The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee

by Jared Diamond

  When I arrived in Papua New Guinea and first heard Neo-Melanesian, I was scornful of it. It sounded like long-winded, grammarless baby-talk. On speaking a form of English according to my own notion of baby-talk, I was disturbed to discover that New Guineans did not understand me. My assumption that Neo-Melanesian words meant the same as their English cognates led to spectacular disasters, notably when I tried to apologize to a woman in her husband’s presence for accidentally jostling her, only to find that Neo-Melanesian pushim does not mean ‘push’ but instead means ‘have sexual intercourse with’.

  Neo-Melanesian proved to be as strict as English in its grammatical rules. It was a subtle language that let one express anything sayable in English. It even let one make some distinctions that cannot be expressed in English except by means of clumsy circumlocutions. For example, the English pronoun ‘we’ actually lumps together two quite different concepts: ‘I, plus you to whom I am speaking’, and ‘I, plus one or more other people, but not including you to whom I am speaking’. In Neo-Melanesian these two separate meanings are expressed by the words yumi and mipela respectively. After I have been using Neo-Melanesian for a few months and then meet an English-speaker who starts talking about ‘we’, I often find myself wondering, ‘am I included or not in your “we”?’

  Neo-Melanesian’s deceptive simplicity and actual suppleness stem partly from its vocabulary, partly from its grammar. Its vocabulary is based on a modest number of core words whose meaning varies with context and becomes extended metaphorically. For instance, while Neo-Melanesian gras can mean English ‘grass’ (whence gras bilong solwara [salt water] means ‘seaweed’), it also can mean ‘hair’ (whence man i no gat gras long head bilong em becomes ‘bald man’).

  The derivation of Neo-Melanesian banis bilong susu as the word for ‘bra’ further illustrates the suppleness of the core vocabulary. Banis, derived from the English word ‘fence’, is the Neo-Melanesian word with that meaning, as in the expression banis pik for ‘pigpen’. Susu, taken from Malay as the word for ‘milk’, is extended to mean ‘breast’ as well. That sense in turn provides the expressions for ‘nipple’ (ai [eye] bilong susu), ‘prepubertal girl’ (i no gat susu bilong em), ‘adolescent girl’ (susu i sanap [stand up]), and ‘aging woman’ (susu i pundaun pinis [fall down finish]). Combining these two roots, banis bilong susu denotes a bra as the fence to keep the breasts in, just as banis pik denotes pigpen as the fence to keep pigs in.

  Neo-Melanesian grammar appears deceptively simple because of what it lacks or else expresses by circumlocutions. These omissions include such seemingly standard grammatical items as plural and case forms of nouns, inflectional endings of verbs, the passive voice of verbs, and most prepositions and verb tenses. Yet Neo-Melanesian has passed far beyond baby-talk and vervet sounds in many other respects, including its conjunctions and auxiliary verbs and pronouns, and its ways of expressing verb moods and aspects. It is a normal complex language in its hierarchical organization of phonemes, syllables, and words. It lends itself so well to hierarchical organization of phrases and sentences that election speeches by New Guinean politicians rival the German prose of Thomas Mann in their convoluted structure.

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  At first, I ignorantly assumed that Neo-Melanesian was a delightful aberration among the world’s languages. It had obviously arisen in the 170 years since English ships started visiting New Guinea, but I supposed that it had somehow developed from baby-talk that colonists spoke to the natives they believed incapable of learning English. Only when I began working in Indonesia and learned the Indonesian language did I sense that Neo-Melanesian origins exemplified a much broader phenomenon. On the surface, Indonesian is incomprehensible to an English speaker and totally unrelated to Neo-Melanesian, because its vocabulary is largely Malay. Nevertheless, Indonesian reminded me of Neo-Melanesian in its word use and in the grammatical items that it possessed or lacked.

  As it turns out, dozens of other languages resemble Neo-Melanesian and Indonesian in structure. They have arisen independently around the globe, with vocabularies variously derived largely from English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Malay, or Arabic. They appeared especially in and around plantations, forts, and trading posts, where populations speaking different languages came into contact and needed to communicate, but where social circumstances impeded the usual solution of each group learning the other’s language. Many cases throughout the tropical Americas and Australia, and on tropical islands of the Caribbean, Pacific, and Indian Oceans, involved European colonists importing workers who came from afar and spoke many different tongues. Other European colonists set up forts or trading posts in already densely populated areas of China, Indonesia, or Africa.

  Strong social barriers between the dominant colonists and the imported workers or local populations made the former unwilling, the latter unable, to learn the other’s language. Usually the colonists scorned the local people, but in China the scorn was mutual: when English traders set up a post at Canton in 1664, the Chinese would no more abase thenselves by learning the foreign devils’ language or teaching them Chinese than would the English learn from or teach the heathen Chinese. Even if those social barriers had not existed, the workers would have had few opportunities to learn the colonists’ tongue, because workers so greatly outnumbered colonists. Conversely, the colonists would also have found it difficult to learn ‘the’ workers’ tongue, because so many different languages were often spoken among the workers.

  Out of the temporary linguistic chaos that followed the plantations’ or forts’ founding, simplified but stabilized new languages emerged. Consider the evolution of Neo-Melanesian as an example. After English ships began to visit Melanesian islands just east of New Guinea in about the year 1820, the English also took islanders to work on the sugar plantations of Queensland and Samoa, where workers of many language groups were thrown together. From this Babel sprung the Neo-Melanesian language, of which the vocabulary is eighty per cent English, fifteen per cent Tolai (the Melanesian group that furnished many of the workers), and the rest derived from Malay, German, and other languages. The German element was added when German traders arrived in the 1870s and took over northeastern New Guinea as a colony in 1884. Germans must often have shouted the expletive heraus! (‘get out!’) at New Guineans, thereby inspiring the Neo-Melanesian words raus for ‘get out’ and rausim for ‘throw out’, as well as metaphorical extensions such as rausim bol for ‘castrate’.

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  Linguists distinguish two stages in the emergence of the new languages: initially, the crude languages (termed pidgins), then later the more complex ones, referred to as creoles. Pidgins arise as a second language for colonists and workers who speak differing native (first) languages and need to communicate with each other. Each group (colonists or workers) retains its native language for use within its own group; each group uses the pidgin to communicate with the other group, and in addition workers on a polyglot plantation may use pidgin to communicate with other groups of workers. An illustration of how quickly pidgins may arise is given by my own experience soon after I first arrived in Indonesia. An Indonesian worker and I were dropped together by helicopter in an uninhabited mountain range to survey birds. We had no Indonesian/English dictionary, knew nothing of each other’s language, and could teach each other words only by pointing. Within a week we had evolved a crude pidgin, based solely on Indonesian nouns, to communicate about camp chores: for instance rice fire meant ‘to cook rice’, while bird binoculars meant ‘to watch birds’.

  Compared to normal languages, pidgins are greatly impoverished in their sounds, vocabulary, and syntax. A pidgin’s sounds are generally only those common to the two or more native languages thrown together. For example, many New Guineans find it hard to pronounce our consonants ƒ and v, but I and other native English speakers find it hard to pronounce the vowel tones and nasalized sounds rampant in many New Guinean languages. Such sounds became largely excluded from New Guinean pidgins and then from t
he Neo-Melanesian creole that developed from them. Words of early-stage pidgins consist largely of nouns, verbs, and adjectives, with few or no articles, auxiliary verbs, conjunctions, prepositions, or pronouns. As for grammar, early-stage pidgin discourse typically consists of short strings of words with little phrase construction, no regularity in word order, no subordinate clauses, and no inflectional endings on words. Together with that impoverishment, variability of speech within and between individuals is a hallmark of early-stage pidgins, which approximate an anarchic linguistic free-for-all.

  Pidgins that are used only casually by adults who otherwise retain their own separate native languages persist at this rudimentary level. For example, a pidgin known as Russonorsk grew up to facilitate barter between Russian and Norwegian fishermen who encountered each other in the Arctic. That lingua franca persisted throughout the Nineteenth Century but never developed further, as it was used only to transact simple business during brief visits. Both those groups of fishermen spent most of their time speaking Russian or Norwegian with their compatriots. In New Guinea, on the other hand, the pidgin gradually became more regular and complex over many generations because it was used intensively on a daily basis, but most children of New Guinean workers continued to learn their parents’ native languages as their first language until after the Second World War.

  However, pidgins evolve rapidly into creoles when a generation of one of the groups contributing to a pidgin begins to adopt the pidgin itself as its native language. That generation then finds itself using pidgin for all social purposes, not only for discussing plantation tasks or bartering. Compared to pidgins, creoles have a larger vocabulary, much more complex grammar, and consistency within and between individuals. Creoles can express virtually any thought expressible in a normal language, whereas trying to say anything even slightly complex is a desperate struggle in pidgin. Somehow, without any equivalent of the Académie Francaise to lay down explicit rules, a pidgin expands and stabilizes to become a uniform and more sophisticated language.

  This process of creolization is a natural experiment in language evolution that has unfolded independently dozens of times in the modern world. The sites for the experiment have ranged from mainland South America and Africa to Pacific islands; the labourers, from Africans and Portuguese to Chinese and New Guineans; the dominant colonists, from English and Spaniards to other Africans and Portuguese; and the century, from at least the Seventeenth to the Twentieth. What is striking is that the linguistic outcomes of all these independent natural experiments share so many similarities, both in what they lack and in what they possess. On the negative side, creoles are simpler than normal languages in that they usually lack conjugations of verbs for tense and person, declensions of nouns for case and number, most prepositions, distinctions between events in the past and present, and agreement of words for gender. On the positive side, creoles are advanced over pidgins in many respects: consistent word order; singular and plural pronouns for the first, second, and third persons; relative clauses; indications of the anterior tense (describing actions occurring before the time under discussion, whether or not that time is the present); and particles or auxiliary verbs preceding the main verb and indicating negation, anterior tense, conditional mood, and continuing as opposed to completed actions. Furthermore, most creoles agree in placing a sentence’s subject, verb, and object in that particular order, and also agree in the order of particles or auxiliaries preceding the main verb.

  The factors responsible for this remarkable convergence are still controversial among linguists. It is as if you drew a dozen cards fifty times from well-shuffled decks and almost always ended up with no hearts or diamonds, but with one king, a jack, and two aces. The interpretation I find most convincing is that of linguist Derek Bickerton, who views many of the similarities among creoles as a result of a human genetic blueprint for language.

  Bickerton derived his view from his studies of creolization in Hawaii, where sugar planters imported workers from China, the Philippines, Japan, Korea, Portugal, and Puerto Rico in the late Nineteenth Century. Out of that linguistic chaos, and following Hawaii’s annexation by the US in 1898, a pidgin based on English developed into a fully fledged creole. The immigrant workers themselves retained their original native language. They also learned the pidgin that they heard, but they did not improve on it, despite its gross deficiencies as a medium of communication. That, however, posed a big problem for the immigrants’ Hawaiian-born children. Even if the children were lucky enough to hear a normal language at home because both mother and father were from the same ethnic group, that normal language was useless for communicating with children and adults from other ethnic groups. Many children were less fortunate and heard nothing but pidgin even at home, when mother and father came from different ethnic groups. The children also did not have adequate opportunities to learn English because of the social barriers isolating them and their worker parents from the English-speaking plantation owners. Presented with an inconsistent and impoverished model of human language in the form of pidgin, Hawaiian labourers’ children spontaneously ‘expanded’ pidgin into a consistent and complex creole within a generation.

  In the mid-1970s Bickerton was still able to trace the history of this creolization by interviewing working-class people born in Hawaii between 1900 and 1920. Like all of us, those children soaked up language skills in their early years but then became fixed in their ways, so that their speech in their old age continued to reflect the language spoken around them in their youth. (My children too will soon be wondering why their father persists in saying ‘icebox’ rather than ‘refrigerator’, decades after the iceboxes of my parents’ own childhood disappeared.) Hence the elderly adults of various ages, whom Bickerton interviewed in the 1970s, provided him with virtually frozen snapshots of various stages in Hawaii’s pidgin-to-creole transition, depending on the subjects’ year of birth. In that way, Bickerton was able to conclude that creolization had begun by 1900, was complete by 1920, and was accomplished by children in the process of acquiring the ability to speak.

  In effect, the Hawaiian children lived out a modified version of the Psammeticus experiment. Unlike the Psammeticus children, the Hawaiian children did hear adults speaking and were able to learn words. Unlike normal children, however, the Hawaiian children heard little grammar, and what they did hear was inconsistent and rudimentary. Instead, they created their own grammar. That they did indeed create it, rather than somehow borrowing grammar from the language of Chinese labourers or English plantation owners, is clear from the many features of Hawaiian creole that differ from English or from the workers’ languages. The same is true for Neo-Melanesian: its vocabulary is largely English, but its grammar includes many features absent from English.

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  I do not want to exaggerate the grammatical similarities among creoles by implying that they are all essentially the same. Creoles do vary depending on the social history surrounding creolization – especially on the initial ratio between the numbers of plantation owners (or colonists) and workers, how quickly and to what extent that ratio changed, and for how many generations the early-stage pidgin could gradually borrow more complexity from existing languages. Yet many similarities remain, particularly among those creoles that quickly arose from early-stage pidgins. How did each creole’s children come so quickly to agree on a grammar, and why did the children of different creoles tend to reinvent the same grammatical features again and again?

  It was not because they did it in the easiest or sole way possible to devise a language. For instance, creoles use prepositions (short words preceding nouns), as do English and some other languages, but there are other languages that dispense with prepositions in favour of postpositions following nouns, or else noun case endings. Again, creoles happen to resemble English in placing subject, verb, and object in that order, but the borrowing from English could not account for creole grammar, because creoles derived from languages with a different word order still use t
he subject-verb-object order.

  These similarities among creoles seem likely to stem from a genetic blueprint that the human brain possesses for learning language during childhood. Such a blueprint has been widely assumed ever since the linguist Noam Chomsky argued that the structure of human language is far too complex for a child to learn within just a few years, in the absence of any hard-wired instructions. For example, at the age of two my twin sons were just beginning to use single words. As I write this paragraph a bare twenty months later, still several months short of their fourth birthday, they have already mastered most of the rules of basic English grammar that people who immigrate to English-speaking countries as adults often fail to master after decades. Even before the age of two, my children had learned to make sense of the initially incomprehensible babble of adult sound coming at them, to recognize groupings of syllables into words, and to realize which groupings constituted underlying words despite variations of pronunciation within and between adult speakers.

  Such difficulties convinced Chomsky that children learning their first language would face an impossible task unless much of language’s structure were already pre-programmed into them. Hence Chomsky reasoned that we are born with a ‘universal grammar’ already wired into our brains to give us a spectrum of grammatical models encompassing the range of grammars in actual languages. This pre-wired universal grammar would be like a set of switches, each with various alternative positions. The switch positions would then become fixed to match the grammar of the local language that the growing child hears.