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Abstract
It is fair to say that to be one of the 11,000 speakers of the Cheke Holo language of Santa Isabel, Solomon Islands, is to be an Anglican Christian. This paper is a case study of various religious factors which intersect and influence language use and development among the Cheke Holo, and which are documented from the author’s three decades of field work among them. The paper describes (1) the place of Cheke Holo among other so-called ‘church languages’ in the Solomons; (2) the role of the Anglican church in influencing language use; (3) issues related to literacy in publications and orthography; and (4) factors related to church work in a multi-lingual Anglican Diocese, and whose largest percentage of speakers is Cheke Holo. The paper concludes with commentary on the predicted future of the use of the Cheke Holo language in twenty-first century Solomon Islands.
Notes
1 These words appear on the inside cover of Geoffrey White’s ethnography of identity on the island of Santa Isabel.
2 Cited in Boswell (Citation2018: 73).
3 As cited in Boswell (Citation2018: 50): ‘It is obvious that there is a need to uncover some sources, oral or written, which can help us to determine exactly how the Cheke Holo language was first written, and then analyze any changes which may have occurred between then and now. Ray (Citation1926) provided the earliest published documentation of the language, but a history of the actual spelling by the people themselves is unfortunately not available. All I have ever been told is, ‘This is the way we have always written it.’ Further interaction yields the information that ‘early missionaries wrote it down.’ That statement generates many more questions than it answers, but does indicate there is some history which needs uncovering. I know of no current source for accessing that information. Interestingly, Besnier (Citation1995: xv) says the same for Nukulaelae, stating ‘how Nukulaelae Islanders developed historically the orthographic system that they currently use to write their language is undocumented. One can surmise that they tailored it on the orthography that London Missionary Society missionaries devised in the early nineteenth century for Samoan.’ The CH orthography was perhaps fashioned after work done by missionaries in Bughotu, which as noted, served as the ‘church language’ for the island for many years.’
4 The topic in this section is taken from and sometimes cited verbatim from my own work, Boswell (Citation2018: 51–53).
5 It is noted that at the time of Bosma’s suggested revision, he had not yet identified in his research the voiceless velar fricative phoneme /x/. If he had, it is logical that he would have applied the same principle of representing a voiceless phoneme with ‘h’ to indicate what he called the ‘puff of air preceding the sound’. And thus, the representation for the voiceless velar fricative would have been ‘hgh’. It is counted as one of the 12 changes that I cite.
6 The only change incorporated was the use of an apostrophe to represent the glottal stop. It is noted that while accepted as a useful representation, it was not consistently applied in orthographic renderings.
7 The data upon which this section is dependent is from the author’s eyewitness experience in CH church services, dating back to 1989. There is not a transcribed corpus upon which to rely, unfortunately, and this section is more of a reflective, socio-linguistic catalogue of reported language use, compiled for this article. While the author has had in his possession a small corpus of CH sermons (and those would be valuable for analysis of the CH-insider speaker), the real interest of this section is language use of the CH-outsider priests, and any scientific data is unfortunately not available. But three decades of personal language experience, observation, and use in a highly Christian-centrist cultural group does carry significant weight in terms of making these propositions.
8 The border between CH and Bughotu demonstrates the break between the Austronesian Western Oceanic substrate (of which CH is a part) and the Eastern Oceanic substrate (of which Bughotu is a part).
9 The small but thriving provincial capital of Buala hosts workers and their families from around the Solomons. Due to the identification of 95% or so of the Solomons population with Christianity, it is not unexpected that other denominations will be present among the work force of those who come from non-Anglican areas of the country. It is likewise noted that the Anglican church found in Buala village is the largest CH-speaking Anglican congregation on the island, as Buala has the highest population of CH speakers.