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The languages of Gaua island
The round island of Gaua is dominated by its central volcano, known in English as Mount Gharat (
Garet in Nume), and by the lake that has formed in its caldera (lake
Letas in English,
Le Tes in Nume).
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.
Nume is the language spoken in Gaua’s northeastern corner – around the island’s airfield, in the villages of
Namasari,
Lebot,
Tarasag. The word
Nume is also the name of a former village, in the same area. The language is also sometimes named
Tarasag, or
Gog.
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The Nume recordings
Alexandre François met Nume speakers 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, and also to collect some of the traditional oral literature.
This Nume archive feature a handful of stories – known locally as kekkeom. They include trickster stories around the popular character “Wenawon” – as this short story, narrated by Bresli.
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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 Nume in its context:
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.
— 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.
François, Alexandre & Sawako François. 2011. Manmanes ta Nume – Our language Nume. Monolingual in Nume. Illustrated by Sawako François. Port-Vila: Alliance Française. 32 pp.
Here is how you can cite the present archive:
François, Alexandre. 2022. Archive of audio recordings in the Nume language. Pangloss Collection. Paris: CNRS.
https://doi.org/10.24397/pangloss-0003145