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Alexandre François
Alexandre François is a French linguist specialising in the description and study of the indigenous languages of Melanesia. He belongs t''Lattice'' a research centre of the CNRS and École Normale Supérieure dedicated to linguistics. Research Language description and documentation François has done linguistic fieldwork in Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands. In 2002, he published a grammatical description of Araki, a language spoken by a handful of speakers on an islet south of Espiritu Santo (Vanuatu). Most of his research focuses on the northern islands of Vanuatu, known as the Torres and Banks Islands, an area where sixteen out of seventeen languages are still spoken: Hiw, Lo-Toga, Lehali, Löyöp, Mwotlap, Volow (extinct), Lemerig, Vera'a, Vurës, Mwesen, Mota, Nume, Dorig, Koro, Olrat, Lakon, Mwerlap - all descended from the Proto-Torres–Banks language, which was also reconstructed by him. After describing Mwotlap, the language with most speakers in that area, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Olrat Language
Olrat was an Oceanic language of Gaua island, in northern Vanuatu. It became extinct in 2009, with the death of its last speaker Maten Womal. François (2022). Name The name ''Olrat'' (spelled natively as ''Ōlrat'' ) is an endonym. Robert Codrington mentions a place south of Lakon village under the Mota name ''Ulrata''. A few decades later, Sidney Ray mentions the language briefly in 1926 under the same Mota name ‒ but provides no linguistic information. The language In 2003, only three speakers of Olrat remained, who lived on the middle-west coast of Gaua. Their community had left their inland hamlet of Olrat in the first half of the 20th century, and merged into the larger village of Jōlap where Lakon is dominant.. Alexandre François identifies Olrat as a distinct language from its immediate neighbor Lakon, on phonological, grammatical, and lexical grounds. Phonology Olrat has 14 phonemic vowels. These include 7 short /i ɪ ɛ a ɔ ʊ u/ and 7 long vowels /iː ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
