Lakon

1. The languages of Gaua island

2. The Lakon recordings

Alexandre François spent some time in the Lakon-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 grammar and lexicon (François 2011), and also to collect some of the traditional oral literature.

The Lakon recordings include musical recordings, belonging to different genres:

• Customary dances, particularly the women’s dance leng and the men’s dance magh, both accompanied with instrumental music and singing
• A rare recording of “Water music”
• Popular “string band” songs
• Christian chorus songs.

Several of these recordings were made on 26 Aug 2003 – on the day of St Bartholomew, the patron day of West Gaua. Some made it into a CD publication of the best ethno­musico­logical recordings for northern Vanuatu (François & Stern 2013).

The other category of recordings is a set of 18 myths or tales – known locally as Suusuu pule maraw “Stories of the Spider” (François 2013: 222) – told in the Lakon language, by various storytellers of all ages. Among them, several have been selected to be here transcribed and translated:

• “Wuwut the orphan”, by †Klera Romalev
• “Kpwat and his brothers against the Ogre”, by Moses Steven Weting
• “The origin of Gaua's great lake”, by Nikson Wevales
• “The origin of dances magh and leng”, also by Nikson Wevales
• “The giant bird on the Lake”, by Wini Rovalēs

To these four narratives, we can add a monologue by Nelson Vagēl explaining the importance of hawks in the tradition of West Gaua:

• “On the significance of Hawks”, by Nelson Vagēl

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

• an ABC-book: “Eln̄angēē wēē avan Lakon – Our language Lakon” (François & François 2011a)
• a collection of stories: “Suusuu pule maraw avan Lakon – Traditional stories in Lakon (Gaua)” (François & François 2011b).

3. The Lakon language

3.1. Phonology, orthography

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

{ a aa ä ää e ee ē ēē g h i ii j k l m m̄ n n̄ o oo ō ōō p q r s t u uu v w }.

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

Lakon 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 Lakon

The glottal stop [ʔ] is not phonemic. Like in German, it occurs predictably as a syllable boundary marker, at the beginning of vowel-initial syllables in lexical (but not grammatical) words – e.g. ēn ‘äh [ɪn.ʔæh] <art song> ‘a song’; ’ät’ätä [ʔæt.ʔætæ] <redup~look> ‘look, watch’. Even though it is predictable, it is sometimes included in the ortho­graphy.

Lakon has 8 vowel qualities, as well as contrastive vowel length – e.g. pō [pʊ] ‘bamboo’ ≠ pōō [pʊː] ‘to swell’ (François 2005:461). Its vowel system can thus be analyzed as having 16 phonemes in total [Table 2]. Stress is word-final.

Table 2 – The 16 vowels of Lakon

Table 3 illustrates the orthography with several examples.

Table 3 – Some words in Lakon

3.2. Pronominal indexing

The personal pronouns of Lakon (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 wōjō “1inclusive: dual” means ‘you & me’, whereas gamaa “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 Lakon

4. Useful references

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

— 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.

— 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, 11). Berlin: DeGruyter Mouton. 185-244.

— 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.

François, Alexandre & Sawako François. 2011a. Eln̄angēē wēē avan Lakon – Our language Lakon. Monolingual in Lakon. Illustrated by Sawako François. Port-Vila: Alliance Française. 44 pp.

— 2011b. Suusuu pule maraw avan Lakon – Traditional stories from Lakon. Monolingual in Lakon. Illustrated by Sawako François. Port-Vila: Alliance Française. 44 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 Lakon language. Pangloss Collection. Paris: CNRS.