Page 185 - THE MELANESIA DIASPORA FILE CETAK ISI 10022017

Languages from these two families are in contact with each other and this results
in language change. Bowden’s (2013) research on the Gamkonora language in West
Halmahera, which belongs to the Sahu sub-group of language according to (Grimes and
Grimes, 1984), exemplifies such processes of change.
The Gamkonora people live in four villages in West Halmahera, Southern Ibu district.
Gamsungi village (a village in southern part) has 81% basic vocabulary similarities with
Waioli language, so it may be said that the Gamkonora language in Gamsungi village is
a dialct of the Waioli language. Gamkonora people are known to live in the Gamkonora
village of Talaga, and in the north of Tahafo village. Three villages there have similar
dialects. However, the villagers readily say that the manner of speaking of the Tahafo
people is rough.
The Gamkonora language belongs to the North Halmahera language group. It “can be
seen to be basically non-Austronesian in origin” (Bowden, 2013: 80) because the vocabulary
of this language is essentially similar to non-Austronesian. However, the language is losing
its non-Austronesian characteristics, in particular its grammatical structure is shifting to
SVO, which is characteristic of Austronesian languages, and it does not have pronouns
showing gender characteristics (gender pronoun is a characteristic of non-Austronesian
language). Another characteristic of non-Austronesian languages are complex systems of
pronouns for describing space and directions.

An example of a sentence with SVO grammatical structure from Bowden (2013) is
simata ngenetagi pasae
we all go market
We all go to the market
This is typical of languages in the Autronesian language family.

Another example can be given for the language of space and directions.
O’o isa iye tala
Sea land to the top down

Words that indicate directions can be used with nouns. If someone asks another person
to put a glass on the table and the table was in the direction of the sea, then she will say
“put the glass at the sea (direction). Directions also use “upwards” in a specific way. The
sultan’s palace is ‘above’ and ‘down’ always means away from the sultan’s palace. So in

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