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,[François (2012):97).] as well as migrant groups in the two main cities of the country, Luganville and Port Vila.
Mwotlap was first described in any detail in 2001, by the linguist Alexandre François.
Volow language, which used to be spoken on the same island, may be considered a dialect or a separate language.
The language
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:
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
Anglicanism priest who studied
Melanesians societies, first described Mwotlap in 1885. While focusing mainly on
Mota language, 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 r to y (a process demonstrated already in the loanword Epyaem ). Furthermore, Codrington described
Volow language, 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.
[pp. 77–78]
Mwotlap contrasts 16 consonant phonemes.
>| + Consonants
!colspan="2" | ! Labiovelar
! Bilabial
! Alveolar
! Dorsal consonant
! Glottal |
|
|
|
|
|
Mwotlap has 7 phoneme vowels, which are all short , with no diphthongs being present in the language.[François (2005a): 445); François (2005b): 116).]
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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 skul (from English ), are exceptions to this structure.
When a root beginning with two constants forms the beginning of a word, an Epenthesis vowel (the same as the next vowel) is inserted between the two consonants.[François (2000).] For example, the root tron̄ can form the following:
-
me-tron̄ : the consonants and belong to two different syllables;
-
t oron̄ : the insertion of a vowel between and 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.[See entry vōy in the Online Mwotlap dictionary.] and [See entry hiy in the Online Mwotlap dictionary.] allow their vowel to be copied, while the stems [See entry v[ō]nō in the Online Mwotlap dictionary.] and [See entry d[e]ye~ in the Online Mwotlap dictionary.] 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 contrasts clusivity, and distinguishes four numbers (singular, Dual number, Trial number, plural).[François (2016).] Human nouns also have four numbers; as for non-human nouns, they do not inflect for number and are expressed as singulars.[ 122-125).]
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.[François (2003), 175-176).]
Sources
Main references
Other references
External links
