Small Worlds: The Language Ecology of the Penan in Borneo
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SMALL WORLDS: THE LANGUAGE ECOLOGY OF THE PENAN IN BORNEO
INTRODUCTION
Borneo Island sits astride the equator, is 750,000 km2 in area, and had an estimated population of 15 million people at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It is divided politically among Brunei Darussalam (hereafter Brunei), Indonesian Kalimantan and the East Malaysian states of Sarawak and Sabah. The ethnonym Penan is used here generically to refer to those in Borneo who were, have been or, in a few cases, continue to live as nomadic hunter–gatherers, i.e. people whose economies are based on hunting wild game, fishing and gathering uncultivated plant foods, without plant or animal domestication other than dogs (cf. Lee and Daly, 1998). This article provides a brief socio-cultural outline of the Penan. This serves as an introduction to the language ecology of the congeries of Penan people in the East Malaysian state of Sarawak (124,450 km2, population approximately 2.18 million, capital Kuching) and the independent sultanate of Brunei (5,765 km2, population around 350,000, capital Bandar Sri Begawan), with close reference to the dominant languages and formal education in these states. This discussion does not include Sabah where there are no Penan; neither does it take account of Penan in the three northern provinces of Kalimantan (in Indonesia), whose circumstances are substantially different in a number of ways, largely historical and political, from the Penan in Sarawak and Brunei (for details of Penan in Kalimantan see, for example, Sellato, 1994). E A R LY D E V E L O P M E N T S
There are three main ethnic groups in Borneo, Chinese, Dayak and Malay. The Penan are part of the Dayak group of peoples who are generally seen as indigenous to Borneo and non-Muslim. Penan in Sarawak and Brunei currently number around 11,000 people and thus constitute an ethnodemographic minority (cf. Haarmann, 1986). They traditionally inhabit mountainous areas between river basins and can be divided into Western and Eastern Penan. The Western Penan are situated upriver in Sarawak between the state’s two longest rivers, the Rejang and the Baram, and generally comprise larger communities than their Eastern A. Creese, P. Martin and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 9: Ecology of Language, 183–192. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
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PETER G. SERCOMBE
counterparts. The Eastern Penan also live mostly inland, east of the Baram River as far as the Limbang River watershed, with one small community in the southern part of Brunei’s western enclave. Compared to Western Penan, nomadic Eastern Penan encampments are of shorter duration, they generally have smaller foraging areas, and less developed institutions of group leadership. The two broad varieties of the Penan language (Eastern and Western), although there is diversity within these, are dialects of Kenyah (Blust, 1972; Sercombe, 2002), a language of a Central Bornean group of settled agriculturalists; and the linguistic division of (Eastern and
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