When being the ‘expert’ creates a barrier

IN RECENT YEARS, SIL has felt it necessary to shift our approach in serving minority peoples. In the past we focused on languages; we now want to put “people before language.” This is a very welcome turn. I reflect briefly on my experience of these two approaches as I look back on my career with SIL (see sil.org/about).

In SIL’s training in the 1980s we learned that the world’s minority languages were being “discovered” and classified. Missionary linguists had analyzed many unreached languages, but there were many more to go. We learned how to reduce any language to writing, develop alphabets, teach literacy, and translate the New Testament. We saw our focus on language as scientific work critical for reaching minority peoples.

In April 1986 my family and I stepped out of the boat at Tengelik, Matvung, on Lovangai Island (Papua New Guinea). I felt excited at meeting the speakers of Tungag, a language on the list of translation needs, and wanted to begin language analysis. But the encounter between missionary-linguist and his language group did not materialize. Instead, a young family was welcomed by a community of persons! In particular, we got to know our host family, Papa Voivoi, Nana Naomi, Moses and Gertruth, Gaye, Ellie and little Laisi. They were a hospitable, serious, hard-working, humorous, sometimes concerned, always generous family. They did speak their home-language, of course, as well as a trade language, but my focus on language faded out of the picture as we all smiled, shook hands and made practical living arrangements on that first afternoon together.

But still, I experienced a tension between what I ought to be doing according to my training and SIL’s ethos and the people I was getting to know in their setting. My linguistic fieldwork was supposed to establish, for example, which of the four dialects of Tungag was the best one to have God’s word in it. I was concerned how that would pan out because we had, after all, committed heavily to settling in Matvung! At the same time, Matvungs had already developed a preliminary alphabet which some people were using proficiently. Gospel stories were known, people were singing Christian songs that had been translated into Matvung. My assignment, my “expertise,” began to feel like a barrier preventing me from engaging unreservedly with what these Matvungs were already doing.

I experienced a tension between what I ought to be doing according to my training and SIL’s ethos and the people I was getting to know in their setting.

SIL’s recent change in approach (currently expressed as vision and aspiration), prioritizing personal community relationships over language as focal point, is not an either-or dilemma. It is about the way we do language work, because language work is SIL’s area of knowledge and experience. As we become better at offering that experience and knowledge as a contribution to local initiatives, from within relationships of mutual trust, we will experience jointly a freedom to serve, co-create and enrich one another. God has created us as persons, meant to commune with him and with one another as persons. In essence we are not ethnic groupings or speakers of languages. May we be diligent to carry out the vision that is before us, making this explicit shift become a joyous working reality.