Olrat was an
Oceanic language
The approximately 450 Oceanic languages are a branch of the Austronesian languages. The area occupied by speakers of these languages includes Polynesia, as well as much of Melanesia and Micronesia. Though covering a vast area, Oceanic languages ...
of
Gaua island, in northern
Vanuatu
Vanuatu ( or ; ), officially the Republic of Vanuatu (french: link=no, République de Vanuatu; bi, Ripablik blong Vanuatu), is an island country located in the South Pacific Ocean. The archipelago, which is of volcanic origin, is east of no ...
. 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 Mota, MOTA or variations thereof may refer to:
Geography
* Mota (island), Vanuatu
* Mota, Ethiopia, a town
* Mota, Gujarat, India, a town
* Mota, Ljutomer, Slovenia, a village
Music
* ''M.O.T.A.'' (album), a 2005 album by Cultura Profética
* "M ...
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
![Alex-Maten-Gaua-2003](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9b/Alex-Maten-Gaua-2003.jpg)
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
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 ...
identifies Olrat as a distinct language from its immediate neighbor
Lakon, on phonological, grammatical, and lexical grounds.
Phonology
Olrat has 14
phonemic
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west o ...
vowels. These include 7 short /i ɪ ɛ a ɔ ʊ u/ and 7 long vowels /iː ɪː ɛː aː ɔː ʊː uː/.
Historically, the phonologization of vowel length originates in the
compensatory lengthening
Compensatory lengthening in phonology and historical linguistics is the lengthening of a vowel sound that happens upon the loss of a following consonant, usually in the syllable coda, or of a vowel in an adjacent syllable. Lengthening triggered ...
of short vowels when the
voiced velar fricative
The voiced velar fricative is a type of consonantal sound that is used in various spoken languages. It is not found in Modern English but existed in Old English. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , ...
was lost syllable-finally.
Grammar
The system of
personal pronoun
Personal pronouns are pronouns that are associated primarily with a particular grammatical person – first person (as ''I''), second person (as ''you''), or third person (as ''he'', ''she'', ''it'', ''they''). Personal pronouns may also take dif ...
s in Olrat contrasts
clusivity
In linguistics, clusivity is a grammatical distinction between ''inclusive'' and ''exclusive'' first-person pronouns and verbal morphology, also called ''inclusive " we"'' and ''exclusive "we"''. Inclusive "we" specifically includes the addressee ...
, and distinguishes four
numbers
A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The original examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. Numbers can be represented in language with number words. More universally, individual numbers can ...
(singular,
dual,
trial
In law, a trial is a coming together of Party (law), parties to a :wikt:dispute, dispute, to present information (in the form of evidence (law), evidence) in a tribunal, a formal setting with the authority to Adjudication, adjudicate claims or d ...
, plural).
Spatial reference in Olrat is based on a system of geocentric (
absolute Absolute may refer to:
Companies
* Absolute Entertainment, a video game publisher
* Absolute Radio, (formerly Virgin Radio), independent national radio station in the UK
* Absolute Software Corporation, specializes in security and data risk manage ...
) directionals, which is typical of
Oceanic languages
The approximately 450 Oceanic languages are a branch of the Austronesian languages. The area occupied by speakers of these languages includes Polynesia, as well as much of Melanesia and Micronesia. Though covering a vast area, Oceanic languages ...
.
[ François (2015).]
Notes and references
References
Bibliography
*
* .
*
*
*
*
External links
Linguistic map of north Vanuatu, showing range of Olrat on Gaua
(site of linguist A. François)
Access to audio recordings in Olrat language(section of the Pangloss Collection
The Pangloss Collection is a digital library whose objective is to store and facilitate access to audio recordings in endangered languages of the world. Developed by the LACITO centre of CNRS in Paris, the collection provides free online access to ...
, CNRS
The French National Centre for Scientific Research (french: link=no, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science agency in Europe.
In 2016, it employed 31,637 ...
)
Petition to create ISO code for Olrat
{{Austronesian languages
Banks–Torres languages
Critically endangered languages
Endangered languages of Oceania
Languages of Vanuatu
Torba Province