May, 21, 2013 09:23 Age: 85 days
FALE Community Engagement Series in Association with the Israeli Embassy (Australia) for Fiji
Category:
Faculty of Arts, Law and Education Community Engagement Series
in Association with the Israeli Embassy (Australia) for Fiji.
Presents
Kaise Baat – Reloaded
Non Indo-Fijian Articulations of Fiji Hindi – Conversations and Performances
Date: Wednesday, 26th and Thursday 27th June, 2013
Time: 6.30pm-9pm/6pm-10pm
Venue: TBC
The University of the South Pacific: Laucala Campus, Suva.
This two-day event on Fiji-Hindi features internationally acclaimed academic and language revival expert Professor Ghilad Zukermann giving a guest lecture on the topic “Language Reclamation, Diversity and Wellbeing.” Professor Ghil'ad Zuckermann is the Chair of Linguistics and Endangered Languages at The University of Adelaide, Australia.
Wednesday, 26th June, 2013
PUBLIC LECTURE
ABSTRACT
This lecture will analyse the ethical, aesthetic and utilitarian benefits of language revival, and propose the establishment of REVIVALISTICS (including Revival Linguistics and Revivalomics), a new interdisciplinary field of inquiry studying systematically the universal constraints and local peculiarities apparent in linguistic and cultural revitalizations across various sociological backgrounds. With coca-colonization and homogenization there will be more and more groups added to the forlorn club of the lost-heritage peoples. Language reclamation will become increasingly relevant as people seek to recover their cultural autonomy, empower their spiritual and intellectual sovereignty, and improve their wellbeing. There is an urgent need to offer perspicacious comparative insights, for example from the Hebrew revival, which is so far the most successful known linguistic reclamation.
The talk will be followed by refreshments and a special memorial DVD screening of the performances by the late Jet Shri Krishna from the 2012 Kaise Baat series.
Thursday 27th June, 2013
Kaise Baat Reloaded: Non Indo-Fijian Articulations of Fiji Hindi – Conversations and Performances
The 2013 Kaise Baat series provides a platform for conversation and performances by Non-Indo- Fijian speakers of Fiji-Hindi. The 2013 series will have a number of speakers in conversation on a topic of their choice, apart from a range of performers, including folksingers and popular singers in performance. The Invited International Guest for the second day of the Kaise Baat series will be Professor Ghil'ad Zuckermann.
Fiji-Hindi: Overview
The major introduced language in the Pacific, according to a study by France Mugler and Jan Tent, other than English is Hindi – in particular, as they document, “…a variety of which, known as Fiji Hindi, is spoken as a first language by about half the population of Fiji (about 380,000 Indo-Fijians) whose ancestors were brought as indentured labourers to work on the sugarcane plantations between 1879 and 1916.” Fiji-Hindi has also become the common language among later free Indian migrants to Fiji. And common currency in spoken words between Indo-Fijians and other ethnic groups like the Indigenous Fijians or I-Taukei, Chinese migrants, other Pacific Islanders, and part-Europeans. In the past, it was a replacement language, post-indenture for plantation or field Hindi, spoken mainly by Colonial Sugar Refining Company officers, but also by colonial officials, and the general colonizer populace. Much of the pioneering work on Fiji-Hindi, in academia, came notably from the discipline of linguistics. This includes major studies of the language, and its grammar by Jeff Segiel and Rodney Moag. This extended into the writing of a translation dictionary of Fiji-Hindi and English. Indo-Fijian writers like Raymond Pillai, argued early on for the legitimacy of the place of Fiji-Hindi into public spaces and mediums like radio and literature. In order to bring Fiji-Hindi beyond the colloquial, Pillai, wrote the play Adhuraa Sapnaa (Shattered Dreams) in 1978 to prove his point on its legitimacy as a language. This was followed by the novel, Dauka Puraan, (Epic of the Subalterns) 2001, a tragi-comic epic saga, tracing life in picaresque fashion in among Indo-Fijians. More recently, films like Adhuraa Sapnaa (based on Pillai’s) play and Pump up the Mandali! and Ghar Pardesh (Home and Abroad) have used Fiji-Hindi. This is a significant departure from earlier films from Fiji that used a Bollywoodish variant of Hindi. Increased usage since 2000, on radio, in advertising across various mediums, on the internet, in public forums as well on open sites like Wikipedia, and in other popular culture forms, such as folk songs, and in rap music has given Fiji-Hindi, the currency, in the public space that Pillai, among others, had asked for.
BRIEF BIO: Professor Ghil‘ad Zuckermann
Professor Ghil‘ad Zuckermann (DPhil, Oxford; PhD, Cambridge, titular; MA Tel Aviv, summa cum laude) is Chair of Linguistics and Endangered Languages at the University of Adelaide, Australia. He is also Visiting Professor at the Pilpel Genomics Lab of the Molecular Genetics Department at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, as well as ‘Oriental Scholar’ and Project 211 Distinguished Visiting Professor at Shanghai International Studies University, China. He is the author of the revolutionary bestseller Israelit Safa Yafa (Israeli – A Beautiful Language; Am Oved, 2008), Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), Revival Linguistics (Oxford University Press, forthcoming), and three chapters of the Israeli Tingo (Keren, 2011). He is the editor of Burning Issues in Afro-Asiatic Linguistics (Cambridge Scholars, 2012) and Jewish Language Contact (in print), a special issue of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language. He is currently establishing Revivalistics, including Revival Linguistics and Revivalomics, and has recently launched the reclamation of the Barngarla Aboriginal language in Port Lincoln, Whyalla and Port Augusta (Eyre Peninsula, South Australia). He was an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Fellow in 2007–2011 and Gulbenkian Research Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge in 2000–2004. He has taught inter alia at the University of Queensland, University of Cambridge and National University of Singapore, and has been a Research Fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Study and Conference Center, Villa Serbelloni, Bellagio, Italy; Israel Institute for Advanced Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Research Centre for Linguistic Typology (RCLT), Institute for Advanced Study, La Trobe University; Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin; and Kokuritsu Kokugo Kenkyūjo, National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, Tokyo.
