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The language
Mota is spoken by a small community of farmers living on Mota, a small island of the Banks group.
The phylogenetic affiliation of Mota is the same as the other 138 languages spoken in Vanuatu: it is an Oceanic language – and thus a member of the vast Austronesian family that covers most islands in the Pacific. Within the northern Vanuatu “linkage”, Mota forms a linguistic link between the languages of Vanua Lava (e.g.
Mwesen) on the one hand, and those of southern Banks on the other hand (e.g.
Mwerlap,
Nume).
In 1867, the Melanesian Mission of the Anglican church, based in New Zealand, chose Mota as its main language of Christianization, which gave it a privileged status for translating gospels and church material. Progressively, the status of lingua franca for the northern New Hebrides would be taken up by Bislama, an English-based creole. Yet Mota can still be heard occasionally in church hymns around the region, along with Bislama or English.
As a corollary to its special status in church, for a whole century Mota was the only language of northern Vanuatu that was documented, through the work of early linguists and missionaries. In particular, the famous missionary and anthropologist Rev. Robert Codrington published in 1896 a thorough dictionary of the language
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The Mota corpus
The island of Mota 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 Mota language through unplanned encounters with Mota speakers who lived on other islands.
In 2003, François thus recorded Melret Malanko on a small hamlet of Vanua Lava. In subsequent trips, he collected linguistic information from the Anglican priest Mama Febaian Din (Vanua Lava, 2007), and from Melody Ropet Pele, a Mota woman married into the Torres Islands (Lo island, 2011). In the same island of Lo (Torres), he also met Ro Pansi Salevaglea, who told him several stories in the Mota language.
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Notes on the language
3.1 Orthography
The Mota orthography follows this alphabetical order:
{ a e g i k l m m̄ n n̄ o p q r s t u v w }.
Each of these letters corresponds to one phoneme in the language. In northern Vanuatu, Mota has the smallest phoneme inventory, with only 19 contrasting phonemes.
Mota 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 /k͡pʷ/.
Table 1 – The 14 phonemic consonants of Mota
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labiovelar
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bilabial
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alveolar
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velar
|
|
voiceless stop
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k͡pʷ ‹q›
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p ‹p›
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t ‹t›
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k ‹k›
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|
fricative
|
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v ~ f ‹v›
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s ‹s›
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ɣ ‹g›
|
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nasal
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ŋ͡mʷ ‹m̄›
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m ‹m›
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n ‹n›
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ŋ ‹n̄›
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rhotic
|
|
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r ‹r›
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|
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lateral
|
|
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l ‹l›
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|
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approximant
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w ‹w›
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|
|
|
Mota is original in the region in having kept a very simple system of 5 short vowels.
Table 2 – The 5 vowels of Mota
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front
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back
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close
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i ‹i›
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u ‹u›
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mid
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ɛ ‹e›
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ɔ ‹o›
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open
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a ‹a›
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3.2 Pronominal indexing
The personal pronouns of Mota 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 nara “1inclusive: dual” means ‘you & me’, whereas kara “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 Mota
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singular
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dual
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trial
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plural
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1 inclusive
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nara
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natol
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nina
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1 exclusive
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nau, na
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kara
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katol
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kamam
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2
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ko, niko
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kamra
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kamtol
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kamiu
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3
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ni, nia
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rara
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ratol
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nira, neira
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Useful references
For more on the languages of Northern Vanuatu, visit http://alex.francois.online.fr. The following selected publications help understand Mota in its context:
Codrington, Robert H. 1891. The Melanesians: Studies in their Anthropology and Folk-Lore. Oxford: Clarendon.
Codrington, Robert H. & Jim Palmer. 1896. A Dictionary of the Language of Mota, Sugarloaf Island, Banks' Islands, with a short grammar and index. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.
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.
Vienne, Bernard. 1984. Gens de Motlav. Idéologie et pratique sociale en Mélanésie. Paris: Société des Océanistes.
Here is how you can cite the present archive:
François, Alexandre. 2021. Archive of audio recordings in the Mota language. Pangloss collection. Paris: CNRS.
https://doi.org/10.24397/pangloss-0003067