LCTL of the Month: Yapese

Yapese is the perfect example of why I love the world's lesser known languages.  The total number of Yapese speakers (about 7,170) is less than the average number of people at a Tampa Bay Rays home game (18,937).  Almost all of them live on the Yap Islands, a state within Micronesia in the South Pacific (where, coincidentally, divers from around the world go to see real manta rays).

The only English language reference grammar of Yapese was written in the seventies and is now out of print. Nonetheless, it is a vigorous national and official language with many things to teach us. Like, what's in a word anyway?
The linguistic sub field of morphology is concerned with the building of words. A morpheme is a unit of meaning and all words are at least one morpheme long. "Car," for example is a word made of one morpheme, "anti-dis-establish-ment-arian-ism" is a word made of six morphemes. Some languages can make epically large words by gluing morphemes on morphemes on morphemes.  Take this Turkish example:

"Amerika-lı-laş-tır-a-bil-dik-ler-imiz-den-miş-siniz-cesine"


Which uses a whopping 13 morphemes to mean as if you are one of those people that we were able to make resemble (those people) from America. For more on this type of word building, check out the inaugural LCTL of the Month for Turkish.

People are often curious about "What is the largest word in language X?", but what about the other extreme? How small can a word be?  That is, what is the smallest amount of significant information that a word can convey.


In English a word like "cars" is made up of two morphemes: the so-called root word "car" and a plural morpheme "-s" that tells us that there are more than one car. The situation is different in Yapese:


1. "rea kaaroo" = SINGULAR car
2. "gal kaaroo" = DUAL car
3. "pi kaaroo" = PLURAL car


In Yapese the morpheme that tells us whether we have a single car (1), a pair of cars (2) or cars (3) is a separate word, distinct from the "root word" and different than the number words meaning one, two or three.
This kind of system is very rare.  The linguist Matthew Dryer found only 48 languages worldwide that use a plural word and only 4 that mark grammatical number like Yapese does.


What's in a word, then? Well, it depends on who you ask. In Yapese PLURAL is a word, in English it is a suffix. So why don't we just banish the word "word" and talk about morphemes all the time?  Because other aspects of language (like vowel harmony) prove that the idea of a word as an independent chunk of language is real.


In languages like Turkish, these chunks are sticky. In others (like Yapese or, say, Chinese) they barely cling to each other at all. Perhaps the tension of finding the right balance between big words and small words is the reason why languages have historically changed type.


In any case, there is much more in Yapese to be explored, and far more to be discovered.  All it takes is a few adventurous people to break out of the library and brave fieldwork on a tropical island in the South Pacific. Actually, come to think of it... somebody get me a plane ticket, a Mai Tai and a tape recorder.

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This has been a tropical flavored offering from Schendo's Less Commonly Taught Language of the Month club, a fully owned and rarely restrained subsidiary of Schendo's Bad Grammar. Yapese language data was taken from Matthew Dryer (1989) "Plural Words" in Linguistics 27: pp 865-895. Photograph of a stick dance on Yap was taken by Ben Mieremet and is part of the NOAA photo library. Any mistakes or typos are purely intentional, I just wanted to see if you were paying attention....