Hiw

1. The language

2. The Hiw corpus

The island of Hiw can be accessed by taking a small plane to Lo island, and then an engine boat from Lo to Hiw. Alexandre François made several field trips there between 2004 and 2011.

The Hiw archive includes recordings of various genres: songs (lullabies, guitar songs, newēt dances, etc.), narratives, conversations, village events… One of the most prolific storytellers of Hiw was the Anglican priest (“Mama”) of the island, named Jimmy Tiwyōy, or “Mama Jimmy”. Before his untimely death in 2013, Mama Jimmy was able to tell many stories to François, who made nineteen recordings with him.

Whether the elders recorded were Mama Jimmy, Edward Bilis or Sisil Howard, many conversations revolved around topics of high cultural interest:

• memories of the ancient society of Hiw;
• sorcery and the art of healing;
• the power of good and evil spirits;
• shamanic practices;
• origin myths of yams, mats or newēt dances;
• the history of Blackbirding.

At this stage, only one text is provided here with a full translation: The mat from the Underworld (Ne tapego te Pënö). Mama Jimmy tells the story of his ancestor Samuel, a wise man who used his shamanic powers to travel to the Underworld (Pënö) and rescue the soul of a man who had just died. The two men travelled back to our world aboard a flying carpet – a special mat (ne tapego) which is still used nowadays by Hiw islanders.

3. Notes on the language 

3.1 Orthography

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

{ a e ë ē g i k m n n̄ n̄w o ö ō p q r̄ s t u v w y }.

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

Hiw has 14 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​ʷ/. The letter ‹r̄› encodes the (typologically rare) “prestopped velar lateral” [g​͡ʟ]; phonologically, this is a liquid that can be understood as /ᶢʟ/.

Table 1 – The 14 phonemic consonants of Hiw

Hiw has 9 vowels, all short monophthongs.

Table 2 – The 9 vowels of Hiw

The syllabic template of Hiw is CCVC (with optional consonants):

The phonology and phonotactics of Hiw are presented in François (2010a).

3.2 Pronominal indexing

The personal pronouns of Hiw distinguish three numbers: singular, dual, plural. They also strictly encode the contrast between ‘inclusive we’ [=you & me & others] and ‘exclusive we’ [me & others]. Thus the pronoun tör̄ö “1inclusive: dual” means ‘you & me’, whereas kamar̄e “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, or objects of certain prepositions.

Table 4 – The free personal pronouns of Hiw

The grammatical structures of Hiw are presented in François (2017, 2019).

4. Useful references

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

François, Alexandre. 2010a. Phonotactics and the prestopped velar lateral of Hiw: Resolving the ambiguity of a complex segment. Phonology, 27 (3): 393–434, 

François, Alexandre. 2010b. Pragmatic demotion and clause dependency: On two atypical subordinating strategies in Lo-Toga and Hiw (Torres, Vanuatu). In Isabelle Bril (ed.), Clause hierarchy and Clause linking: The Syntax and Pragmatics interface. Studies in Language Companion Series 121, Amsterdam: Benjamins, 499–548.

François, Alexandre. 2011. Social ecology and language history in the northern Vanuatu linkage: A tale of divergence and convergence. Journal of Historical Linguistics 1 (2). 175-246.

François, Alexandre. 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.

François, Alexandre. 2017. The economy of word classes in Hiw, Vanuatu: Grammatically flexible, lexically rigid. In Eva van Lier (ed.), Lexical Flexibility in Oceanic Languages. Special issue of Studies in Language 41, 294–357.

François, Alexandre. 2019. Verbal number in Lo–Toga and Hiw: The emergence of a lexical paradigm. Transactions of the Philological Society 117 (3): 338–371. 

Here is how you can cite the present archive:

François, Alexandre. 2021. Archive of audio recordings in the Hiw language. Pangloss collection. Paris: CNRS.