Use of the term "Negrito" (fwd)

[Yuphaphann Hoonchamlong]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 7 Sep 2001 17:59:32 -0500
From: Tom_Headland at sil.org
To: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk
Subject: Use of the term "Negrito"

To Larry Trask, COGS, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK, email:
larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk, from Thomas Headland (tom_headland at sil.org) on
September 9, 2001

Dear Sir,
     Several of my colleagues have forwarded your question on to me, asking
about the history of the use of the term "Negrito." I am willing to give
you a short answer. First, I would concur with your thought that "the term
'Negrito' has been used in English as an (apparently vague) ethnic label
for various peoples of southeast Asia."
Yes, it is definitely a vague label, all right. You are interested in its
use as a language name. As you are suggesting, the term "Negrito" should
never be used as a language name, because it is not, any more than
"African" or "Pygmy" should be used as a language name. "Negrito" is
commonly used as an exoethnonym, however, by most specialists, including
most of the ten scholars named below, as well as by most lay people
including Filipinos. I also have diaries of Japanese soldiers who lived in
my research area during WW2 who referred to them as "Negritos" or
"Negriyos" in their notes.

The world's leading scholarly experts alive today on "Negritos" are, in my
opinion, Ponciano Bennagen (U of the Philippines), James Eder (Arizona
State U), Kirk Endicott (Dartmouth College in New Hampshire), Agnes
Estioko-Griffin (Filipina, U of the Philippines, now in Hawaii), Marcus
Griffin (M-Griffin at cecer.army.mil), P. Bion Griffin (U Hawaii), Janet D.
Headland (SIL in Dallas), Navin K. Rai (Nepal, but now at the World Bank),
Lawrence A. Reid (U Hawaii, specifically on Philippine Negrito languages),
and myself. Perhaps the best bibliography list you can find of academic
publications on Negritos in the Philippines (where we find 29 different
Negrito linguistic groups totaling about 31,000 people) is located on the
Internet at www.sil.org/silewp/1997/004/silewp1997-004.html. All of those
29 languages are Austronesian. The members of these 29 populations all have
distinct phenotypic characteristics, specifically dark skin, fuzzy hair,
and small body size, so they look immediately different from the 80 million
people of the major population groups in that nation. Negrito populations
on the Malay Peninsula and in the Andamans look the same, but their
languages are not Austronesian.

You asked some specific questions, such as, "Is the label 'Negrito' in
respectable use among specialists today as a label for any language or
languages at all?" The term is in respectable use by most of the ten
specialists' names above (but not by all). But we do not use it as a label
for a language name. There is no such language. And you asked about the
etymology of the term "Negrito." It was coined by the early Spaniards who
visited or moved to the Philippines. You will find it in common use in the
earliest Spanish records by 1600. And you asked if anyone can cite an
example of its earlier use as a language name. Off of the top of my head, I
cannot, but I may have myself referred somewhere in print to "Negrito
languages," and I am sure others must have, say in Spanish records during
the Hispanic period in the Philippines, as well as in the American period
and post-WW2 period. And if we searched, we would doubtless find a few
written records of a writer or two who used the term even in the late 20th
century as the name of some specific language. But if they did it would be
an incorrect use of the term.

Is the term pejorative? You didn't ask that, but I will answer it anyway.
No, it is not a bad word, in my opinion. I myself have watched for this
problem, and have not encountered it (yet). I have never met any members of
these 29 groups in the Philippines---and I have lived with them for most of
my adult life---who are offended by the term or who dislike it. After all
the heavy controversy among anthropologists in the late 1980s over what
ethnonym to use to refer to the so-called San (or Bushmen) populations in
southern Africa---an issue still not settled---most of the ten specialists
named above have been sensitive to the political-correctness of whether or
not to use the term "Negrito" at all. I discussed this question with some
of them in the early 1990s. But eventually, most of us have continued to
cautiously use the term. (Specialists on Pygmy populations are also nervous
about their term, but most continue to use the general word "Pygmy" for
those ethnolinguistic groups in central Africa.)

Thomas N. Headland, Ph.D.
SIL Int'l Anthropology Consultant, and
Adjunct Professor, University of Texas at Arlington
Visiting Professor, University of North Dakota (2001-02)
WebPage: http://www.sil.org/sil/roster/headland-t/
E-mail: tom_headland at sil.org