Andrew Gray's travel tales

"I remember when the volcano on Ambrym fired up," Old Mark told me. "I was a boy at the time. The sky on Pentecost turned black. For three days my father had to light a stick of wild cane and take it with him when he went to work in the garden."

There had been no torches or paraffin lanterns back then.

"How old do you think you are?" I asked.

"Oh, I think I've beaten a hundred," he told me brightly.

People on Pentecost are seldom sure of their age. Even my students often respond with uncertainty when asked their dates of birth, and at the time Old Mark was born there was certainly nobody around ticking off days on a calendar. Ages are often exaggerated - several islanders claim to have grandparents aged 120 or more. However, since Old Mark had just described a historical event that occurred in 1913, the mystic-looking yet bright-eyed old man sitting beside me probably was a genuine centenarian.

In Vanuatu, even more so than in Britain, old people have lived through a fascinating amount of history. A hundred-year-old on Pentecost today is only a generation removed from the Dark Ages, and only a couple of further generations removed from the Stone Age. A real life Stig of the Dump, almost, yet one who has adapted with total nonchalance to the shiny screens that are filled on Friday nights with tiny moving people and to the flying canoes that pass low over the village on their way to the nearby airfield.

"Were there missionaries around when you were born?" I asked.

"Oh yes, I remember a couple," Old Mark said. He listed the names of some of the first missionaries to have worked on Pentecost - or at least, the first who had escaped the cooking pot long enough to begin converting the islanders to Jesus's cause.

I badly wanted to ask whether people were still eating each other at the time he grew up, but I couldn't think of a tactful way of phrasing the question. Recalling the trouble that Prince Philip had once got into for asking a similar thing on a similar island, I moved on instead to the subject I had come to ask about: the language that had been spoken when Old Mark was young.

Pentecost is haunted by the ghosts of extinct languages. The linguistic diversity of the place today is impressive enough - four living languages, with ten or eleven dialects between them, confined to an island of fifteen thousand people - yet in reality these merely represent the survivors from an age of an even greater diversity. Two centuries ago the inhabitants of Pentecost lived in tiny and isolated clans, and had lived that way for long enough for each clan to have developed its own distinct way of speaking. Occasionally a clan and its language would die out, but a new one would soon arise to replace it, and a rich variety was maintained.

The arrival of white people, however, unleashed a linguistic maelstrom. Pentecost's population was gutted out, as epidemics of Western disease to which the islanders had no immunity killed off perhaps nine-tenths of the people. The survivors regrouped in new villages, and were often obliged to marry those from other clans, since so few of their own clan's people were left. The establishment of schools, churches and plantations brought together young people from many different areas, among whom the most widely-spoken language would be adopted as a lingua franca. Some of the smaller languages became the preserve of the elderly, who would sit in lonely corners conversing in them, being largely ignored by their children and grandchildren (some of whom would later regret this deeply). When the last of these old people died - or rather, when the second-last person died - the ancestral languages would cease to be heard.

The last generation that truly spoke the old languages died off as the twentieth century drew to an end. However, some of their languages survive as ghosts in the minds of the speakers' children, people who never fully learned their parents' language but have not fully forgotten it either. The Ranwadi area is home to one such ghost, Sowa language, described in an earlier blog. North-western Pentecost has two resident ghost languages, named Volvoluana and Nggasai. And from southern Pentecost I'd heard numerous linguistic ghost stories, the most well-known of which centres around the village of Hotwata, once home to a language named Doltes. Doltes is believed to have died around half a century ago, yet its ghost survives in the memory of one very old villager: Old Mark.

Sitting in Old Mark's house, a breezy wood-and-cement building that would have resembled a dockside shed if it hadn't contained beds and mats, Old Mark gave me as many words and phrases as he could remember in Doltes, which he referred to as 'the small language'. He translated these for me into 'the big language' - Ske, the language now spoken in the Hotwata area. (This made me smile: Old Mark's 'big language' is spoken by a mere five hundred people. On my way down to Hotwata from Ranwadi, I'd walked right across the area in which it was spoken in an hour and a half.) With his grandchildren's help, Old Mark translated these phrases into Pidgin English, from which I translated them into proper English. It was a weird meeting of cultures: a speaker of a language known only by a single person, working with a speaker of a language known by a billion.

"Bononfu", Old Mark said. "That means dog, in the small language. In the big language we say 'boblievuk'."

Translated literally, 'the white person's pig'.

I noted the words and phrases down as best I could with English letters, scribbling circumflexes onto the ghost language's incredibly short vowels. In my basket I had an MP3 player containing a tiny microphone, but I didn't bother to get it out.

"'Tubwi'. That means bamboo in the small language. In the big language it's 'tumbul'."

I scribbled.

"But there's two kinds of bamboo," Old Mark continued. "The really strong kind they called 'aio fat'."

"Aio fat?"

"Yes. 'Aio' on its own means 'knife'."

Of course - before metal came along, knives were made from strong bamboo. This really was a Stone Age language.

We chatted more about language, and about history. The sun outside got lower, and I remembered that I had a long walk back at Ranwadi, and that I'd arranged to meet someone at sunset. I thanked Old Mark for sharing his language with me, and prepared to leave.

As I packed my notepad away, I remembered the MP3 player in my basket. Doltes might never have been recorded before, and there might never be a chance to record it again. By the time the next person with an interest in language happens to come by, Old Mark will probably not be around. I asked if the old man would mind repeating a few of the words into the microphone. He agreed, and I made my recordings.

When Old Mark eventually passes away, those two short MP3 files, tiny snatches less than a minute in length, may be all that survives of the sounds through which an entire community once lived their lives.