The end of Melanesian stable multilingualism and its consequences for Papuan grammaticology

The literature on the linguistic ecology of New Guinea is full with studies describing widespread early-life multilingualism without shift. That is, Melanesian languages have traditionally been described as being stably passed from generation to generation, even where communities have traditionally been multilingual. Today, the Melanesian pattern of stable multilingualism has been significantly disrupted, with younger community members increasingly dominant in vehicular languages, such as Tok Pisin and Malay. This new dynamic is leading to rapid simplification―that is, loss, reduction or regularization of paradigms, and a preference for certain types of analytical or transparent structures―in many Melanesian languages. Grammar writers of Papuan language can increasingly expect to find simplification and variation in the languages of even small speech communities as shift advances, and transmission of the traditional languages weakens. Today even where fieldworkers are often aware of this kind of language change, age-based variation and shift-induced change rarely makes its way into grammatical descriptions of Papuan languages, with preference typically given to describing conservative varieties of older speakers. In this paper I consider some of the consequences of the rapid language shift in New Guinea and how it will impact the collection of data and writing of grammars for Papuan languages.