Mwotlap language

Mwotlap (pronounced ; formerly known as Motlav) is an Oceanic language spoken by about 2,100 people in Vanuatu. The majority of speakers are found on the island of Motalava in the Banks Islands, with smaller communities in the islands of Ra (or Aya) and Vanua Lava, as well as migrant groups in the two main cities of the country, Santo and Port Vila.

Mwotlap was first described in any detail in 2001, by the linguist Alexandre François.

Volow, which used to be spoken on the same island, may be considered a dialect or a separate language.

The language

File:WIKITONGUES- Serah speaking Mwotlap.webm

A speaker of Mwotlap

Name

The Mwotlap language is named after the island of Motalava, which is locally known as Mwotlap.

Geographic distribution

Mwotlap is spoken by about 2,100 people in the Banks Islands, in the North of Vanuatu. Among them, 1,640 live on the island of Mota Lava and its neighbor island, Ra. It is also spoken by a few hundred people living elsewhere in Vanuatu:

• Vanua Lava, particularly in the northeast
• Several other northern Vanuatu islands including Ureparapara, Gaua, and Ambae
• Port-Vila, the capital of Vanuatu
• Luganville, the country's second largest city, located on the island of Espiritu Santo

Classification

Mwotlap belongs to the Torres–Banks linkage within Southern Oceanic, one of the subgroups of the Oceanic family, itself part of the larger Austronesian phylum.

History

Robert Henry Codrington, an Anglican priest who studied Melanesian societies, first described Mwotlap in 1885. While focusing mainly on Mota, Codrington dedicated twelve pages of his work The Melanesian Languages to the "Motlav" language. Despite being very short, this description can be used to show several changes that occurred in Mwotlap during the 20th century, such as the change of to (a process demonstrated already in the loanword Template:Gloss). Furthermore, Codrington described Volow, a language closely related to Mwotlap (sometimes even considered a dialect of Mwotlap). Volow, which is extinct today, was spoken in the east of Mota Lava, in the area of Aplow.

Phonology

Because Mwotlap has been passed down by oral tradition, it has no official writing system. This article uses the orthography devised by linguist Alexandre François, based on the Latin alphabet.

Mwotlap contrasts 16 consonant phonemes.

Consonants

		Labiovelar	Bilabial	Alveolar	Dorsal	Glottal
Nasal		Template:IPA linkTemplate:IPA link Template:Angbr	Template:IPA link Template:Angbr	Template:IPA link Template:Angbr	Template:IPA link Template:Angbr
Stop	voiceless	Template:IPA linkTemplate:IPA link Template:Angbr		Template:IPA link Template:Angbr	Template:IPA link Template:Angbr
	prenasalized		Template:IPA link Template:Angbr	Template:IPA link Template:Angbr
Fricative			Template:IPA linkTemplate:Efn Template:Angbr	Template:IPA link Template:Angbr	Template:IPA link Template:Angbr	Template:IPA link Template:Angbr
Approximant		Template:IPA link Template:Angbr		Template:IPA link Template:Angbr	Template:IPA link Template:Angbr

Mwotlap has 7 phonemic vowels, which are all short monophthongs, with no diphthongs being present in the language.

Vowels

	Front	Back
Close	Template:IPA link Template:Angbr	Template:IPA link Template:Angbr
Near-close	Template:IPA link Template:Angbr	Template:IPA link Template:Angbr
Open-mid	Template:IPA link Template:Angbr	Template:IPA link Template:Angbr
Open	Template:IPA link Template:Angbr

Prosody

Mwotlap is not tonal. Stress always falls on the last syllable of a word. Historically, before syncope of unstressed vowels, it always fell on the penultimate syllable. When syncope took place, the stressed vowel became part of the last syllable.

Morphophonology

Syllables

Mwotlap's syllable structure is (C)V(C), historically resulting from the syncope of unstressed vowels in pre-modern times. This means that no more than two consonants can follow each other within a word and that no word can start or finish with more than one consonant. Recent loanwords, like (from English Template:Gloss), are exceptions to this structure.

When a root beginning with two constants forms the beginning of a word, an epenthetic vowel (the same as the next vowel) is inserted between the two consonants. For example, the root Template:Gloss can form the following:

• Template:Gloss: the consonants Template:Angbr and Template:Angbr belong to two different syllables;
• Template:Gloss: the insertion of a vowel between Template:Angbr and Template:Angbr is necessary to prevent the syllable from starting with two consecutive consonants.

Vowel copying

Vowel copying is the tendency of certain prefixes to copy the first vowel of the following word. Notable vowel copying prefixes include the article , the locative , and , a prefix used to form adjectives describing origin. These prefixes form Template:Gloss, Template:Gloss, and Template:Gloss, but also Template:Gloss and Template:Gloss. Words stems beginning with two consonants do not permit vowel copying. Thus the stems Template:Sc and Template:Sc allow their vowel to be copied, while the stems Template:Sc and Template:Sc do not.

Syntax

Mwotlap is an SVO language: the word order of a sentence is fixed and is always subject-verb-complement-adverbial.

The system of personal pronouns contrasts clusivity, and distinguishes four numbers (singular, dual, trial, plural). Human nouns also have four numbers; as for non-human nouns, they do not inflect for number and are expressed as singulars.

Spatial reference in Mwotlap is based on a system of geocentric (absolute) directionals, which is in part typical of Oceanic languages, and in part innovative.

References

• Pages from: François, Alexandre (2001), Contraintes de structures et liberté dans l'organisation du discours. Une description du mwotlap, langue océanienne du Vanuatu. PhD dissertation, Université Paris-IV Sorbonne. 1078 pp.

Sources

Main references

• François, Alexandre (2001), Contraintes de structures et liberté dans l'organisation du discours. Une description du mwotlap, langue océanienne du Vanuatu. PhD dissertation, Université Paris-IV Sorbonne. 1078 pp.

• .

Other references

• .

External links

• Introduction to Mwotlap and Motalava culture, photos, maps, songs, myths and stories
• Presentation of the Mwotlap language, with links to audio recordings in open access, by A. François (Pangloss Collection, CNRS).
• Access to several stories in Mwotlap (with English and French translations, by A. François).
• Nalne Genyon Ta Melanesia A Liturgy for Melanesia in Mwotlap (1970)