Easter Island, or Rapa Nui - Part Two

RapaNui Language

 Who speaks the RapaNui language in Easter Island

When I visited RapaNui island in the summer of 2009 I found out that the total inhabitants of this island speak Spanish with the Chilean accent and it is difficult to hear native people speaking Rapa Nui language, the tongue of their ancestors, in a spontaneous or candid manner. The only one occasion I heard speaking in this way was when, in my hotel entrance lobby, two native youths were waiting to carry the luggage for some tourists to the island airport; they were gibbering in their own autochthonous language in a proficient way.

In this trip to there for a week, via Chile, I had a curiosity and a great interest to know the extension, degree or rate in the use of it as native language and some questions such as how people speaks it, if fluently, for instance. Incidentally, I had a doubt about how its population was formed related to its ethnicity and whether there would be a rampant cohersive force over the language's native people by the dominant one, the Spanish.

If it is possible to have a fair idea over the habits of a tiny population of about five thousand in my short time of staying, I would say that all the people have the Spanish as their first language and the use of RapaNui language seems to be gradually disappearing, despite the government's efforts to promote its use, certainly for cultural and tourist purposes.

Samples of Rapa Nui people speaking their language

I'll start showing you how sounds the Rapanui language with the following film I made it when I interviewed a young girl in Easter Island during this same journey. I asked her to say some phrases in her native tongue explaining who was she, how was her tiny island, what she most liked, and so on; and the result was this short footage for only 45 seconds that follows below:




The next film was my second attempt to record current and live Rapa Nui speaking and happened in a flea market booth at the main fair of the island where a woman, owner of her small business, explains in this movie that in the 1980s the General Augusto Pinhochet made the Rapa Nui language a compulsory subject in the school curriculum in this island.



As shown below in another film, this time made with a modest photography camera, a public display of a local band in Anga Roa in which local musicians sing folk songs performing in Rapanui language. In this movie you can see that the spectators are tourists, but among them there are also groups of young native people.



Although I found this fact unusual, I saw this signboard (see the photograph below) written in its native language at the gate entrance of the school on the island. Here, it is using its Rapa Nui alphabet glyphs on this sign at the top line from side to side, in Latin characters at the right side of the sign and at the left-hand side the writing is in Spanish.

Is RapaNui going to be a dead language?

We know that this language has not a sizeable amount of writing text, historic and cultural registers, literature etc, because their hieroglyphics did not evolve for this purpose and despite the adoption of the Latin alphabet later, it is difficult that they can maintain alive a language in an era of great requirements related to writing content; all of that still join to the fact that its indigenous population at the moment is modest in size, today approximately 2,500 souls, they also would cope with the pervasive tongue, Spanish, the second language in number of speakers on the planet that the all inhabitants here speak fluently. The effort since the Chile's Augusto Pinochet who established by decree to make the Rapanui a compulsory course in the school will not stop the disappearance of the list of living languages.