The Ragged Edge of the World by Eugene Linden Page A

strong hold on the people of Kaironk. Even some of the more enlightened missionaries—Anglican, Catholic and Lutheran—recognized that maselai helped preserve the forest.
    By the time I met him, Majnep had become something of an evangelist himself, and was spending a lot of time on the radio, broadcasting his message in pidgin to whoever among New Guinea’s hundreds of cultures cared to listen. His message: “All I can do is try to help save the knowledge of my own culture. If you want to save yours, record it. If you want to lose it, it’s your choice.”

    Saem Majnep could reach out to other cultures in part because of the works of another very good man, an American named Frank Mihalic. During his more than fifty years in New Guinea, Mihalic served as a living antidote to the narrow-minded fundamentalist missionaries who demonized traditional beliefs. Trained in the Catholic order Verbi Divini (Divine Word), Mihalic saw his role as a helper of the people, and if that meant recognizing that traditional beliefs were the glue that held their cultures together, he was ready to make that compromise. I caught up with him at the Communication Arts Department of the Divine Word University in Madang. With its louvered windows and simple concrete structures, the university had a sleepy, tropical feel. Mihalic was dressed casually in a short-sleeved, lightweight cotton shirt. He began our conversation by stressing the importance of establishing a grammar for pidgin.
    â€œPidgin was the first unifying factor of this country,” he asserted flatly. “It’s now spoken by 1.5 million people—half the population. Once you had pidgin, then through the radio, you could jump barriers and get this country to a state where someone could fly anywhere and be understood.”
    Linguistically, a pidgin is a trade language—one that stands as a bridge between two languages. There are about 170 pidgins in the world. Tok Pisin, the New Guinean pidgin, draws about 80 percent of its words from English; Swahili, the best-known African pidgin, draws most of its words from Arabic.
    Mihalic first codified the New Guinea grammar in 1957, setting it on a path to becoming a language. He also started a pidgin newspaper called Wantok (One-talk), a pidgin word referring to individuals who speak the same language. For a priest, he showed unexpected flair as a newspaper entrepreneur. Knowing, for instance, that many villagers used newspaper to roll their smokes, he took pains to choose newsprint that had the best properties as cigarette paper, burning slowly and producing a white ash. In a communication with the Society of the Divine Word, he even joked about printing an exhortation on the front page: “Please read this newspaper before you smoke it.”
    Once a pidgin comes to be spoken as a first language, it achieves creole status. When I interviewed Mihalic, pidgin was the first language for about 40,000 New Guinean children. The process of gravitating to a single tongue is organic and probably inevitable in the evolution of Papua New Guinea as a nation, but each child who begins speaking with either pidgin or English means one less child learning one of New Guinea’s 800 indigenous languages.
    Languages die as silently as traditional knowledge. As kids go off to the city, schooling and business are conducted in English or pidgin, until one day the last native speaker of a given tongue passes away, and while he or she may leave dozens of descendants, a critical part of their culture has died. In many cases, traditional knowledge is the language—think of the many Inuit words for snow, or the subtle differences in Polynesian words for ocean water. Worldwide it’s inevitable that at least half the languages now spoken will soon die out, primarily because they do not exist in written form, and the young have turned to English or Spanish or other dominant tongues.
    Mihalic, who was well aware of the