The story of the Fijian storyteller

In the gradual fading away of traditional stories and story-telling due to new occupations of both the tellers and the listeners in a changing society, the oral art takes on a new dimension in the form of “snippets”, short stories often containing a slice of humour. A cultural and linguistic analysis of a collection of these stories tells us much about a large group of multi-dialectal Pacific islanders, the Fijians. These stories provide insights into sources of humour, popular expressions, and reactions to change in modern Fijian society. They constitute a popular but largely unrecognised genre. This paper presents aspects of the form and style of this art

The glottal stop in Nasarowaqa Fijian and other Oceanic languages

This thesis identifies the sources of the glottal stop in Nasarowaqa Fijian and in other Oceanic languages seeing that some glottal stops are reflexes of the Austronesian glottal stop phoneme while some are independent developments within the language themselves. Double glottalling, as it occurs in Nasarowaqa Fijian, is described and notes that while k-glottalling is a typical Oceanic phoneme and t-glottalling is not so common, both forms of glottalling occur in Nasarowaqa Fijian. This thesis also describes k-glottalling amongst children of Lau and posits a possible link between speakers that replace /k/ with the glottal stop. The multidialectal language situation in Nasarowaqa is examined. This study identifies and describes the dialect of the place and gives an account as to why the people are not speaking the Nasarowaqa Fijian. In addition, this study notes that phonological similarities shared between Nasarowaqa Fijian and the dialects of Namuavoivoi and Nakalou and classes them as a communalect in the Eastern Fijian group of languages of the Oceanic subgroup of the Austronesian language family. Chapter one provides the background to the study and states its aims. Chapter two outlines the ethnography of the people of Nasarowaqa while language and the language situation are described in chapter three. Explanations of language change especially through contact is summarised in chapter four and chapter five discusses the features and uses of the glottal stop. The occurrence of the glottal stop in Oceanic languages and their sources are presented in chapter six while chapter seven discusses the occurrence of the glottal stop in Fijian. Chapter eight concludes the thesis by responding to the issues raised in chapter one focusing on the glottal stop, glottalling and language use in Nasarowaqa and in the Oceanic languages

Catering for cultural and linguistic diversity: using teacher created information texts

Teachers in the Pacific region have often signalled the need for more locally produced information texts in both the vernacular and English, to engage their readers with local content and to support literacy development across the curriculum. The Information Text Awareness Project (ITAP), initially informed by the work of Nea Stewart-Dore, has provided a means to address this need through supporting local teachers to write their own information texts. This article reports on the impact of an ITAP workshop carried out in Nadi, Fiji, in 2012. Nine teacher volunteers from the project trialled the use of the texts in their classrooms with positive results in relation to student learning and belief in themselves as writers

Teachers-as-writers: Writing information texts in English and vernacular

Our contribution to this volume is not on the work of the teacher who inspires the child writer, but the teacher as the writer and illustrator of multilingual texts for classroom use that inspires the child reader. This chapter focuses on a first time teacher writer from Fiji, Bereta¹, who participated in a two day writing workshop known as the Information Text Awareness Project (hereafter ITAP). This chapter commences with an overview of the ITAP which was conducted in Nadi, Fiji, in 2012 with Bereta and 17 teachers from urban, semi-urban and rural contexts within the Nadi educational district. The politics of presenting Western ways of knowing to teachers from diverse cultural and linguistic contexts via a Western pedagogical approach is explored in the second section. We believe that this work involves a moral dimension that needs careful consideration. The third section outlines the eight stages of ITAP where teacher writers such as Bereta produced an English and a vernacular information text for use in their classrooms. The outline of the eight stages of ITAP is justified with links to the research literature. The final section recounts Bereta’s interview data where she talks about using the newly created English and vernacular information texts in the classroom and the community’s response to her inaugural publications. The findings may be of interest to those seeking to establish an adult writing cooperative to produce English and vernacular information texts for classroom use

Catering for cultural and linguistic diversity: using teacher created information texts

Teachers in the Pacific region have often signalled the need for more locally produced information texts in both the vernacular and English, to engage their readers with local content and to support literacy development across the curriculum. The Information Text Awareness Project (ITAP), initially informed by the work of Nea Stewart-Dore, has provided a means to address this need through supporting local teachers to write their own information texts. This article reports on the impact of an ITAP workshop carried out in Nadi, Fiji, in 2012. Nine teacher volunteers from the project trialled the use of the texts in their classrooms with positive results in relation to student learning and belief in themselves as writers

Focus prosody in Fijian: In-situ focus marking

This paper presents an acoustic analysis of focus prosody in Fijian - a verb-first language. We analysed the pitch (f0), intensity, and duration data of the same sentence that vary in the position of narrow focus: (i) initial, (ii) medial, and (iii) final focus, compared to the neutral focus. Compared with neutral focus, we found that narrow focus led to a general elevation of the pitch f0, greater intensity, and longer mean syllable duration. The only exception is for initial focus. Initial focus differs from the other two positions, with shorter mean syllable duration and no significant difference in intensity with neutral focus. We used sentences composed solely of juxtaposed NPs to elicit focus because in a verb-first language, focus is otherwise often marked by word order

The Fijian transitive ending-(C)aki/a in loan words

This paper focuses on verbs that were borrowed from English to Standard Fijian (SF) and examine how they are adapted to the verb system of SF. Applying Lexical Dependency, it shows that these loan verbs show derivational relationships between unergative and unaccussative transitive verbs and their corresponding transitive verbs, as the SF verbs do. Unlike SF verbs, however, a loan verb may carry only one ending, namely -(C)aki/a, while a SF may occur as well with the so called "short transitive ending"

Regional Consultation in the Pacific for the preparation of the Global Action Plan of Indigenous Languages. A report

This report highlights the thinking, preferences, recommendations and the voices of a fairly representative population of indigenous peoples in the Pacific and those working with Pacific indigenous languages in whatever capacity they have. Participants were invited to register for a virtual conference and be consulted on their views towards an action plan dedicated to a decade on indigenous languages. The views in this consultation reflect participant responses to pre-determined consultation questions and platforms