Mwotlap 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 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
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:
, 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. Furthermore, Codrington described Volow, a language closely related to Mwotlap. Volow, almost extinct today, was spoken in the east of Mota Lava, in the area of Aplow.
exists as the allophone of /β/ word-finally, as in the name of the language, /ŋ͡mʷɔtlaβ/ . Mwotlap has 7 phonemic vowels, which are all short monophthongs, with no diphthongs being present in the language. Stress always falls on the last syllable of a word.
Orthography
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.
Letter
a
b
d
e
ē
g
h
i
k
l
m
m̄
Pronunciation
Letter
n
n̄
o
ō
p
q
s
t
u
v
w
y
Pronunciation
Prosody
Mwotlap is not tonal. Stress falls on the last syllable of a word or syntagma.
Morphophonology
Syllables
Mwotlap's syllable structure is V. 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, are exceptions to this structure. When a root beginning with two constants forms the beginning of a word, an epenthetic vowel is inserted between the two consonants. For example, the root tron̄ can form the following:
me-tron̄ : the consonants t and r belong to two different syllables;
toron̄ : the insertion of a vowel between t and r'' 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 na-, the locative le-, and te-, a prefix used to form adjectives describing origin. These prefixes form nō-vōy, ni-hiy, and to-M̄otlap, but also na-pnō and na-nye-k. Words stems beginning with two consonants do not permit vowel copying. Thus the stems and allow their vowel to be copied, while the stems and do not.
Grammar
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. 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 directionals, which is in part typical of Oceanic languages, and in part innovative.
Main references
François, Alexandre, . PhD dissertation, Université Paris-IV Sorbonne. 1078 pp.
