The Salibury's Obsession

A Kiwi family's life-long passion for a rare Pacific language is ensuring its safe passage into posterity.

Mary and Kevin Salisbury, both academics living and working in Auckland, have been studying the Pukapuka language and culture for over 30 years. The Pukapuka islands are part of the Cooks but lie more than 1100 km to the north of Rarotonga‹much closer to Samoa than to their political capital.

While studying linguistics back in the seventies, Mary was required to select for study an unwritten language. She chose Pukapuka, because she knew some Aucklanders spoke the tongue.

With their help, she and husband Kevin visited the islands, fell in love with the inhabitants‹and thus began a life-long affair with everything Pukapukan‹the people, their history, music, language and culture.

Only about 5000 people speak the language today and just around 600 actually live in Pukapuka. A like number is distributed throughout the Cook Islands, a couple of thousand live in New Zealand and the rest are around Brisbane in Australia. "It's a very interesting language from a historical perspective, because it's basically a Samoic language (related closely to Samoan, Tuvaluan, etc) but located close to eastern Polynesian languages," says University of the South Pacific senior lecturer in linguists, Dr Paul Geraghty.

"Some features of the language are closer to Samoan while others are shared with Manihiki/Rakahanga and Tongareva," say Mary and Kevin.

"What makes it interesting is that it is in the middle between the western and eastern geographical and cultural areas of Polynesia." It is not that Mary and Kevin are the first to have studied this culture in detail.

Several scholars have done so since the beginning of the 20th century but the commitment with which the couple has compiled, documented and even published material on Pukapuka is significant.

Mary has recently earned her doctorate for her work on the grammar of the Pukapuka language from the University of Auckland. This is the most detailed and definitive study of the language to date.

She is a lecturer in linguistics at Massey University which has funded one of her research projects.

The work is intended for linguists and a lay version that can be used in schools and by migrants who want to stay in touch with the language is under printing.

Over the years, she has continually added to a dictionary of Pukapuka words that was initially compiled in the early eighties. She worked with dozens of Pukapukans both in Pukapuka and Auckland over several years. The new, greatly expanded two-way English-Pukapukan dictionary, is under publication and is slated to hit the bookstores shortly.

The modest couple don't see themselves as "rescuers of a dying language" as some people have referred to them. "We're not rescuers," says Mary. "And the Pukapuka people are too proud and love their language too much to let it die away. What we have done is documented things about their language and culture." Given the small numbers that speak it and the influence of other languages on its speakers particularly because of migration, the language is endangered but not dying, says Kevin.

Being far up north from the centre of power, Pukapuka suffers from the out-of-sight-out-of-mind syndrome.

The islands have had long-standing communication, transportation and logistic problems.

The language too has been swept to the sidelines by the administration. In its Language Bill of 2002, the Cook Islands government stopped short of recognising Pukapuka as an official language of the country. This despite Pukapuka schools topping the national school examinations.

Kevin's specialisation is ethnomusicology and over the decades he has studied, compiled, recorded and written hundreds of Pukapukan chants that have been hitherto passed down orally from generation to generation.

"Most chants are about love and they also have chants for fishing and other activities." The couple has accumulated a fund of knowledge about this isolated, ancient, now dispersed culture.

Kevin has plans of publishing their mythologies, legends and even children's books to keep future generations interested in things Pukapukan. Miriam, their daughter has just graduated with a degree in statistics. She is lending her expertise in designing questionnaires and conducting statistical analyses.

The family's obsession with Pukapuka only deepens with the years. In July, Mary and Kevin will both present papers at the conference of Pacific linguistics that will be held at Port Vila in Vanuatu.

And what next? "There's a museum of sound out there in the Cook Islands that needs to be studied," says Kevin.

"We'd like to work with graduates of the University of the South Pacific or other such institution on a project like this because of its scale." The passion of a lifetime continues.