On May 26, Professor Diane Massam gave an entertaining and informative lecture, 'Small Island, Big Language: The Story of Niue,' as part of the Flaut lecture series. She described some of her research on Niuean, an Oceanic language spoken in Niue, an isolated rocky island in the South Pacific. Niue Island is both the world's smallest independent self-governed nation and the world¹s largest upraised coral atoll. She also told us about its geography, history, and culture. Niuean challenges universal claims such as All languages have nouns and verbs and All sentences have a subject and a predicate. She also showed us some beautiful photos, which I hope she'll post a sampling of here.
Alana also promises a video of an anonymous linguist illustrating proper cocounut-opening technique. As a bystander quipped, "Linguists don't just crack the code of languages. They know how to crack coconuts, too." All part of linguistic fieldwork!
University of Toronto Department of Linguistics Blog
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