Moving further into Vanuatu for the search of languages with case prefixes, we find ourselves on the island of Efate in the Shefa Province of Vanuatu. It is the island where the capital and largest city, Port Vila, is located, and it is the southern villages of the island like Erakor and Eton where we can find one particular language said to have case prefixes.

This language does not really have a set name by the native speakers, although some might refer to it as Nafsan, which translates to ‘language’ or ‘story’. Instead, it is perhaps better known as the South Efate language, which is an Austronesian language, more precisely a Southern Oceanic language, spoken by around 6000 people as of 2006. This makes it closely related to languages like Lelepa and Nguna (or North Efate), which are also Southern Oceanic languages spoken on the island of Efate.

Most contemporary research has been conducted by the Australian linguist Nick Thieberger, who has published a grammar of South Efate in 2006, among other publications studying various aspects of the language. However, the first known publication goes way back to the 1860s, which was a biblical pamphlet titled Nadus iskei nig Fat, and other works by Reverend Dr. James Mackenzie and Daniel Macdonald. One of the first grammar sketches was done by Robert Codrington in 1885, with one or two other grammar sketches coming in the mid or late 20th century by linguists like Arthur Capell and Ross Clark.

Like the Mwotlap language we introduced previously, the South Efate language has a similar number of consonant and vowel sounds — with 15 consonants and 5 vowels. As noted by Thieberger, these vowels are undergoing some sort of change from its traditional distinction by vowel length. Like the Mwotlap language and some languages of Vanuatu, South Efate has the labiovelar consonants /k͡p/ and /ŋ͡m/, although in the case of South Efate, these consonants lack the velarisation that one would see in languages like Mwotlap.

In the grammar of South Efate, Thieberger noted that nouns do not inflect for person, number, nor role, which indicates there should be no inflection for grammatical case. However, the same could not be said for the system of pronouns it has. South Efate’s pronouns are extensive, with distinctions made for the singular, dual, and plural, as well as the exclusive ‘we’ and the inclusive ‘we’.

Pronouns can also exist in a free and bound (attached to a word) state, and adopt different forms depending on their role in a certain sentence or clause. Amongst these are a the oblique free pronouns and the oblique object bound pronouns, which function as possessives, benefactives. In some languages, you might recall that the latter might be represented using the dative case, though the dative applies more for indirect objects. There is also an object marker, used to mark direct objects much like the accusative case does in some languages. In the bound forms, these exist as suffixes which are attached to a certain verb.

	1sg	2sg	3sg	1pl, excl.	1pl, incl.	2pl	3pl
Object	-wou	-k	-ø / -n	-mam	-kit	-mus	-r
Oblique	-wou	-wok	-wes	-mam	-kit	-mus	-wer

Other kinds of relationships between arguments of a clause may include possessor-possession relationships. In some of the world’s languages, this might be done using the genitive case, or with a preposition denoting the relationship, such as ‘X of [the] Y’ or ‘X from Y’. It is with these prepositions generally that South Efate uses to denote possessor-possession relationships. In addition to the set of possessive pronouns South Efate has, the preposition ni (of), for example, is also used as a possessor marker, as in sum̃ ni Ben (house of Ben, Ben’s house). For this preposition though, it also plays an ablative function (from [something]), in phrases like plisman ni natkon (the police from the village). The particle knen, which translates to ‘of it’, is also used to denote such a possession, but it is more often used to refer to an aforementioned inanimate argument. For example, if a ‘story’ was previously mentioned in a conversation, the word knen may be used to refer to it.

There is also a system of direct possession used in South Efate, as the possessed nouns are usually suffixed by possessive markers. This normally takes place with a certain person referred to by a certain pronoun being the possessor of a noun. Such nouns may include kinship terms, body parts, body products like footsteps and breath, and associated parts like a name. If such a noun occurs without a suffix, it signifies that this noun is either not owned, or disembodied, such as blood that is no longer part of the body it normally flows in. And so, even if we take such constructions as grammatical “case”, by a long stretch, it does not seem that South Efate uses prefixes to express such grammatical functions. Or does it?

But let us turn back to the names of villages where the South Efate-speaking population resides. Erakor, Ekasup, Eratap, Enam, Epantgouei, and Eton. All of these names begin with an ‘e-‘ affix. And as Thieberger noted, this affix is the locative case affix in South Efate, which is used to form a location using the noun it modifies. Interestingly though, this affix may also be used with a ‘location’ in time, like ‘tomorrow’ (e-matol). There are also cases where the affix is fused together with the noun as well, such as elau (sea, to sea).

Before we get our hopes high that we have finally found a case prefix in yet another Southern Oceanic language, we need to address the wording in the previous paragraph. Note that the term mentioned was a ‘case affix’. The reference grammar I consulted also called it an ‘affix’ instead of a ‘prefix’. It turns out that this affix e- could also be used as a directional particle, which may follow the noun it modifies. In some transcriptions, this is glossed as such:

• I=en nam̃las-e / e-sum̃-e.
• 3sgRS=lay bush-LOC / LOC-house-LOC
• It is in the bush / the house.

Did you see how the particle may also sandwich the noun it modifies? Drawing interpretations from such a typology, it seems reasonable that the locative case is better classified as an affix rather than a prefix. Perhaps once again, we are let down by another inaccuracy in the World Atlas of Language Structures Online, since this language would be better described as a language that uses case affixes among other structures. And so, to answer the titular question, no, not this one.

While the basic word order of South Efate is subject-verb-object, pretty much like the one we use in English, the most basic of sentences would include pronoun prefixes and object suffixes attached to the verb stem. This gives us the word iskotir, which can be broken down into i=skot-i-r, which means ‘she was with them’. There is also a system of topicalisation in the language, where the first and second objects may be used as a topic of a certain sentence. Subjects however, cannot be topicalised due to the requirement for subject proclitics of some form to be part of a certain phrase.

South Efate uses a quinary, or base-5 number system, with a notable pattern to form the numbers 6 to 10. While it has numerals for 100 (tifli), 1000 (p̃on), and even a million (p̃onti), most numbers above 10 are now counted using Bislama, an English-based creole spoken in Vanuatu. To form numbers like 17, these numbers could be broken down into smaller elements like 10 + (5 + 2), using the word atmat (and) to join them. Thus, 17 would translate to ralim iskei atmat ilaru.

1	i-skei	6	i-lates
2	i-nru	7	i-laru
3	i-tol	8	i-latol
4	i-pat	9	i-lfot
5	i-lim	10	ralim iskei

Today, the South Efate language is still thriving, but like many other languages in the country, there are some threats to the language’s survival. In Vanuatu, education takes place using English and French, with many of its residents also fluent in the local English-based creole called Bislama. As observed from the increasing use of Bislama numerals to count higher quantities, there is potential threat of language shift, where speakers prefer to use Bislama, English, or French instead of South Efate for an increasing number of contexts or scenarios. This subtle, but potentially progressive constraining of the scenarios in which South Efate is used (at home, at school, professionally, etc.) could raise concerns of the long-term survival of the South Efate language. On the flipside, with over a hundred indigenous languages spoken in Vanuatu, uniting these communities using Bislama as a lingua franca could help bridge linguistic differences between speaking groups. But for now, the South Efate language is not endangered as noted by the Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, and hopefully this classification does not change in the future.

Further Reading

Lynch, J. & T. Crowley. (2001) ‘Languages of Vanuatu: A new survey and bibliography’, Canberra, Pacific Linguistics, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University.

Thieberger, N. (2004) ‘Topics in the grammar and documentation of South Efate, an Oceanic language of Central Vanuatu’, PhD thesis, Department of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, University of Melbourne.

Thieberger, N. (2006) ‘A grammar of South Efate: An Oceanic language of Vanuatu’, Oceanic Linguistics Special Publication, No. 33., Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press.

Thieberger, N. (2006) ‘The benefactive construction in South Efate’, Oceanic Linguistics, 45(2), pp. 297-310.

Thieberger, N., members of the Erakor community. (2021) ‘A Dictionary of Nafsan, South Efate, Vanuatu: M̃p̃et Nafsan ni Erakor’, Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press.