Public lecture given at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, on Tuesday 30 September 2008 Lexical innovation in Iatmul From bitter water in a coconut shell to a glass of beer Dr Gerd Jendraschek 1 g.jendraschek@latrobe.edu.au Research Centre for Linguistic Typology La Trobe University Abstract Iatmul is a Papuan language spoken along the Sepik River in the North-West of Papua New Guinea. The language has about 40.000 speakers with varying sociolinguistic profiles. Older speakers grew up monolingually in Iatmul, and learned the national lingua franca Tok Pisin during their childhood. For younger speakers, it is the other way round. Their first and dominant language is Tok Pisin, but most of them acquire Iatmul as a second language. What we have is thus not (yet) language shift, but a switch of first and second language. Although only a minority learns English as a third language, it has the highest status among the three languages spoken in the community. The changes in the language ecology correlate with important cultural changes. Within a few decades, the community has changed from an isolated farming and fishing economy with little knowledge of the outside world, to a community that has adopted Western clothing, household items, and electrical appliances. Many new food items were also introduced. At the same time, old items and practices fell into oblivion. In this talk, I will show how some of these changes in the environment of Iatmul speakers are reflected in their language. Although there is no corpus planning institution, lexical innovations abound and spread rapidly. We find meaning extensions of existing words, new compounds, native nouns modified by a verbal attribute or by ‘white people’, and nativized loans. The neologism for ‘cat’ seems to have been created from scratch. Since lexical innovation is limited to physical objects and associated activities, nouns for abstract concepts remain few and vague. I will argue that this has to do with the status of Iatmul as a language of face-to-face interaction. 1 [ ]