The life history of a speech community: Guugu Yimidhirr at Hopevale

Abstract

In late 1983, the linguist Noreen Pym visited the Aboriginal community of Hopevale, near Cooktown on the Cape York Peninsula, for fourr months. During two weeks of this time she carried out research on changes in the Guugu Yimidhirr language spoken there. In a paper called 'Observations on language change at Hope Vale',1 Pym concludes that the Guugu Yimidhirr language '[t]oday . . . is spoken only by the elderly'(p. 153). After describing the range of changes she detects in the speech of two anonymous women at Hopevale (which she contrasts with the 'traditional' form of Guugu Yimidhirr documented in an earlier descrip­ tion of mine)2 she concludes (p.165) that 'Guugu Yimidhirr is in danger of disappearing completely'. I spent several months at Hopevale at the end of 1984 without suspecting that Guugu Yimidhirr was on the brink of death, and I was thus surprised at Pym's findings from a year earlier. She found that Hopevale people, especially children and young adults, are unable to use Guugu Yimidhirr in most contexts and that their knowledge of the language is limited and imperfect. It seemed to me, on the other hand, that both Guugu Yimidhirr — albeit in a constantly changing form — and English — also changing from moment to moment — are both alive and well at Hopevale, and that they both have shared complementary roles in the communicative repertoires of all Hopevale people. The discrepancy between our im­ pressions led me to ponder how two trained observers could have come to such different conclusions. Since both Pym and I hope that our research at Hopevale will have beneficial effects for the community (she characterises her paper as having been written 'for the people at Hope Vale'), I thought it might be useful to explore our different perspectives by examin­ ing language at Hopevale in a somewhat wider social and historical context. Language and language policy are serious issues at Hopevale. Nonetheless, people both inside and outside the community have differing opinions about the place and nature of language in Hopevale life. A look at the development of the speech community may resolve, or at least locate with precision, some apparent contradictions and dilemmas. One irony is this: 1984 is not the first time an observer has claimed that English was taking over and Guugu Yimidhirr dying among the people of Hopevale or their forebears. Various observers, as I note below, have made the same claim repeatedly since before 1900! If Guugu Yimidhirr John Haviland is currently a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California. He has worked with Mayan Indians in southeastern Mexico and with Guugu Yimid-hirr-speaking Aborigines at Hopevale, learning their languages and trying to participate in and understand their social lives.