumed control from that time until the peaceful transfer of independence to PNG in 1975.
Recorded history prior to European contact is scant at best. Both the Bariai and the neighbouring Amara people groups trace their ancestry back to the inhabitants of a now-abandoned village on the eastern slopes of Mt. Sakail known as Maraibin. According to legend, a dispute over marital infidelity resulted in a tribal war which caused the clans of the village to scatter and abandon Maraibin. Members of one clan descended the slopes of the mountain and founded Bambak, the first coastal village, from which all present-day Bariai-speaking villages descend. Today Amara is spoken primarily in the village of Siamatai. (See map 2.) Two other villages in the area, Kaogo and Niuniuiai, also have an Amara-speaking heritage. There are also Amara-speaking villages on the south coast of New Britain in the vicinity of Sauren, but the sociolinguistic relationship between north-coast and south-coast Amara is unclear. Culturally, the Bariai and north-coast Amara peoples are the same, and there is a significant rate of intermarriage between the two groups, which today peacefully co-exist.
Linguistic Classification
Bariai is categorised by Ross (1988:122) as Austronesian, Eastern Malayo-Polynesian, Western Oceanic, North New Guinea, Ngero-Vitiaz, Ngero, in the Bariai sub-family.
The Name Bariai
The name Bariai, which literally means ‘at the mangrove’ (bare ‘mangrove’ plus ‑eai ‘at’), is the most common name for the people, the language and their geographic area. The language and people have also been referred to as Kabana by Amara speakers, and this name is acceptable and preferred by a moderate number of Bariai. However, those Bariai who are aware of the derogatory connotations of the name Kabana, which in the Amara language means ‘foreigner,’ are not willing to use it. People of neighbouring language groups (besides Amara) know of no other term besides Bariai to use in reference to either the language or the people. Several anthropologists and linguists who did fieldwork in West New Britain through McMaster University in the 1980s (McPherson [formerly Scaletta] 1985:13-14, Thurston 1987:21 and Goulden 1996:63-65) had opted for the name Kabana, recommending it replace Bariai in academic literature. An impetus for using the name Kabana is that Bariai has been applied by linguists since Friederici (1913) (according to Chowning [1973:189]) as a label for the sub-family to which Bariai proper belongs, and so Kabana is a conveniently unique label for distinguishing Bariai proper from the wider sub-family, which includes Lusi and Kove. However, since the name Kabana is unacceptable to many of its speakers, and because of its derogatory connotation in Amara, the compiler of this dictionary recommends that the name Bariai be retained as the language name and that Kabana be dropped from the literature. Thurston, Goulden and McPherson (personal communication, 2005) are no longer favouring the name Kabana.
Linguistic Homogeneity
Bariai has no sub-dialects. This is a claim the people themselves make, validated by our research and experience over the last fifteen years among the Bariai. While the language is essentially homogeneous, there are a few words (marked as variants within some entries) which exhibit slight pronunciation variations between the eastern villages (Kokopo and Gurisi), Akonga, and the rest of language group. (See map 2.) These words exhibit no consistent phonological variation pattern.
Previous Research
The Bariai language was first described in German by Georg Friederici (1912), a researcher who never visited the area as far as we know, but worked with a single informant on a ship (Thurston 1987:21). Unfortunately, we do not have access to his work.
More recently Thurston (1987, 1992) described Bariai as Kabana in his description of the sociolinguistic situation in northwest New Britain. His 1987 work is especially groundbreaking in that it offers profound insight into the linguistic and social relationships of all the languages groups of northwest New Britain. Included is an appendix with glosses for about 400 lexical items from each of the northwest New Britain languages, including Bariai.
Goulden (1982, 1989, 1996) has described Bariai in his comparative studies of the languages in the Bariai sub-family, primarily in the area of phonology, but his 1996 work (1996:109-135) also provides a good general overview of the morphosyntax of Bariai and its neighbours. Thurston's and Goulden's works present well-researched analyses of these languages from both sociolinguistic and historical linguistic perspectives, and make a valuable contribution to the typological data bank of Oceanic languages.
Naomi McPherson (formerly Scaletta) has done a great deal of insightful and accurate anthropological work on the Bariai (e.g. Scaletta 1985, 1986, 1987). Most noteworthy is her 1985 ethnography of Bariai firstborn child and mortuary traditions, which not only describes these traditions in detail, but also shows how all of Bariai ideology and world view is closely bound up in them. Her work includes numerous explanations of lexical items.
The compiler of this dictionary, together with a linguistic intern, Peirce Baehr, co-authored a grammar of Bariai in 2005 entitled Bariai Grammar Sketch (Gallagher & Baehr 2005).
History of the project
The compiler, with his wife, Carol Jean Gallagher, began living and working among the Bariai people in 1993 as members of the Summer Institute of Linguistics. The goal of the project has been to do language development through linguistics, literacy and Bible translation. The Gallaghers, together with their children, Erin and Adam, have resided in the village of Bambak for approximately four months of each year since 1993. Peirce Baehr worked alongside the Gallaghers during the year of 2004 as part of the Graduate Internship Programme of the Summer Institute of Linguistics in the United Kingdom.
Methodology
In the initial phase of language learning, we tried our best to write down every word we heard into notebooks. Tape recordings also proved to be a valuable tool at this stage for capturing natural texts and for mastering correct pronunciation. Computer software such as Shoebox (and later Toolbox) became effective tools for interlinearisation and compiling and organising lexical entries.
After gaining a fundamental proficiency in the language, we proceeded to collect more obscure vocabulary using wordlists such as are found in Healey (1975), Kooyers (n.d.) and a 2,000-item elicitation list compiled by Malcolm Ross. Mihalic's Jacaranda Dictionary and Grammar of Melanesian Pidgin (1971) also proved to be a useful tool. Later I developed a computer-generated list of possible words based upon the phonology and syllable patterns of the language, then worked with native speakers to eliminate items from the list which did not constitute true words. However, that method became tedious, so it was abandoned. The process of doing grammar research, literacy, and Bible translation work has also been an invaluable opportunity for discovering new vocabulary. However, after 12 years we still only had about 2,000 unique entries in our lexical database, together with about 700 phrasal units and idioms.
In 2004, with the help of Peirce Baehr, we conducted a data elicitation workshop in Bambak village. We endeavoured to follow a method of lexical elicitation developed by Ronald Moe, which is based upon semantic domains. (See Moe [2004a-d], and http://www.sil.org/computing/ddp/.) We had a total of 24 Bariai participants working through over 1,700 all-encompassing domains, listing as many lexical items as they could think of for each domain. Leading questions written by Moe helped participants to grasp the scope of each domain. Part of this workshop involved working with the participants to collect the names of flora and fauna. Several pictorial resources proved to be invaluable in this effort, including Allen & Swainston (1993), Coates & Peckover (2001) and Womersley (1978). I am indebted to the authors of these works for the scientific names used in this dictionary. A report of our workshop was written by Peirce Baehr (2004). The result of this eight-day elicitation effort was seven notebooks full of new data. After painstakingly entering all of this data and cross-checking it with the data we had already collected, the number of lexical entries increased by 75%. Much work was also done with our co-workers, Grevasius Mondo, John Kuri, Peter Biriu, and John Golua to define words and to provide examples of usage.
Bariai alphabet and pronunciation
The letters of the Bariai alphabet are as follows: a, b, d, e, g, i, k, l, m, n, o, p, r, s, t, and u. The phonetic values of these symbols are generally the same as those of the corresponding symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet. The r is pronounced as a trill. The digraph ng represents the phoneme /ŋ/. The voiced plosives b, d and g freely vary with [B], [ɾ] and [Ä] respectively in non-word-initial environments. However, such weakening or shortening does not occur after a homorganic nasal (m, n and ng [ŋ] respectively). Also, the velar g never weakens to [Ä] after a consonant or utterance-finally. All intervocalic, non-morpheme-initial instances of b are weakened to [B]. The non-low vowels i, e, o and u are desyllabified when they occur immediately before or after any vowel that is of a lower height. This produces nearly all possible sequences of vowel onglides and offglides. Stress is normally placed upon the penultimate syllable, but see Gallagher & Baehr (2005:9-25) for a more complete description of stress placement and of the phonology.
The Scope and Limitations of this Dictionary
Nearly every Bariai person over the age of five is bilingual in Tok Pisin. This high degree of bilingualism gives rise to code-switching between the two languages. However, Tok Pisin terms rarely supplant their Bariai counterparts, but act instead like parallel vocabulary. Partly for this reason, after more than a century of influence from Tok Pisin, the Bariai language has remained the first language of all locally-born residents. However, this dictionary makes no attempt to include the numerous Tok Pisin vocabulary which occur in colloquial speech. Instead, only a handful of borrowed terms have been included. A few items of Latin and Kuanua origin have been included because of their importance to Bariai religious and/or political life. Also, with rare exceptions, proper names have been avoided.
This dictionary is far from perfect. Even a few days prior to its publication, new vocabulary was being discovered, and it is certain that many words, idioms, and senses remain undiscovered. There are undoubtedly errors of spelling and definition. However, it was felt that the research in this project has reached a sufficient stage of progress where it might prove to be useful to the Bariai people and to the academic world.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks goes to Peirce Baehr who helped us to carry out the data collection which has greatly improved this dictionary. Thanks for sharing not only your effort and expertise, but also your friendship.
The Bariai people who have contributed to this research are too numerous to name individually here. Indeed, they consist of men, women, old people and young people from every Bariai village. Some of these dear people have already passed away. How does one begin to thank such patient and gracious people? My heartfelt thanks goes to all of them, and especially to my co-workers, Grevasius Mondo, John Kuri, Peter Biriu and John Golua. I wish to especially thank Clara Nuka for her expertise in identifying shellfish. I also wish to thank Paul Pupua, Peter Kaitu, Bill Angen, John Kataka, Alois Anis, Stephan Talania, Augustine Kaloga, Anton Moroka, Joe Bola, Joe Avel, Tomas Aipao, and Dixon Kandiko for their assistance in the final revisions. It is my sincere hope that this dictionary become a symbol of our gratitude to all of our Bariai friends, and also that it remain for them a helpful tool for education, as well as an effective preservation of their beautiful language.
Map 1: Bariai Language Area in Papua New Guinea
Map 2: Bariai Language Area Enlarged
Abbreviations
|
adj. |
adjective |
|
adv. |
adverb |
|
cnj. |
conjunction |
|
excl. |
exclusive |
|
expr. |
expression |
|
imperf. |
imperfect aspect |
|
incl. |
inclusive |
|
intj. |
interjection |
|
lit. |
literally |
|
n. |
noun |
|
n.inal. |
inalienably possessed noun |
|
pl. |
plural |
|
pron. |
pronoun |
|
prep. |
preposition |
|
prt. |
particle |
|
qnt. |
quantifier |
|
redup. |
reduplicated form |
|
sg. |
singular |
|
sp. |
species or specific set member |
|
v.i. |
intransitive verb |
|
v.ni. |
non-inflecting verb |
|
v.r. |
reflexive verb |
|
v.t. |
transitive verb |
Bibliography
Allen, Gerald R. and Roger Swainston, 1993. Reef Fishes of New Guinea: A Field Guide for Divers, Anglers and Naturalists. Madang: Christensen Research Institute.
Baehr, Peirce, 2004. Developing a Bariai dictionary. Unpublished electronic document. Ukarumpa: SIL.
Chowning, Ann, 1973. Milke's ‘New Guinea cluster’: the evidence from northwest New Britain. Oceanic Linguistics 12:189-243.
Coates, Brian J. and William S. Peckover, 2001. Birds of New Guinea and the Bismark Archipelago: a Photographic Guide. Alderley, Queensland: Dove Publications.
French, Bruce and Celia Bridle, 1978. Food Crops of Papua New Guinea. Vudal College of Agriculture. Madang: Kristen Press.
Friedrici, Georg, 1912. Beiträg zur Völker- und Sprachenkunde von Deutsch-Neuguinea. In: Mitteilungen aus den Deutschen Schutzgebieten. Ergänzungsheft 5. Berlin: Mittler und Sohn.
1913. Untersuchungen über eine melanesiche Wanderstrasse. In: Mitteilungen aus den Deutschen Schutzgebieten. Ergänzungsheft 7. Berlin: Mittler und Sohn.
Gallagher, Steve and Peirce Baehr, 2005. Bariai Grammar Sketch. Data Papers on Papua New Guinea Languages vol. 49. Ukarumpa: SIL.
Goulden, Rick J., 1982. A comparative study of Lusi and Bariai, two Austronesian languages of West New Britain. Unpublished M.A. thesis. McMaster University.
1989. An orthographic problem: /w/ and /y/ in Lusi and Kabana. In: Ray Harlow & Robin Hooper, eds, VICAL 1. Oceanic Languages. Papers from the Fifth International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics, 183-196. Auckland: Linguistic Society of New Zealand.
1996. The Maleu and Bariai languages of West New Britain. In: M.D. Ross, ed, Studies of Languages of New Britain and New Ireland, 63-144. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
Hargreaves, Dorothy and Bob Hargreaves, 1970a. Tropical Blossoms of the Pacific. Lahaina, Hawaii: Ross-Hargreaves.
1970b. Tropical Trees of the Pacific. Lahaina, Hawaii: Ross-Hargreaves.
Healey, Alan, 1975. Language Learner's Field Guide. Ukarumpa: SIL.
Hinton, Alan, n.d. Guide to Shells of Papua New Guinea. Port Moresby: Robert Brown & Associates.
Holdsworth, David K., 1977. Medicinal plants of Papua New Guinea: technical paper No. 175. Noumea, New Caledonia: South Pacific Commission.
Kooyers, Orneal, n.d. English-Vernacular Wordlist. Ukarumpa: SIL.
Mackay, Roy D., 1986. Papua New Guinea Flora & Fauna. Bathurst, N.S.W.: Robert Brown & Associates.
1987. Papua New Guinea Birds. Bathurst, N.S.W.: Robert Brown & Associates.
Mihalic, F. S.V.D., 1971. The Jacaranda Dictionary and Grammar of Melanesian Pidgin. Port Moresby: The Jacaranda Press.
Moe, Ronald, 2004a. Domain templates. Unpublished electronic document. SIL International.
2004b. Instructions for filling out the domain templates. Unpublished electronic document. SIL International.
2004c. Lexical Elicitation Workshop: instructions for workshop leaders. Unpublished electronic document. SIL International.
2004d. Steps in developing a dictionary: dictionary development program. Unpublished electronic document. SIL International.
Ross, M.D., 1988. Proto Oceanic and the Austronesian languages of Western Melanesia. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
Scaletta, Naomi M., 1985. Primogeniture and primogenitor: firstborn child and mortuary traditions among the Kabana (Bariai) of West New Britain, Papua New Guinea. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis. McMaster University.
1986. Childbirth: A case history from West New Britain, Papua New Guinea. Oceana 57:1, 33-52.
1987. Death by sorcery: the social dynamics of dying in Bariai, West New Britain. In: D.A. Counts and D.R. Counts, eds, Aging and its Transformations: Moving Toward Death in Pacific Societies. ASAO Monograph Series 11, 223-247. University Press of America: Washington.
Taylor, Ron and Valerie Taylor, 1987. Papua New Guinea Marine Fishes. Bathurst, N.S.W.: Robert Brown & Associates.
Thurston, William, 1987. Processes of change in the languages of north-western New Britain. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
1992. Sociolinguistic typology and other factors effecting change in north-western New Britain, Papua New Guinea. In: Tom Dutton, ed, Culture Change, Language Change: Case Studies from Melanesia, 123-139. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
Womersley, John S., 1978. Handbooks of the Flora of Papua New Guinea. Volume I. Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press.