Mwotlap 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: • Vanua Lava, particularly in the northeast • Several other northern Vanuatu islands including Ureparapara, Gaua, and Ambae • 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 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 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, such as the change of to (a process demonstrated already in the loanword ). Furthermore, Codrington described Volow, 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. Consonants Mwotlap contrasts 16 consonant phonemes in native words, with the addition of // in recent loanwords. : Vowels Mwotlap has 7 phonemic vowels, which are all short monophthongs, with no diphthongs being present in the language. : 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 (from English ), 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 can form the following: • : the consonants and belong to two different syllables; • : 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. and allow their vowel to be copied, while the stems and 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 personal pronouns contrasts clusivity, and distinguishes four numbers (singular, dual, trial, plural). 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 (absolute) directionals, which is in part typical of Oceanic languages, and in part innovative. Like most Oceanic languages, Mwotlap creates its non-verbal predicates without resorting to a copula (like Eng. to be). As a corollary, its grammar is omnipredicative, i.e. most of its word classes (verbs, adjectives, nouns, numerals, etc.) are directly predicative. {{interlinear|number=(1)|glossing=link|abbreviations=ART:article:article (grammar) ==References==