Olrat

The round island of Gaua is dominated by its central volcano, known in English as Mount Garet (Garat in Olrat), and by the lake that has formed in its caldera (lake Letas in English, Lē Tas in Olrat).
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.
As this list suggests, Olrat is intermediate between Koro and Lakon, both in terms of geography and of linguistic structures. It used to be spoken in a small inland hamlet called Olrat, in the south­western corner of Gaua – roughly halfway between Kōrō and Jōlap [see map]. Olrat is also called Viar.
The considerable weakening of the Olrat language is similar to what happened to Lemerig or Mwesen, further north: they result from the historical reconfiguration of settlements that followed the contact with traders and missionaries (François 2012). In the early 20^th century, Olrat speakers left their inland hamlet, as they underwent the pressure to live in the larger settlements in the island’s west coast (Jōlap). Some also underwent the epidemics, and others were recruited in the plantations, either in Vanuatu or in Australia (Blackbirding).
In 2003, the language was still spoken or remembered by three individuals. Alas, they passed away in the following years, without transmitting their language to the next generations.

 

2. The Olrat corpus

2.1.  The final years of the Olrat language

In the course of his linguistic survey of Gaua in August 2003, Alexandre François spent two weeks in the village of Jōlap, in the chief’s family where the dominant language was Lakon. However, it quickly became clear that the village, and particularly this very family, were in fact multilingual: while chief Henry spoke Lakon, his wife spoke Mwerlap, and their children were bilingual. And crucially, Henry’s father Maten Womal, aged about 65, spoke yet another language “from the mountains” – called Olrat.

After leaving his native village of Olrat in the 1960s (?), Maten had settled in the coastal village of Jōlap, and married there; other people did the same, so Olrat quickly became an abandoned hamlet in the bush. Later, as other speakers of Olrat passed away, he progressively shifted to using Lakon on a daily basis, with his family and other villagers. However, he never forgot his native language – nor the myths and stories he had been told in his youth. Maten sometimes spoke Olrat with other people in Jōlap who could speak, or at least understand it; in fact he would commonly speak Olrat, and receive answers in Lakon, as the two languages were close enough that everyone could keep speaking their own languages.

2.2.  The Olrat recordings

Thanks to a specially designed questionnaire (François 2019), François quickly learned from Maten Womal the essentials of the language – enough to understand its basic structures, and also to collect some of the traditional oral literature.

Maten Womal was a prolific storyteller: in a single evening, he volunteered six stories, and could hardly be stopped. Two of these tales – known locally as Ususraa pulē Maraw “Stories of the Spider” (François 2013: 222) – are here transcribed and translated:

• “The curse of the Eel”
• “The boy who bullied the Ogress”

To these tales, we can add also a life story that Maten narrated about John Young, one of his ancestors, who was abducted by a recruiting ship to Queensland:

• “John Young, one who went to Queensland”.

 

Based on his work of transcription and interpretation, François published two books in Olrat, in mono­lingual format, meant to keep the memory of this language for future generations:

• an ABC-book: “Valvalaw men Ōlrat – Our language Olrat” (François & François 2011a)
• a collection of stories: “Ususraa pule maraw men Ōlrat – Traditional stories in Olrat (Gaua)” (François & François 2011b).

 

The second category of recordings presented in this Olrat archive is a set of musical pieces that were recorded in the village of Jōlap, on 26 Aug 2003 – on the festival of St Bartholomew, the patron day of West Gaua. Several are from the Magh dance performed by young men. But of the main pieces presented that day was a woman’s dance called Leng: it was accompanied by the Song of the Great Cyclone – a poem composed in the language Olrat in 1972, after the island of Gaua was devastated by cyclone Wendy. This sung performance was later featured in our discographic publication on the best ethno­musico­logical recordings for northern Vanuatu (François & Stern 2013) – see pp.102-103 in our CD booklet. 

 

3. The Olrat language

3.1.  Phonology, orthography

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

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

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

Olrat 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 Olrat

	labiovelar	bilabial	alveolar	velar
voiceless stop	k​͡pʷ  ‹q›	p  ‹p›	t  ‹t›	k  ‹k›
affricate			j  ‹ʧ›
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›		y  ‹y›

 

Olrat has 7 vowel qualities, as well as contrastive vowel length – e.g. la [la] ‘take’ ≠ laa [laː] ‘marry’ (François 2005:461). Its vowel system can thus be analyzed as having 14 phonemes in total [Table 2]. Stress is word-final.

Table 2 – The 14 vowels of Olrat

	front	back
close	i  ‹i› – iː  ‹ii›	u  ‹u› – uː ‹uu›
near-close	ɪ  ‹ē› – ɪː  ‹ēē›	ʊ  ‹ō› – ʊː  ‹ōō›
open-mid	ɛ  ‹e› – ɛː  ‹ee›	ɔ  ‹o› – ɔː  ‹oo›
open	a  ‹a› – aː  ‹aa›

 

Table 3 illustrates the orthography of Olrat with several examples.

Table 3 – Some words in Olrat

	orthography	phonetic
‘a person, someone’	jujuŋ	[ʧuʧuŋ]
‘woman’	raqa	[rak​͡pʷa]
‘pandanus leaves’	jajkōy	[ʧaʧkʊj]
‘myself’	m̄aasēk	[ŋ​͡mʷaːsɪk]
‘hundred’	m̄ēlējōl	[ŋ​͡mʷɪlɪʧʊl]
‘thing(s)’	vrojroj	[βrɔʧrɔʧ]
‘kava’	qogogo	[k​͡pʷɔɣɔɣo]
‘mosquito’	muu	[muː]

 

3.2.  Pronominal indexing

The personal pronouns of Olrat (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 jōrō “1inclusive: dual” means ‘you & me’, whereas kēmēy “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 Olrat

	singular	dual	trial	plural
1 inclusive		jōrō	jēlēt	gēj
1 exclusive	na	kēmēy	kēlkama	kama
2	nēk	kumuy	kēlkimi	kimi
3	nē	nōrō	tēlēy	nēy

 

(1)	Na	ga	ron̄vēlēē	nēk,	la	nēk	tē-	ron̄vēlēē	wōs	ti	na.
	1sg	stat	know	2sg	but	2sg	ipfv₁	know	neg	ipfv₂	1sg
	‘I know you, but you don't know me.’

 

(2)	Nōrō	tak	saasaa	valrēē	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 Olrat 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.

— 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. Valvalaw men Ōlrat – Our language Olrat. Monolingual in Olrat. Illustrated by Sawako François. Port-Vila: Alliance Française. 36 pp.

— 2011b. Ususraa pule maraw men Ōlrat – Traditional stories in Olrat. Monolingual in Olrat. Illustrated by Sawako François. Port-Vila: Alliance Française. 32 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 Olrat language. Pangloss Collection. Paris: CNRS.