Thursday, 2 December 2010

The problem and politics of language

East Timor has many languages, both local and externally imposed. As described in my history post, East Timor was colonised by the Portuguese about 500 years ago. Consequently the “official” language (meaning the language of law and educated people) was Portuguese. The Indonesian invasion changed everything – the speaking of Bahasa Indonesia was enforced in schools and official business. Consequently, most people now speak it.

In practice however, the Timorese have always spoken their own languages amongst themselves the whole time, and the lingua franca is arguably Tetun rather than Bahasa. Tetun is essentially a creole of various local languages with many words borrowed from Portuguese. Everyone in Dili speaks Tetun, but the further away you go, the more local languages become the mother tongue. There are in fact more than 30 languages in the various districts (see map above). Less educated people will only be able to speak their local language, and will not even understand much Tetun.

All this makes things extremely complicated, not to mention political. After independence from Indonesia, Portuguese was chosen as the official language, a controversial decision for many. After all, what’s the point in choosing a language which only educated people over 50 can speak? One might note that the political elite at the time was composed of these people. Many exiled independence leaders spent the 80s and 90s overseas in Portugal or Mozambique.

Even the most optimistic lusophile would admit that less than 5% of the population speak Portuguese. To be fair however, what was the alternative? Bahasa is widely spoken, but to choose it would have been politically unpalatable. Some people say “why not English?” but even fewer people speak English than Portuguese.

Why not Tetun, then? Put simply, it does not have enough words. Written Tetun (which has no agreed form, by the way) borrows huge numbers of words from either Portuguese or Bahasa. It would be impossible to draft complicated laws in Tetun. It is also not used anywhere else in the world, so would not be great for business, whereas Portuguese is at least spoken in a large number of countries, including emerging global power Brazil.

So in the end, they chose Portuguese, for better or for worse. This is already bringing serious complications – MPs are legally obliged to speak Portuguese in parliament but most cannot. I personally haven’t heard a single Timorese speaking it. In theory, Portuguese has been the language used in schools since independence, but in practice very few teachers can speak it well. So, lots of kids are learning in bad Portuguese. Their parents can’t speak it, so kids can’t get help with their homework. As the children who started school since 1999 get older, it will become even more complicated. University-level books are mostly in Bahasa, and all the lecturers are used to teaching in Bahasa. The list of problems goes on. It’s an educational nightmare, and it will take a long time to sort it out.

(I’m extremely glad that I did a beginners course in Tetun at the Dili Institute of Technology, which I would thoroughly recommend to anyone coming here, by the way. Tetun is a really interesting language and, thankfully, it’s incredibly simple. I’ll do it proper justice in a full post sometime soon.)

3 comments:

  1. Thanks for the interesting post, but it's a bit oversimplified. There are two languages called Tetun. The one you wrote about is Tetun Prasa or Tetun Dili, a creole with Portuguese that has limited vocabulary and simplified grammar, which is the lingua franca and the only one foreigners learn. Tetun Terik is a fully-developed local language that's the first language for people living in the yellow part of the map, with a much larger vocabulary, verb tenses, etc. Unfortunately, few people who didn't learn it as babies know how to speak it, and there is virtually nothing published in Tetum Terik.

    Another interesting area to explore is why, nine years after Portuguese was chosen as the official language and the language of instruction in school, Timor-Leste has been so unsuccessful in getting people (including children) to learn and use it. This leads into the bigger question of why the education system is so undervalued, underresourced and ineffective.

    Atu aprende Tetum Prasa fasil duni, maibe asuntu lian komplikado la halimar.

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  2. Thanks Charles. I'm aware there are two types of Tetun (Catharina has a wealth of knowledge on this and explained it during one class) - I simplified it becuase it's pretty difficult to compress the incredible complexity of this issue into a single blogpost.

    I think the 'Portuguese in schools' question is a real timebomb, and agree that it seems education should be a higher priority. I see from the 2011 budget (downloaded from the indispensable La'o Hamutuk website) that the Education budget is $70m next year. This is about the same last year, whilst the overall budget envelope has increased significantly...

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  3. Very nice post Ian, I understand your point of view and also agree with Charles that it is a difficult issue. The only surprise was that you haven't heard a Timorese speaking Portuguese yet... I know it is slow but I have heard timorese people speaking portuguese among themselves even inside supermarkets (maybe you thought it was tetun?), it is not a commom thing to hear, but more and more people are using portuguese. My children go the Portuguese school and there is timorese staff that speaks portuguese there and many children too. ( of course they are the elite, the new elite) but I totally agree that the pace is too slow, the budget is not enough. The situation is so difficult that we cannot even give any suggestions, do you have any? I just feel sorry for this young generation that are having their education in this language chaos

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