Bystander Honorifics

1. Bystander Honorifics Withbystanderhonorificsthelinguistic form of language is not dependent on thespeakeror on addressee. It is not dependent on therelationshipbetweenthespeakerandtheaddressee, nor is it dependent on what is beingreferredto,butsimplywho can hearwhat is beingsaid. Thisthereforecoversparticipants, such as audiences, as well as non-participants, or ‘bystanders’. This is oftentermed ‘avoidancelanguage’ or ‘honorificregister’. Mersin University

2. ManyAustralianlanguages had orhavebystanderhonorificstovaryingdegree. • Dyirbal is famousforhaving had twolanguagevariants, GuwalandDyalnuy. • Guwalwasused in allcircumstancesexceptwhencertain ‘taboorelatives’ werepresent,inwhichcaseDyalnuy had to be used.

3. No man or woman would closely approach or look at a taboo relative, still less speak directly to them. The avoidance language, Dyalŋuy, had to be used whenever a taboo relative was within earshot. The taboo was symmetrical – if X was taboo to Y so was Y to X. • Taboorelativeswere: [1] a parent-in-law of the opposite sex; and, by the symmetry rule, a child-in-law of the opposite sex. [2] a cross-cousin of the opposite sex – that is, father’s sister’s or mother’s brother’schild.

4. GuwalandDyalnuywereidenticalphonologicallyandalmostidenticalgrammatically,butdifferedcompletely in theirvocabulary. Togive an example:

5. While a number of languages may have ‘taboo relatives’, these are not necessarily identical cross-culturally. • GuuguYimidhirr (Australian (Pama-Nyungan): Australia) also has an avoidance language that specifically involves the vocabulary and prosody of the language. Here the taboo is especially strong between a man and his in-laws. a man could not speak at all to his mother-in-law, remaining silent in her presence and absenting himself when possible. With his father-in-law, his brothers-in-law and with certain other relatives, a man was obliged to speak in a specially slow, soft, and respectful tone of voice, and to substitute respectfulequivalents for many common words. (Haviland 1979a: 32)

6. It should be noted that the overlap between the two vocabularies was not complete; the basic, informal ‘everyday lexicon’ had more items than the ‘respectful lexicon’. • In GuuguYimidhirr, for example, several ‘everyday language’ words translate into only one ‘respectful language’ (or ‘brother-in-law language’, as it was called) word:

7. In (353) several of the ‘everyday lexicon’ words translate into the same ‘respectful lexicon’ word. • However, in both GuuguYimidhirr and in Dyirbal, and presumably in most languages that had or have an ‘avoidance language’, there was no limit to what could be expressed in the ‘respectful language’. • For instance, if someone specifically wanted to say ‘foat’ in the respectful language, this was done by the expression balilwabiirrbi (lit. go on water) and if someone wanted to say ‘limp’ in the respectful language, the expression would be dyirrunbalil (lit. go badly).

8. Bystander honorifics do not have to be restricted to the lexicon. • Waray (Australian (Waray): Australia) also had an avoidance language, referred to as ‘sideways language’, which was used with various in-law relatives and which involved adding a suffix -lawu to nominals and using the plural forms for verbs.

9. In (354) the ‘sideways language’ demands the suffix -lawu on the noun (nguk ‘tobacco’) and that the verb is inflected in the plural even though the utterance only has a single addressee.

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