Today, we will take a look at the languages that reportedly use case prefixes in a country that is not really talked about much here on The Language Closet. An archipelago shaped like a ‘Y’ belonging to the Oceanic sub-region of Melanesia. Vanuatu. Despite its size, Vanuatu is among the most linguistically diverse nations on the planet, with 138 languages spoken amongst its population of 330 000. Thus, I would be doing a great disservice by not introducing the languages spoken in this nation.

When we browse the World Atlas of Language Structures Online map, we find that there are two languages in the sample which reportedly uses case prefixes. Both of these belong to the Oceanic branch of the Austronesian languages, which go by the names of the Mwotlap language, and the South Efate or Nafsan language. For today, we will take a look at the Mwotlap language, and see if it really does use case prefixes.

Mwotlap is spoken by around 2000 native speakers who mainly live in the island of Mota Lava and the Banks Islands. Despite its apparently small speaking population, this language is thriving, and is considered not endangered by the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. However, the potential of language shift still poses a threat to the health of the Mwotlap language, as speakers may move away from the islands, and preferring to speak Bislama, the English-based creole of Vanuatu, or English.

Most of the contemporary research and resources on the language is conducted by the linguist Alexandre François, who has published a dictionary and a detailed reference grammar of the language. However, this is not the first time this language has been documented; the earliest written records of Mwotlap date back to 1885 by Robert Henry Codrington, with several more studies by linguists such as Darrell Tryon in the 1970s. This has allowed linguists to record some cases of ongoing evolution in the language over the past century.

Mwotlap has a total of 16 consonants, but a couple of the most interesting ones are those that are transcribed as [k͡pʷ] and [ŋ͡mʷ]. These are what phonologists refer to as a “doubly articulated consonants”, and here, with labialisation or rounding. Here, consonants may be articulated at two different places simultaneously, and they usually share the same manner of articulation. Thus for the former, it sounds like a speaker is trying to say /k/ and /p/ at the same time, with a /w/ sound after. This particular type of consonants is especially seen in some of the languages of Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea, while sounds like [k͡p] may be typically found in some languages of West Africa. In Mwotlap, the [k͡pʷ] sound is written as “m̄” by François, while the [ŋ͡mʷ] sound is written as “q“.

Additionally, Mwotlap has a total of 7 vowels. They are not distinguished by length, nor does the language have diphthongs, that is, the combination of two different vowel sounds into a single syllable. Furthermore, consonant clusters do not exist. To pronounce words like tron̄, the Mwotlap word for ‘drunk’, there would be a vowel inserted between the “t” and “r”, in a phenomenon known as epenthesis. In this case, this word would be pronounced as [tɔ.rɔŋ].

François also noted two particular phenomena occurring in the vowels. In his 2005 overview, he proposed that Mwotlap is developing some form of vowel harmony, a feature that is quite peculiar amongst the Oceanic languages. How this works is by using the advanced tongue root, where the pharynx may expand by moving the base of the tongue forward. Vowels articulated with advanced tongue root may have different tension qualities compared to their plain counterparts, and it is this distinction that forms the basis of vowel harmony in some languages.

Following from vowel epenthesis and vowel harmony, there is also the feature of vowel copying. This is where some prefixes used in Mwotlap copy the vowel used in the first vowel of the word the prefix modifies. Other processes do occur as well, such as vowel elision and vowel transfer, likely to suit the phonotactic rule that diphthongs and consonant clusters cannot occur in Mwotlap.

The basic Mwotlap sentence structure is pretty rigid, with a generally fixed subject-verb-object word order. This makes for rather intuitive deduction of the functions performed by the core arguments when case markers are not present. Additionally, the language distinguishes between four numbers in its grammar, the singular, the dual, the trial (3), and the plural.

Perhaps one peculiarity to us English speakers at least is the lack of the reflexive (yourself etc.) and reciprocal (each other, one another) pronouns. Instead, the ordinary pronouns are used to express this, presenting some ambiguity over which meaning is exactly intended. One method of clarifying this ambiguity is through the use of the word lok (back), which indicates that the sentence involves a reflexive or a reciprocal by rendering the basic interpretation (like ‘they hit them’ with different participants) ungrammatical.

With a rigid word order, but generally indicating a nominative-accusative morphosyntactic alignment, and possessive suffixes that may be interpreted as the ‘genitive’, it appears that the system of case prefixes proposed in the WALS Online map was perhaps more restricted or clandestine. Reading through the thesis by François on Mwotlap, which was written in French, I found two further cases being discussed — the ablative, indicating direction from something, and the dative, indicating an indirect object. However, these are marked using entire prepositions or words, such as ⁿdɛn for the ablative and hij for the dative.

I was already prepared to write this claim off as misleading or false, or that some competing interpretation was used to supplement the map data point. This was until I inspected the source from which this deduction was made. It pointed me to a section written by Terry Crowley in the 2002 publication The Oceanic Languages. And there it was, the ‘case prefix’ in Mwotlap:

Checking back at François’ thesis, this seems to be generally corroborated. Mwotlap does indeed use a locative case, which is indicated as a prefix. Two more prefixes are also shown in Crowley’s analysis here, where the V would be the first vowel used by the word modified, showing that expressing the locative case would involve vowel copying. Thus, the Mwotlap language could be more accurately said to express grammatical case by a combination of different means – through a rigid word order, through case markers, case suffixes (to express possessor-possessed relationships) and case prefixes.

Like most Austronesian languages, Mwotlap uses a decimal number system, but this one is split into sub-bases of 5. To make the numbers 6 to 9, the construction “5 + n” is used, with the prefix lɛ- or li- indicating the number 5. Thus, the numbers from 1 – 10, 100 and 1000 are as follows, in numerical order:

βi-tiwaɣ, βʊ-jʊ, βɪ-tɪl, βɪ-βɛt, tɪβɪlɪm, lɛβɛtɛ, liβijʊ, lɛβɛtɪl, lɛβɛβɛt, sɔŋwul (tiwaɣ), ŋ͡mʷɛlⁿdɪl (βaɣ-tiwaɣ), tɛj (βaɣ-tiwaɣ)

On top of these, Mwotlap also has a rather intriguing set of directional terms, where geocentric directional terms are used. In François’ 2003 publication, this takes the form of a land-sea axis (haj – jɔw), and a southeast-northwest axis (haɣ – hʊw). This is on top of the directional pairs that seem to draw a vector in space. These pairs translate to “up-down”, “in-out”, and “hither-thither” or “toward speaker – toward non-speaker”. To some extent, these directional terms are related to the seafaring history of the Mwotlap people, like many other Austronesian people groups. Next time, we will take a look at the other language in Vanuatu that has been purported to use case prefixes, South Efate (Nafsan).

Further Reading

Mwotlap Dictionary:

http://alex.francois.online.fr/AF-dict-Mwotlap_e.htm

Alexandre François’ works in Mwotlap language and other languages of Vanuatu:

http://alex.francois.online.fr/index.htm

Crowley, T. (2002) ‘A grammar sketch of Mwotlap’, The Oceanic Languages, pp. 587 – 598.

François, A. (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.

François, A. (2003) ‘Of men, hills, and winds: Space directionals in Mwotlap’, Linguistics, 42(2), pp. 407 – 437.

François A. (2005) ‘A typological overview of Mwotlap, an Oceanic language of Vanuatu’, Linguistic Typology, 9, pp. 115 – 146.