Asahi: U.S. linguist joins Chichijima islander on his dream voyage
... At a village on Chichijima, one of the Ogasawara Islands (Bonin Islands) about 1,000 kilometers south of Tokyo, Long encountered a more than 150-year-old community whose northeastern U.S. and Pacific Island roots helped create a unique native tongue. The group comprises about 10 percent of the island's 1,800 residents, Long says. While they speak Japanese, some, usually the older community members, also speak English. And many use a hybrid of both. It's not just a mix, Long says, but an entirely separate language... "I thought, `There's something more here than remnants of Boston English,'" he recalls. "Even if you're bilingual, you've never heard anything like this. Creole and pidgin languages have been simplified. But in this case they've kept most of the complexity of both languages, as well as certain patterns." The result is a language that uses English for terms such as numbers and time-yesterday, last month, for example. Japanese words as well as sentence structure are also used to form sentences such as: "Yesterday me apple tabeta," Long says...more...
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