In an insightful essay Heryanto

In an insightful essay, Heryanto (1990, 40) writes that language is “a phenomenon expressing the particular history of a society” that did not exist in many parts of the world. “Language is not a universal category or cultural activity. Though it may sound odd, not all people have a language in the sense in which this term is currently used in English” (41). In pre-colonial Indonesia, that he is writing about, language was the result of a “radical social transformation” in the past centuries that involved the “restructuring of pre-existing vernacular world-views and social activities of non-Western and non-industrialised communities” (40). Here, as elsewhere, the emergence of “language” was intimately related to specific historical processes in Chlorpromazine HCl mg and post-colonial encounters. It is the story of such an emergence of language, the “origin of language among the Aché,” that I would like to tell here.
The Aché and their words for speech The Aché are a society of former hunter–gatherers in eastern Paraguay, recently settled on reservations. Deforestation, disease, and persecutions by colonists forced them to give up their nomadic way of life in the 1960s and 70s (Clastres, 1998 [1972]; Münzel, 1983; Hill and Hurtado, 1996). Sedentarization entailed dramatic sociocultural changes, among them shift to agriculture as primary mode of subsistence, the abandonment of traditional ritual practices, conversion to evangelical Christianity, and language shift from their heritage language to Guaraní, a regionally dominant and official language of Paraguay alongside Spanish. The Aché communities comprise roughly above 2000 individuals today, of which less than 200, mostly elders, are still fluent in Aché. Most Aché speak Guaraní or an Aché-Guaraní hybrid across contexts and communicative situation. When exploring any phenomenon in foreign lifeworlds the logical places to start are indigenous concepts, their usage, and meanings, as well as their mythology and cosmology, i.e., indigenous theories of the order of things. It is here that we get the first hints of absence. When looking at the Aché lexicon we do not find a term easily translatable as “language.” The two terms referring to “speech” in Aché are djawu (to speak/make a noise) and na’ã/ina (to tell/say) respectively. Today, indeed, ache djawu is used to designate the Aché language – and quite frequently so. However, there is no evidence of such a use in any of the traditional material or earlier accounts. Djawu appears in early vocabulary lists and transcribed texts almost exclusively as a verb (speaking) or to refer to the sound of animals, such as mynga djawu (honey speech) for the buzzing of bees. An unpublished vocabulary list by Mayntzhusen from the year 1948 lists djawu (yabu) as “speaking” and “making a sound/noise (animals),” dja is listed as “sound” although this is not found in any other material on the Aché, nor is this use known today. Cadogan's (1968) dictionary lists djawu (javú) as “speaking, rumor, noise.” Susnik's (1974) vocabulary list gives examples as a verb, djawu (žavú), “to speak.” In a few compounds she translates skeletal system as “speech.” Münzel (1973, 103–104, 112) published a number of songs and narratives from when he visited a reservation in 1971–2 where the term djawu is used to talk about speaking well, or speaking like the Paraguayans. In a text collection compiled by Sammons (1978), all occurrences are verbs with one exception. This exception is a transcribed recording from 1978 of a relatively young speaker (born 1953) who talks about his experience of coming to Asunción and not knowing the “new language/speech,” the language of the Paraguayans. It is indicative that one of the first occurrences of the word djawu used to refer to what we would call “language” of which we have evidence in the historical record is in the context of the encounter of another language.