Dorig

1. The languages of Gaua island

2. The Dorig recordings

Alexandre François spent some time in the Dorig-speaking area in August 2003, as part of his linguistic survey of Gaua. Thanks to a specially designed questionnaire (François 2019), he quickly acquired the essentials of the language – enough to understand its basic structures (François 2023), and also to collect some of the traditional oral literature.

The Dorig recordings include a few songs, mostly sung a cappella, and a few informal conversations. But the main category of recordings is a set of 14 myths or tales – known locally as Susrig ble Mraw “Stories of the Spider” (François 2013: 222) – told in the Dorig language, by various storytellers of all ages. Among them, several have been selected to be here transcribed and translated:

• “The woman who became volcano”, by John Collection Wemaras
• “The mysterious pixies”, by John Star
• “The barracuda boy”, by Selwyn Wesur
• “The tragic revenge of the two sisters”, by Charles Maklen
• “The Heron and the Demon”, also by Charles Maklen.

(The archive also contains a version of some stories that was told in Bislama, the lingua franca.)

To these five narratives, we can add also an interview with chief Charles Maklen about Wrisris, the mythical guardian of the Underworld (in three parts):

• “Wrisris, the Guardian of the Underworld”: Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3.

Based on his work of transcription and interpretation, François published two books in Dorig, in mono­lingual format, meant to endow younger generations with literacy materials in their native language:

• an ABC-book: “O vavgat ta Dōrig – Our language Dorig” (François & François 2011a)
• a collection of stories: “O susrig ble mraw vata Dōrig – Traditional stories in Dorig (Gaua)” (François & François 2011b).

3. The Dorig language

3.1.  Phonology, orthography

The orthography proposed for transcribing the Dorig texts follows this alphabetical order:

{ a ā b d e ē g i k l m m̄ n n̄ o ō q r s t u v w }.

Each of these letters corresponds to one phoneme in the language.

Dorig has 15 phonemic consonants. The following chart lists the phonemes themselves (using IPA); the orthographic convention is shown in brackets. For example, the letter ‹q› in the orthography encodes the labiovelar stop /k​͡pʷ/.

Table 1 – The 15 phonemic consonants of Dorig

Dorig has 8 phonemic vowels. This includes a long vowel /aː/ spelled |ā|, which forms a contrastive pair with its short counterpart /a/ – e.g. lan̄ [laŋ] ‘a fly’ ≠ lān̄ [laːŋ] ‘wind’ (François 2005:461):

Table 2 – The 8 vowels of Dorig

The default syllabic structure is CCVC. Dorig thus commonly starts its words with consonant clusters, regardless of the universal trends in terms of the sonority hierarchy (François 2010: 407–8) – e.g. qrāt [k͡pʷraːt] ‘flying-fox’, rm̄os [rŋ​͡mʷɔs] ‘Casuarina tree’, wde [wⁿdɛ] ‘pig’, Lkon [lkɔn] ‘Gaua’.

Table 3 illustrates the orthography of Dorig with several examples.

Table 3 – Some words in Dorig

3.2.  Pronominal indexing

The personal pronouns of Dorig (François 2016) distinguish four numbers: singular, dual, trial, plural. They also strictly encode the contrast between ‘inclusive we’ [=you & me & others] and ‘exclusive we’ [me & others]. Thus the pronoun dār “1inclusive: dual” means ‘you & me’, whereas kmār “1exclusive: dual” will read as ‘one person (other than you) + myself’, i.e. ‘me & him/her’.

The free pronouns, listed in the next table, can serve as subjects, objects of verbs, objects of prepositions.

Table 4 – The free personal pronouns of Dorig

Grammatical information on Dorig can be found in François (2023).

4.  Useful references

For more on the languages of Northern Vanuatu, visit http://alex.francois.online.fr. The following selected publications help understand Dorig in its context:

François, Alexandre. 2005. Unraveling the history of the vowels of seventeen northern Vanuatu languages. Oceanic Linguistics 44 (2): 443-504. Dec 2005. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press.

— 2010. Phonotactics and the prestopped velar lateral in Hiw: Resolving the ambiguity of a complex segment. Phonology 27 (3): 393-434.

— 2012. The dynamics of linguistic diversity: Egalitarian multilingualism and power imbalance among northern Vanuatu languages. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 214, 85–110.

— 2016. The historical morphology of personal pronouns in northern Vanuatu. Faits de Langues. Bern: Peter Lang. 25–60.

— 2019. A proposal for conversational questionnaires. Language Documentation & Conservation 16, 155–196.

— 2023. Negation in Dorig. In Matti Miestamo & Ljuba Veselinova (eds). The Typology of Negation. Language Science Press.

François, Alexandre & Sawako François. 2011a. O vavgat ta Dōrig – Our language Dorig. Monolingual in Dorig. Illustrated by Sawako François. Port-Vila: Alliance Française. 32 pp.

— 2011b. O susrig ble mraw vata Dōrig – Traditional stories in Dorig. Monolingual in Dorig. Illustrated by Sawako François. Port-Vila: Alliance Française. 48 pp.

François, Alexandre & Monika Stern. 2013. Musiques du Vanuatu: Fêtes et Mystères – Music of Vanuatu: Celebrations and Mysteries. CD album + liner notes. Inédit. Paris: Maison des Cultures du Monde.

Kalyan, Siva & Alexandre François. 2018. Freeing the Comparative Method from the tree model: A framework for Historical Glottometry. In R. Kikusawa & L. Reid (eds), Let's talk about trees: Genetic Relationships of Languages and Their Phylogenic Representation (Senri Ethnological Studies, 98). Ōsaka: National Museum of Ethnology. 59–89.

Here is how you can cite the present archive:

François, Alexandre. 2022. Archive of audio recordings in the Dorig language. Pangloss Collection. Paris: CNRS.