Studying the vernacular in the vernacular – Luqa literacy in the Solomon Islands
Channel: ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language
Date: 2019-06-27

In this public lecture, Dr Alpheaus Graham Zobule takes the audience on the fascinating 20-year journey of the Kulu Language Institute in the Solomon Islands, which he founded and continues to direct.

In the late 1990s, Dr Zobule was a young man of the Luqa language who had just graduated with a Masters Degree majoring in Bible Studies and Linguistics. When he came up with the idea of translating the Bible into the vernacular language, speakers of Luqa were no doubt thrilled about the possibility of having a very important but foreign book written in their own vernacular.

Dr Zobule calls the Institute a community language movement, which has involved creating a conceptual framework, orthography and educational program for Luqa.  

“The goal of translating a foreign book into the familiar vernacular is so that its speakers can understand it,” Dr Zobule recalls. “However, achieving that goal seemed remote and unrealisable when it became obvious that most vernacular speakers themselves could not intelligibly read the first book, the Gospel of Mark, even when it was translated and published in their own language as a trial.” 

While they all wanted to understand such an important book, when it was translated a greater practical difficulty became obvious: the young and adult vernacular speakers needed to be taught to read and understand their own language first. So was born the literacy concept which later formally became Kulu Language Institute.

“With little funding, it is the community that has done this, studying their language in their own language,” Dr Zobule said. “It’s about people discovering something through reading that has given them ability to do things they were not able to do before.”