Portuguese in East Timor...

Friday 24/3/2000

Summary:

Like all of Melanesia, Timor is an island of many languages. Tetum is the principal indigenous language of East Timor, and in particular, Tetum Praca, the creolised form of the language that evolved as the lingua franca for the Portuguese colonisers and the indigenous population over nearlyfour centuries.

In 1974,when the Portuguese decided to withdraw from East Timor, the Fretilin independence movement had already formulated its language policy: Portuguese was to be retained as the official language. Instead, the Indonesian invasion in 1975 brought Bahasa Indenosia, the language of Indonesia, a standardised variety of Malay, in which a whole generation of East Timorese was schooled.

Now East Timor's National Council of Timorese Resistance has decided to reinstate Portuguese as the official language.

Dr Geoffrey Hull is Director of the Linguistic Survey of East Timor at the University of Western Sydney. His Standard Tetum-English Dictionary was published last year by Allen & Unwin. He explains why Portuguese is the right choice for East Timor.

Details or Transcript:

Song: O Hele Lei

Jill Kitson: East Timorese refugees at the Puckapunyal Safe Haven in Victoria last year, singing a song of freedom in their mother tongue, Tetum.

Welcome to Lingua France. I'm Jill Kitson.

This week: independent East Timor's official language. Dr Geoffrey Hull on why Portuguese is the right choice.

Like all of Melanesia, Timor is an island of many languages. Fifteen indigenous languages are spoken in East Timor; three others are unique to West Timor. Four of East Timor's vernaculars were introduced from north-western Papua over 4,000 years ago. The other eleven belong to the Austronesian family and so are related to Malay and most of the languages of Indonesia, the Philippines and the Pacific. Tetum has long been the principal indigenous language of East Timor.

Early in the 16th century, Portuguese traders brought their language to East Timor. By 1642, the whole island was under Portuguese control. In 1651, the Dutch took over the Western half of the island. In East Timor, the Portuguese appointed a resident governor in 1703, and made Dili the colonial capital in 1769. The lingua franca for the colonisers and the indigenous population was Tetum, which absorbed many elements of Portuguese. The creolised form of the language that evolved was given the name Tetum Praca; praca is Portuguese for marketplace.

When the Portuguese eventually decided to withdraw from East Timor, in 1974, the Fretilin independence movement had already formulated its language policy: Portuguese was to be retained as the official language. Instead, the Indonesian invasion in 1975 brought Bahasa Indonesia, the language of Indonesia, a standardised variety of Malay. Indonesian was taught in schools. A whole generation of Timorese grew up without learning Portuguese. Yet, with independence, East Timor's National Council of Timorese Resistance has decided to reinstate Portuguese as the official language.

Geoffrey Hull is Director of the Linguistic Survey of East Timor at the University of Western Sydney. His Standard Tetum-English Dictionary was published last year. Here he is to answer the question: why Portuguese in East Timor?

Geoffrey Hull: When East Timor was under Indonesian occupation, Jakarta's imposition of Bahasa Indonesia as the official language of the so-called 27th Province seemed to many outsiders a sin against justice, though probably not a sin against nature or again commonsense. Indonesian was, after all, related to most of the territory's languages. Many foreigners even supposed that Tetum, the most widely spoken vernacular, was so closely akin to Indonesian that the two languages must be mutually intelligible. In any case, since East Timor was part of a wider region where Indonesian was the lingua franca, its imposition in the former Portuguese territory could hardly be faulted on practical grounds.

But when the Conselho Nacional da Resistencia Timorense or CNRT announced recently that the official language of independent East Timor will be Portuguese, there was a range of negative reactions in Australia, from puzzlement and incomprehension to irritation and scorn. East Timor has its own lingua franca, Tetum; why was this language not declared the official one? What was wrong with keeping official Indonesian, the language of the region and the one in which a whole generation of East Timorese had been educated? Why not indeed adopt English as the official language, given the proximity of Australia and the Australian role in the liberation and reconstruction of the nation, not to mention the enormous usefulness of English as the international language?

And of all the languages to declare official, why Portuguese? Yes, East Timor was a Portuguese territory before 1975 but wasn't Portuguese merely an imposed European language, spoken by white administrators, missionaries and a minority of the indigenous population? And after 24 years of Indonesian domination, surely Portuguese had been largely forgotten. Its sudden revival seemed not only anachronistic but foolishly impractical. So why on earth have Portuguese as the official language of East Timor?

Why indeed. The truth is that those in Australia or elsewhere who question the propriety and wisdom of the CNRT's decision, display a profound ignorance of East Timorese ethnology and culture. If we are to be good and respectful neighbours to East Timor, it's time for a bit of re-education.

Let's look at a few facts. First of all, Portuguese is not an insignificant language. It's the world's sixth biggest language in terms of numbers of speakers, being more widely used than French, German and Russian. Second, official Portuguese is hardly going to be an economic liability for East Timor when the country is planning to live largely off tourism. East Timor's Latinate architecture and way of life will enable it to be promoted as a little piece of the Mediterranean off the north-west coast of Australia. People who speak Portuguese can easily be taught Spanish, Italian and French, all important languages in international tourism. In tourist economies, knowledge of languages means employability and earning capacity.

Third, the Portuguese language is far from moribund in East Timor. That a quarter of the population can still speak it with some degree of fluency is something of a miracle, given the savage persecution of the language by the Indonesians for 24 years. Since Tetum and the other vernaculars are full of Portuguese words, sounds and structures, much of the Portuguese language is immediately comprehensible to Timorese who can't speak it. Portuguese is implicit in the vernaculars of East Timor. Given the right social circumstances, it doesn't take much to activate a language one already understands in part or full.

But we also need to see the Portuguese language in its Timorese context. One of the first facts that strikes the ethnologist or the linguist studying East Timor is that the Portuguese influence is so profound that it's now impossible to separate indigenous elements in the culture from European ones. In East Timor we are dealing with a hybrid culture, a creole society born of 400 years blending of blood, speech and customs. The Indonesians could never understand why East Timor rejected integration so stubbornly, why all their material improvements were received with indifference and ingratitude. This is because the colonial experiences of the Indonesians and the East Timorese were radically different.

The Indonesians had experienced Dutch integrationism. The Dutch, like the British, exploited their colonies economically but left the local languages, cultures and religions largely in place. In the East Indies the Dutch made little effort to spread their own language. Instead they learned Malay themselves and encouraged its use as a lingua franca. But the Portuguese, like their fellow Latins, the Spanish and the French, were avid assimilationists. Their aim was to convert their colonial subjects to the Catholic faith and to Portuguese language and culture. And in this objective they were quite successful, and not least through their policy of promoting intermarriage between the two races, something alien to Dutch apartheid.

Indonesia's attempt to integrate the East Timorese failed quite simply because this people had already been integrated into, and partly assimilated to, Portuguese civilisation, Jakarta's army did not invade a Portuguese 'colony' but an overseas province of Portugal. However backward the place may have been in material terms, East Timor was officially considered an integral part of Portugal, as integral as Lisbon or Coimbra, and Portuguese schoolchildren were taught that Tatamailau, south of Dili, was 'the highest mountain in Portugal.' Portugal's approach was to embrace the Timorese as fellow Portuguese.

This is not to gloss over the shortcomings of the Salazar-Caetano and earlier colonial regimes in East Timor. But if even the less Lusified Timorese preferred Portuguese to Indonesian rule, it was because Portuguese rule was generally minimalistic and laissez-faire. The governors ruled through local kings and chieftains whose ancestors had long since been honoured with baptism and Portuguese aristocratic titles. The Portuguese spread their religion and culture in East Timor, but traditional society carried on largely undisturbed. Portuguese rule in Timor was not sullied by massacres, arbitrary arrest and torture, the destruction of rural cultures, coerced conversions to a new religion, forced resettlement of populations, and plantations of privileged colonists. Indonesian rule was guilty of all this. Its most positive contribution was a material infrastructure which its Army spitefully destroyed when it was forced to withdraw last September.

Part of this infrastructure was an education system which allowed only Indonesian as the medium of instruction, and taught the alien history of Indonesia while totally neglecting East Timorese history and culture. The same Indonesian education that encouraged contempt for everything Portuguese still plays on the minds of certain Timorese youth, who, insecure in their own culture, are easily manipulated by irresponsible foreigners trying to promote English as the official language. A generation deprived of the unversalistic culture formerly taught in Portuguese schools and nurtured on Javanese materialism and narrow state ideology is hardly equipped to make mature value judgements about language. The Timorese civil and Church leaderships are acutely aware of this problem, and are now appealing to Portugal and Brazil for support in restoring Portuguese in the schools.

One great fear of the Timorese leadership is that their country will be gradually anglicised as the Philippines were after the Americans dislodged the Spaniards. Aware that their culture is Latinate, they are determined not to see East Timor turned into a cultural satellite of Australia, like Papua-New Guinea. They are well aware that English is a notorious killer, that Anglophone culture in Australia killed off hundreds of Aboriginal languages in less than 200 years, whereas after four centuries of Lusophone hegemony not one native dialect of East Timor has been lost.

It is this fear of invasive English that explains why, contrary to general expectations, the CNRT has not yet declared Tetum co-official with Portuguese. The Tetum language now has a standardised grammar and spelling. Its vocabulary has been expanded for modern use, and there is a growing literature in it. It could certainly fulfil the role of an official language for domestic purposes. The problem is, however, that the CNRT has before it

the example of countries like the Philippines and Malta. These were anglicised precisely by the American and British governments promoting the local vernaculars to co-official status and abolishing the old established languages, Spanish and Italian respectively. Whereas Tagalog had happily coexisted with Spanish, and Maltese was in a compatible partnership with Italian, neither Tagalog nor Maltese could compete with co-official English, the vehicle of an alien culture. Today the real language of education and higher culture in both the Philippines and Malta is English.

The Timorese leadership are anxious to avoid this fate for their country, and it would appear that their plan is to promote Tetum to co-official status only after Portuguese has been safely restored. Formerly official Indonesian, because of its negative associations, is being gradually phased out of local education and public life. However, for obvious geographical reasons, Indonesian, or Malay, as the CNRT have not incorrectly rechristened it, will always retain a presence in East Timor as a second language. There can similarly be no question that English will have a large presence in East Timor as a regional and international language. However it will not have any official status, since it has no authentic role in the national culture. Indonesian and English will be taught as foreign languages in the secondary schools of the future, and the main languages of the new National University of Timor will be Portuguese and English.

According to current plans, primary education will be through the medium of Portuguese. However, one does wonder how successful this will be, given that most school-age children and illiterate adults are not fluent in the language. It would seem sounder pedagogically to teach literacy through Tetum and the other 14 languages, with students learning Portuguese after learning to read and write their mother tongues. The question of language in education is certain to be a controversial one in East Timor over the coming years. A vernacular literacy program is possible but will need a great deal of planning and funding, given the large number of languages and dialects.

Jill Kitson: Geoffrey Hull. His Standard Tetum-English Dictionary is published by Allen & Unwin. And that's all for this edition of Lingua Franca.

 

It is taken from http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/ling/stories/s113139.htm