Why Toty Sa’Med Writes Songs in Kimbundu.

This is very encouraging. Are there other places where people use music to try to give life to their culture and language? Are there, for instance, efforts in places like Russia to give life to moribund languages by writing songs in that language?

The Māori people have an advantage over many others since theirs is the only indigenous language (and group) in New Zealand, so there is no problem about which indigenous language best represents their culture, spirit, etc. In many other
cases, such as in Africa, Asia and the Americas, there are multiple indigenous languages and even the best-intentioned leaders are hard pressed to treat all of them more or less equally. The situation is even worse in places where a single language is spoken by a group whose traditional territory overlaps the colonial borders and who are therefore under the control of two or mors states or nations.

Stephen, thanks for the information. I thought that the Moriorii had been wiped out several generations ago.

Are there, for instance, efforts in places like Russia to give life to moribund languages by writing songs in that language?

a folk rock band singing in Khanty and Mansi (dunno if most of their lyrics are traditional or not, some probably not)
Despacito in Udmurt 🙂

selectively dishing out guns and steel

The now-traditional third member of the trinity, germs, were rather less selective, and wiped out perhaps 20% of the Moriori. Many more were killed (and sometimes eaten) during the Māori invasion of 1835, but many more remained as slaves, and there are a few thousand people with partial Moriori ancestry today, though the last full-blood died in 1933.

“to be honest this song sounds like a gramma rapping to a techno beat.” In some kind of Mansi.

Despacito in Udmurt

Not bad… not bad at all. 🙂

Manchu song

With a Chinese accent, right? Every sirdan coming out as siledan…
English translation here under “show more”.

Here is a Google-translated excerpt from Chinese Wiki on the singer.

Song Xidong
Original name Manchu: akšan
Nickname Dongzi, Dongge
Nationality People’s Republic of China
Born in 1979
 Bailang Town, Ulanhot City, Xingan League, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, People’s Republic of China
Professional singer
Language Chinese, Manchu, Mongolian
Types of music Ethnic music, Manchu music

Heritage Manchu Music
Because Song Xidong was a Manchu man, he always wanted to know what Manchu music really was like. With more friends playing music around, this idea is getting stronger. It was a coincidence that in 2006, Song Xidong met the same man who was a Manchu member. They both wrote or adapted many Manchu songs together. Since then, Song Xidong has successively met more friends who have learned Manchu language through Sule. After several years of learning, he has been able to use Manchu dialogue and exchanges with many Manchu friends. Everyone often chats and sings together in Manchu. They also often go to the northeast to learn from the winds. On one occasion, due to the extremely bad environment, they almost died of freezing on the banks of the Songhua River. In October 2009, Song Xidong went north to go to Sanjiazi Village, Fuyu County, Heilongjiang Province and various villages under the Heihe River to learn from the wind. There he found a lot of old people who still speak the language. When Song Xidong sang the Song of Manchu songs he had produced to the old people, the old people sighed: “The original Manchu and Manchu songs have not lost!” This gathering was assisted by Jilin TV Station and students from Northeast Media University used DV to produce and documentary “The Last Batu Lu”. In November 2010, Inner Mongolia TV provided an exclusive interview with Song Xidong in the “Blue Hometown – Musical Tribe” column. On December 4th, “Manchu singer Song Xidong” was aired to show the audience the Manchu language and Manchu tradition.

This is how languages get revived these days

Our host will be reminding me shortly about presuming to speak on topics where ‘I have not walked in their shoes’. Also I’m relying too much on memory. never the less …

The Moriori had no contact with North and South Island iwi for centuries.

Hmm? Less than 300 years. Can we be sure of no contact? Didn’t they at least trade? A small isolated group sounds like ideal conditions for preserving a historical version of the language. We do know Moriori settled the Chathams from mainland Aotearoa, not as separate emigrants from the Pacific islands. So they at least spoke (some dialect of) the same language to start with.

Surely their extreme pacifism alone is a pretty massive cultural distinction.

No: several Maori tribes adopted an approach of nonviolent resistance to the colonialists (not that it did them much good). Sadly one such tribe were the Taranaki group (“but living in Wellington” sez wikipedia — which shows how much displacement there was) who were the main perpetrators of savagery on the Chathams.

Language vs dialect… Moriori differs more from the various North and South Island dialects than they do among themselves (at least if I recall correctly… and given its historical isolation, it’d be surprising if it didn’t). Perhaps more importantly, while we know Maori consider all the North and South Island dialects one language, …

The story of the Maori language is the story of the winners. That is principally the tribes that signed the Treaty of Waitangi and thereby got the guns and steel. (Although they’d been getting muskets since the early 1800’s.) The predominant tribe in the South Island became Ngai Tahu, who are (were in 1840’s) more a North Island tribe (that travelled to the South in the Summer) with a North Island ‘dialect’. The Brit’s recruitment of tribes to the Treaty in the South Island was patchy, and there is huge resentment amongst the remnants of (genuine) South Island tribes about the dominance of Ngai Tahu.

There was little survey of the variety of dialects/languages in the South Island before Ngai Tahu took it over. They’d want you to think it’s all one language, wouldn’t they?

the Moriori position on Moriori is understandably much harder to come by. In the little I have seen of the Chathams so far (a few news stories and short documentaries), they always referred to it as the Moriori language.

Yes sure, that’s understandable from their point of view. An act of identity. A language is a dialect that never had an army or navy(?)

The Moriori really were quite isolated. They had no long-distance canoes, and few resources with which to trade. If there was contact with the mainland, it wouldn’t have been regular.
Culturally, the Moriori were distinctly egalitarian, unlike the mainland Maori and most other Polynesian societies.

Mixing Udmurt, Russian and badly recognizable English

Thanks David. I was despairing of this thread ever reverting to Russian, as the past two have.

Looks like another good argument for aggressive, hierarchical, patriarchal (just a gratuitous addition) societies.

Unlike elsewhere in Polynesia, the Chatham Islands did not have enough resources to create the surplus that supports a hierarchical society.

Unlike elsewhere in Polynesia

Supposedly (my sources on this are somewhat unreliable), the land that ultimately became the Pitcairn Islands did not have enough resources (per island) to support a viable breeding population at all, and when their colonizers had their own problems that prevented them from helping, the local population had entirely died out.

(The group that settled the same land in the 18th century – that is, the Bounty mutineers and their descendants – survived due to continuing intermittent contact with the mainland that helped avoid too much gene pool stagnation, as well as due to their higher tech level and, to an extent, probably also their higher starting diversity.)

Moriori, Beothuk, Tasmanian Aboriginals, Tainos.

The list of extinct people whose extinction is now increasingly being questioned today by self-proclaimed descendants of these groups, continues to grow.

Wouldn’t be surprised if the Picts or the Samnites resurface one day.

Two interesting claims by Mr. Sa’Med in the BBC story: a) as recently as the 1960’s (i.e. after many many centuries of Portuguese rule, and while the military campaign to overthrow that rule was already underway) it might have been necessary to know Kimbundu to speak to ones own mother, because she would not have been able to speak Portuguese; b) the once-substantial cohort of musicians who had sung in Kimbundu were mostly killed or imprisoned in a “purge” in 1977, which was after the Portuguese had been driven out (I’m guessing this purge was probably the aftermath of the failed coup attempt by one faction of the MPLA against another, in which if you believe wikipedia approx 18,000 actual or perceived supporters of the losing side were killed by the winners). So obviously the current prevalence and status of Portuguese in post-colonial Angola is bound up with the colonial history, but the causal story about the recent diminution of Kimbundu is probably more complicated. (If anything, a post-colonial independent regime may have more practical difficulties from the lack of a dominant indigenous “national language” than did the former colonial power, which might well have had no objections if different ethnic groups in different provinces had difficulty communicating with each other due to the lack of a common language.)

But me, I’m still on the road

Headin’ for another joint

We always did feel the same

We just saw it from a different point

Of view

Tangled up in a swamp of complications