[lg policy] Saipan: Community involvement stressed in study of Chamorro

[Harold Schiffman]

Community involvement stressed in study of Chamorro

By Clarissa V. David
Reporter

Dr. Matthew Wagers of the University of California Santa Cruz, right,
talks briefly about his research project on the Chamorro language
during the Rotary Club of Saipan meeting at the Hyatt Regency Saipan
yesterday. Looking on is Rotary secretary Dick Cody. (Clarissa V.
David) A linguistics professor from the University of California Santa
Cruz stressed the importance of involving the community in a research
project about the Chamorro language.

Dr. Matthew Wagers, guest speaker at the Rotary Club of Saipan
meeting, said yesterday that while it does not appear significant for
a speaker of the language to study it, it is important “on a practical
level” to do so and learn about the language's structure and
complexity.

Wagers, who is on his second visit to the CNMI, is part of a research
project that delves into the Chamorro language which is interconnected
to the Chamorro Dictionary revision project.

Together with Manuel F. Borja and Sandra Chung, Wagers also held a
presentation sponsored by the NMI Humanities Council as part of its
Community Lecture Series at the American Memorial Park yesterday.

“We're trying to solicit questions and feedbacks from the community.
It's really important that the community members are involved,” Wagers
told the Rotarians during the meeting.

According to Wagers, the project team meets periodically with working
groups from Saipan, Tinian, and Rota to study and understand the
variations of different Chamorro words.

“Chamorro is a really interesting language,” said Wagers, who can now
read and understand Chamorro. “It has a complicated syntax in putting
words together.”

Asked about the origin of the Chamorro language, Wagers said it
belongs to the Austronesian language which originated “probably” from
Taiwan. He noted that the Chamorro language has word borrowings from
other languages, including Spanish, English, and Japanese.

Wagers said that studying how the Chamorro language comprehension
works will allow people to know if it is applicable to general
theories of human understanding, whatever the size or the
socioeconomic relation of the language is in contrast to other
languages.

“They're all human languages and they all need to tell us about how to
learn the language and how we use it,” he added.

http://www.saipantribune.com/newsstory.aspx?cat=1&newsID=121173

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