Mwotlap language

Mwotlap
Motlav
Pronunciation	[ŋ͡mʷɔtˈlap]
Native to	Vanuatu
Region	Mota Lava island, Banks Islands
Native speakers	2100 (2012)
Language family	Austronesian Malayo-Polynesian Oceanic Southern Oceanic Northern Vanuatu Mwotlap
Dialects	Volow
Language codes
ISO 639-3	mlv
Glottolog	motl1237
ELP	Motlav

Mwotlap (pronounced [ŋ͡mʷɔtˈlap]; 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 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.

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 Vanuatian islands including Ureparapara, Gaua, and Aoba
• 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 Austronesian language family, which includes more than 1,200 languages. Inside its family, Mwotlap is an Oceanic language, descending from the hypothetical common ancestor of all Oceanic languages, Proto-Oceanic. More specifically, it is a Southern Oceanic language.

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 occured in Mwotlap during the 20th century. Furthermore, Codrington described Volow, a language closely related to Mwotlap (sometimes even considered a dialect of Mwotlap). Volow, almost extinct today, was spoken in the east of Mota Lava.

Phonology

Mwotlap contrasts 16 consonant phonemes.

	Labiovelar	Bilabial	Alveolar or Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Voiceless Stop	k͡pʷ		t	k
Prenasalized voiced stop		ᵐb	ⁿd
Fricative		β		ɣ	h
Nasal	ŋ͡mʷ	m	n	ŋ
Lateral			l
Approximant	w		j

[p] exists as the allophone of /β/ word-finally, as in the name of the language, /ŋ͡mʷɔtlaβ/ [ŋ͡mʷɔtˈlap].

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

	Front	Back
Close	i	u
Near-close	ɪ	ʊ
Open-mid	ɛ	ɔ
Open	a

Stress always falls on the last syllable of a word.

Prosody

Mwotlap is not tonal. Stress falls on the last syllable of a word or syntagma.

Syllables

Mwotlap's syllable structure is (C)V(C). 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 skul (from English school), 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 tron̄ ("drunk") can form the following:

• me-tron̄ [mɛt.rɔŋ] ("he got drunk"): the consonants t and r belong to two different syllables;
• toron̄ [tɔ.rɔŋ] ("they are getting drunk"): the insertion of a vowel between t and r is necessary to prevent the syllable from starting with two consecutive consonants.

References

• François, Alexandre (2000), "Vowel shifting and cloning in Motlav: historical explanation vs formal description", in Klamer, Marian (ed.), Proceedings of AFLA 7 (The Seventh Meeting of Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association), Amsterdam: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, pp. 49–68
• 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.
• François, Alexandre (2003a), La sémantique du prédicat en mwotlap (Vanuatu), Collection Linguistique de la Société de Linguistique de Paris, Leuven-Paris: Peeters, ISBN 90-429-1271-5
• François, Alexandre (2003b), "Of men, hills and winds: Space directionals in Mwotlap", Oceanic Linguistics, 42 (2): 407–437, doi:10.1353/ol.2003.0021
• François, Alexandre (2004), "Chains of freedom: Constraints and creativity in the macro-verb strategies of Mwotlap", in Bril, Isabelle; Ozanne-Rivierre, Françoise (eds.), Complex predicates in Oceanic languages: Studies in the dynamics of binding and boundness, Empirical Approaches to Language Typology, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 107–143
• François, Alexandre (2005a), "Unraveling the history of the vowels of seventeen northern Vanuatu languages", Oceanic Linguistics, 44 (2): 443–504, doi:10.1353/ol.2005.0034

• François, Alexandre (2005b), "A typological overview of Mwotlap, an Oceanic language of Vanuatu", Linguistic Typology, 9 (1): 115–146, doi:10.1515/lity.2005.9.1.115

• François, Alexandre (2006), "Serial verb constructions in Mwotlap", in Dixon, R.M.W.; Aikhenvald, Alexandra (eds.), Serial Verb Constructions: A cross-linguistic typology, Explorations in Linguistic Typology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 223–238

• François, Alexandre (2007), "Noun articles in Torres and Banks languages: Conservation and innovation", in Siegel, Jeff; Lynch, John; Eades, Diana (eds.), Language Description, History and Development: Linguistic indulgence in memory of Terry Crowley, Creole Language Library 30, Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 313–326
• François, Alexandre (2009), "Verbal aspect and personal pronouns: The history of aorist markers in north Vanuatu", in Pawley, Andrew; Adelaar, Alexander (eds.), Austronesian historical linguistics and culture history: A festschrift for Bob Blust, vol. 601, Canberra: Pacific Linguistics, pp. 179–195

• François, Alexandre (2011b), "Social ecology and language history in the northern Vanuatu linkage: A tale of divergence and convergence", Journal of Historical Linguistics, 1 (2): 175–246, doi:10.1075/jhl.1.2.03fra.
• François, Alexandre (2012), "The dynamics of linguistic diversity: Egalitarian multilingualism and power imbalance among northern Vanuatu languages", International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 214: 85–110, doi:10.1515/ijsl-2012-0022

External links

• Template:Fr Alexandre François's site, including introduction to Mwotlap and Motalava culture, photos, maps, songs, myths and stories
• Two stories in Mwotlap: “The three wives of the Gecko” and “The Fairy from the Other World” (with English and French translations).
• Access to the Online Mwotlap–English–French dictionary (work in progress)
• Access to audio recordings in Mwotlap (from the Pangloss Collection, LACITO–CNRS).
• Nalne Genyon Ta Melanesia A Liturgy for Melanesia in Mwotlap (1970)