Volow (formerly known as ''Valuwa'' or ''Valuga'') is an

Oceanic Oceanic may refer to: *Of or relating to the ocean *Of or relating to Oceania **Oceanic climate **Oceanic languages **Oceanic person or people, also called "Pacific Islander(s)" Places *Oceanic, British Columbia Oceanic is an unincorporated set ...

language variety which used to be spoken in the area of

Aplow Aplow, or ''Valuwa'', is a village located on the eastern part of Motalava island, in the Banks Islands of Vanuatu. Located close to it is the island's airport, ''Valua airport''. Aplow also designates the whole district around this village, corr ...

, in the eastern part of the island of

Motalava Mota Lava or Motalava is an island of the Banks group, in the north of Vanuatu. It forms a single coral system with the small island of Ra. The 2009 census figures give a population of 1640 inhabitants (Mota Lava + Ra), which amounts to a popu ...

, in

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 ...

Name

The name ''Volow'' is originally a placename: it corresponds to the area known as

, but in the local language Volow rather than in Mwotlap. This form, pronounced , is derived from Proto-Torres-Banks *''βaluwa''. In neighboring

Mwotlap Mwotlap (pronounced ; formerly known as ''Motlav'') 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 ...

, the same area is called ''Aplow'' (with locative prefix ''a-''), and in Mota, it is called ''Valuwa'' . Both of these are nowadays used as alternative names for the area.

Sociolinguistics

Volow has receded historically in favour of the now dominant language

. It is now only remembered by a single passive speaker, who lives in the village of

— the new name of what was previously known as Volow. The similarity of Volow with Mwotlap is such that the two communalects may be considered

dialect The term dialect (from Latin , , from the Ancient Greek word , 'discourse', from , 'through' and , 'I speak') can refer to either of two distinctly different types of linguistic phenomena: One usage refers to a variety of a language that ...

s of a single language.

Phonology

Volow

phonemically 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 ...

contrasts 16 consonants and 7 vowels. François (2021).

Consonants

: This consonant inventory includes a typologically rare consonant: a

rounded Round or rounds may refer to: Mathematics and science * The contour of a closed curve or surface with no sharp corners, such as an ellipse, circle, rounded rectangle, cant, or sphere * Rounding, the shortening of a number to reduce the num ...

prenasalised Prenasalized consonants are phonetic sequences of a nasal and an obstruent (or occasionally a non-nasal sonorant such as ) that behave phonologically like single consonants. The primary reason for considering them to be single consonants, rather t ...

voiced labial-velar plosive Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds (usually consonants). Speech sounds can be described as either voiceless (otherwise known as ''unvoiced'') or voiced. The term, however, is used to ...

:. e.g. “woman” (spelled ''n-leq̄evēn'' in the local orthography). Historically, Volow is the only daughter language to have preserved the voicing of the proto-phonemes ''*ᵑg'' > /ᵑɡ/ and ''*ᵐbʷ'' > /ᵑᵐɡ͡bʷ/, which is reconstructed for its ancestor Proto-Torres-Banks. Most of its neighbours (including Mwotlap) devoiced these to /k/ and /k͡pʷ/ respectively.

Vowels

The seven vowels of Volow are all short

monophthong A monophthong ( ; , ) is a pure vowel sound, one whose articulation at both beginning and end is relatively fixed, and which does not glide up or down towards a new position of articulation. The monophthongs can be contrasted with diphthongs, w ...

s:. :

External links

Presentation of the Volow language
by linguist A. François. Access to the Volow corpus (''

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 ...

'' of CNRS).
A story in Volow presented in bilingual (Volow–French) format, with audio recording
(''

'' of CNRS). This story was recorded by anthropologist Bernard Vienne in 1969 from the last fluent speaker Wanhand ��1986 and was translated by A. François in 2003, with the help of Wanhand's son.

Notes

References

* * * . * * * Banks–Torres languages Languages of Vanuatu Torba Province Endangered Austronesian languages {{Vanuatu-stub