Page 445 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

420 P. Chigeza and H. Whitehouse

the rainy time of the northwest winds from December to March. Although these
seasons are shifting now with global climate change, the winds still determine
the sailing, fishing and gardening seasons as they have for millennia (Sharp 1993).
The original languages spoken in the Torres Strait Islands are Kalaw Lagaw Ya, a
related dialect Kalaw Kalaw Ya and Meriam (Shnukal 1996).
The sophistication of island and mainland Australian indigenous languages has
long been underestimated. As Malcolm (1998, p. 119) remarks, Australian languages,
“far from being limited or primitive [are] extremely complex and highly sensitive
communication resources, alongside of which, in some respects, languages such as
English appear to be quite blunt instruments.” During the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, the arrival of other groups to the Torres Strait Islands including South Sea
Islanders, Japanese, Malay and European settlers created a Pidgin English from
which grew a Creole language, known as Broken, Pizin, Blaikman or Torres Strait
Creole (Shnukal 1988).
Pidgins and Creole are considered contact languages; they arise in areas where
people of different languages have had to interact and verbally communicate usu-
ally for trading and commerce purposes. There are many social and historical rea-
sons for the formulation and evolution of these languages. Holmes (2000) describes
a pidgin as a “reduced language” that results from extended contact between people
with no languages in common. A pidgin is no one’s native tongue. A Creole, by
contrast, is an established complex language of relatively recent appearance, usually
with pidgin origins and “used by an entire speech community” (Holmes 2000, p.6).
As Shnukal (1988, p. 4) explains, Creoles “are no different from any other normal
languages in terms of the complexity of their sound and grammatical systems and
the richness of their vocabulary. They are true languages in that they are capable of
expressing their speakers’ need for self-expression and communication.” Torres
Strait Creole emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century and is a true language
and not a pidgin (Tripcony 2000). Crowley and Rigsby (1979) documented the Cape
York and Torres Strait Island area as “linguistically complex.” Islander students
arrive at boarding school with Torres Strait Creole (in both its formal and informal
varieties) as their common language capital and with English – or with versions
Tripcony (2000) called “englishes” – as a second, third or fourth language.
Superficially it may appear that Torres Strait Creole and English/es are similar
in that they share a similar vocabulary. However, the sounds of Creole are very
different and Torres Strait Creole bears very little cultural resemblance to English
in that it does not carry meanings associated with western ways of thinking
(Crowley and Rigsby 1979). Shnukal 1988 noted:
Broken [Torres Strait Creole] has borrowed about 85% of its vocabulary from English
although the borrowed words have changed in the process. On a deeper level, however,
both the systems of meanings and the way the language is used resemble the traditional
languages of the Torres Strait much more than English. It is far easier to translate from a
traditional language into Broken and vice versa than into English. Speakers of any island
language (including Broken) always remark on how uncomfortable they feel when using
English, how ‘frozen’ they find it, even when they speak it extremely well. They find it
difficult to express themselves fully. This is because, as a product and shaper of European
culture, English is alien too much of Islander thinking. (p. 4)