Koro 

The round island of Gaua is dominated by its central volcano, known in English as Mount Garet (Meke Gerāt in Koro), and by the lake that has formed in its caldera (lake Letas in English, Bētäs in Koro).
Gaua is home to two dozen villages or hamlets, scattered around its circular coast. The six languages spoken there form a dialect chain (Kalyan & François 2018) that can be cited clock­­wise, as Nume – Mwerlap – Dorig – Koro – Olrat – Lakon.
Koro is the language spoken in the south­west­ern corner of the island – in the villages of Kōrō [kʊrʊ] and Biam [ᵐbɪam]. The Koro community has always had particularly close links with that of Dorig to its east – as witnessed by the number of mutual marriages, and similarities both of languages and of the oral literature. As a corollary, there are also speakers of Koro in the Dorig area.

 

 

 

2. The Koro recordings

Alexandre François met several Koro speakers in the village of Dorig, as part of his linguistic survey of Gaua in August 2003. Thanks to the proximity of Koro to the language of Dorig, he was able to understand the essentials of the language – enough to collect and transcribed some stories from the oral literature.

The Koro recordings feature four myths or tales – known locally as Ususräg bēlē Maraw “Stories of the Spider” (François 2013: 222) – told in the Koro language. Among them, two stories of man–fish have been transcribed and translated:

• “The boy who became a Flying fish”, by Derik Bogo
• “In love with an Eel Man”, by Banabas Womal

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

 

To these two narratives, we can add also an uncommon genre of narrative – a blend between an epic and the description of a ritual dance:

• “The battle between Gods and Men”, also by Banabas Womal.

 

3. The Koro language

3.1.  Phonology, orthography

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

{ a ä 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.

Koro 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 Koro

	labiovelar	bilabial	alveolar	velar
voiceless stop	k​͡pʷ  ‹q›		t  ‹t›	k  ‹k›
prenasalized stop		ᵐb ‹b›	ⁿd  ‹d›
fricative		β [β,ɸ] ‹v›	s  ‹s›	ɣ  ‹g›
nasal	ŋ​͡m​ʷ ‹m̄›	m  ‹m›	n  ‹n›	ŋ  ‹n̄›
lateral			l  ‹l›
rhotic			r  ‹r›
approximant	w  ‹w›

 

Koro has 8 phonemic vowels. This includes a diphthong /ɛ​͡a/ spelled |ä|, which contrasts with the mono­phthong /a/ – e.g. var [βar] ‘to call’ ≠ vär [βɛ​͡ar] ‘stingray’ (François 2005:447):

Table 2 – The 8 vowels of Koro

	front	back
close	i  ‹i›	u  ‹u›
near-close	ɪ  ‹ē›	ʊ  ‹ō›
open-mid	ɛ  ‹e›	ɔ  ‹o›
near-open	ɛ​͡a  ‹ä›
open	a  ‹a›

 

Table 3 illustrates the orthography of Koro with several examples.

Table 3 – Some words in Koro

	orthography	phonetic
‘lake Letas’	Bētäs	[ᵐbɪtɛ​͡as]
‘women’	lorlorqa	[lɔrlɔrk​͡pʷa]
‘wander around’	äl dälgēt	[ɛ​͡al ⁿdɛ​͡alɣɪt]
‘time of the Origin’	l‑qētē qōtgi	[lk​͡pʷɪtɪ k​͡pʷʊtɣi]
‘rise, appear’	tevräkät	[tɛβrɛ​͡akɛ​͡at]
‘young man’	lōmgäv	[lʊmɣɛ​͡aβ]

 

François published an ABC-book in Koro, in mono­lingual format, meant to endow younger generations with basic literacy materials in their native language: “O valvalaw ta Kōrō – Our language Koro” (François & François 2011).

3.2.  Pronominal indexing

The personal pronouns of Koro (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 duru “1inclusive: dual” means ‘you & me’, whereas kemär “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 Koro

	singular	dual	trial	plural
1 inclusive		duru	tēlēn	gēn
1 exclusive	na	kemär	kēlkama	kama
2	nēk	kumur	kēlkimi	kimi
3	ni	(i)rru	tēlēr	nēr

 

(1)	Na	v‑	ron̄	nēk,	la	nēk	t‑		ron̄	wōs	na.
	1sg	stat	know	2sg	but	2sg	neg₁		know	neg₂	1sg
	‘I know you, but you don't know me.’

 

(2)	Irru	qara	sasag	velrig	mē	kama.
	3du	fut	stay:redup	together	with	1exc:pl
	‘They (two) will stay with us.’

 

4. Useful references

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

— 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.

— 2013. Shadows of bygone lives: The histories of spiritual words in northern Vanuatu. In Robert Mailhammer (ed.). Lexical and structural etymology: Beyond word histories. Studies in Language Change. Berlin: DeGruyter Mouton.  185-244.

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

François, Alexandre & Sawako François. 2011. O valvalaw ta Kōrō – Our language Koro. Monolingual in Koro. Illustrated by Sawako François. Port-Vila: Alliance Française. 32 pp.

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 Koro language. Pangloss Collection. Paris: CNRS.