Löyöp

1. The language

2. The Löyöp corpus

The island of Ureparapara is difficult to access, due to the lack of regular trips by air or by sea. Alexandre François was able to collect data on the Löyöp language through unplanned encounters with Löyöp speakers who lived on other islands.

One of these speakers is Fred William Qasvarong, an older man from Löyöp, who resides on the island of Motalava. He taught the basics of the language to A. François, and told several traditional narratives in Löyöp.

3. Notes on the language

3.1 Orthography

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

{ a ä d e ē ë g i j k l m m̄ n n̄ o ō ö p q s t u v w y }.

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

Löyöp has 16 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 16 phonemic consonants of Löyöp

Löyöp has 10 vowels, all short; to which one may add the diphthong /i​͡ɛ/, transcribed ‹ye›.

Table 2 – The 10 vowels of Löyöp

Unprefixed words conform to the syllabic template (C)V(C):

• vujuwa           [vy.ʧy.wa]                 ‘one’
• qan̄qan̄yis       [k​͡pʷaŋ.k​͡pʷaŋ.jis]       ‘bake food’
• kyeyjöl           [ki​͡ɛj.ʧøl]                   ‘the three of them’ (3:trial)
• jitm̄ey            [ʧit.ŋ​͡mʷɛj]                ‘child’

C‑ prefixes are extrasyllabic, and commonly cause word-initial consonant clusters:

Table 3 – Five common prefixes in Löyöp

3.2 Pronominal indexing

The personal pronouns of Löyöp 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 yedō “1inclusive: dual” means ‘you & me’, whereas mōmyō “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 Löyöp

4. Useful references

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

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, Michael Franjieh, Sébastien Lacrampe & Stefan Schnell. 2015. The exceptional linguistic density of Vanuatu. In A. François, S. Lacrampe, M. Franjieh & S. Schnell (eds), The Languages of Vanuatu: Unity and Diversity. Studies in the Languages of Island Melanesia, 5. Canberra: Asia Pacific Linguistics Open Access. 1–21.

Here is how you can cite the present archive:

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