He or She

I have not written one of my anthropologically leaning posts in quite some time, and I feel like I am just about due to pretend that I am still a college student writing papers on the most archaic of subjects. For those of you who do not seem interested in such a post, understandably so I might add, you may skip this reading at you leisure and I will hopefully see you again next week.

I understand that linguists and other specialists often study language to gleam some insight into other cultures. Having studied Latin in middle and high school, and slogging through one year of Italian my freshman year of college, this type of analysis never seemed to interest me. However, after living in Tonga and learning the Tongan language, I have been particularly struck by the fact that there is no pronoun differentiating “he” and “she” in Tongan.

In Tongan, ne is the pronoun for both he and she. The only way to figure out which pronoun is correct is though the context. This is not quite as easy as it sounds however. Take the simple Tongan sentence of ‘Oku ne alu ki kolo (The boy/girl is going to town). Simply written as is, there is no way to know if the speaker or writer is referring to a boy or a girl.

I have spent an inordinate amount of my free time (don’t worry I still have plenty of other free time to do whatever I wish) thinking about why this is the case and if other languages possess a similar phenomenon. By pairing this thought with my first academic love – history – it seems to me to be evidence of a traditionally patriarchal society where men and women had distinct roles. Men went to war. Women cooked. Men were fisherman and farmed in the bush. Women wove mats and took care of the children. In a traditional structure with such strict gender norms, it wasn’t possible to confuse the pronouns and thus there was no need to have two separate pronouns for what the Tongan people would easily have understood with one.

While Tonga is historically a patriarchal society and remains somewhat so to this day, and I have no evidence to assert this claim, I do believe that this patriarchy is partly responsible for the lack of two separate pronouns. Though lack of separate pronouns may not have been an issue back in the day, it can be quite confusing in the modern world. Tonga is by no means a paragon of equal rights, as many of the stereotypes and gender roles I mentioned in the previous paragraph still abound, but women’s rights have slowly risen throughout the Kingdom. In today’s Tonga women can work in all industries and reach senior positions in both government ministries and in business. Most Tongan teachers, including myself, will tell you that girls outperform boys at both the primary and secondary level by a wide margin. For Tonga in the 21^st Century, one pronoun often just does not seem like enough.

I hope this was not too boring for everyone. Nothing particularly interesting has happened to me recently, and this was a topic I was saving for a rainy day. I don’t have any real suggestion to clarify this ambiguity, and I am certainly unqualified to request the Tongan language to add a pronoun, but this topic has definitely piqued my interest more than I should care to admit. If anyone has a better thought than I do, I’d be happy to hear it.

Thanks for reading and enjoy the photos of my latest fishing excursion.

A beautiful red fish another volunteer caught

A fish that I actually caught - Yes, I was shocked too!

Simply pan seared with only butter for flavoring.

 It was absolutely delicious and could not obviously have been fresher.