Volow (formerly known as Valuwa or Valuga) is an Oceanic language variety that used to be spoken in the area of Aplow, in the eastern part of the island of Motalava, Vanuatu.
Name
The name Volow is originally a placename: it corresponds to the area known today as Aplow, but in the former language Volow rather than in Mwotlap. Now that the Volow dialect has ceased to be used, the name Volow has been forgotten by the modern population. The place is only known through its Mwotlap name Aplow; as for the language variety, it is often referred to, in the Mwotlap language, as na-vap te-Plōw “the language of Aplow”.
The language variety is sometimes also referred to as na-vap ta Dagmel “the language of Dagmel”, after the name of an ancient, now abandoned, village.
Sociolinguistics
Volow has receded historically in favor of the now dominant language Mwotlap. It is now only remembered by a single passive speaker, who lives in the village of Aplow — the new name of what was previously known as Volow.
The similarity of Volow with Mwotlap is such that the two communalects may be considered dialects of a single language.
Phonology
Volow phonemically contrasts 16 consonants and 7 vowels.
Consonants
{ | class="wikitable" style="text-align:center" |+ Consonants !colspan="2"| ! Labiovelar ! Bilabial ! Alveolar ! Dorsal ! Glottal |- !colspan="2"| Nasal | | | | | |- !rowspan="2"| Stop ! voiceless | | | | | |- ! prenasalized | | | | | |- !colspan="2"| Fricative | | | | | |- !colspan="2"| Approximant | | | | | |}
This consonant inventory includes a typologically rare consonant: a rounded, prenasalised voiced labial-velar plosive : e.g. “woman” (spelled n-leq̄evēn in the local orthography).
Historically, Volow is the only daughter language to have preserved the voicing of the proto-phonemes *ᵑg > /ᵑɡ/ and *ᵐbʷ > /ᵑᵐɡ͡bʷ/, which is reconstructed for its ancestor Proto-Torres-Banks. Most of its neighbours (including Mwotlap) devoiced these to /k/ and /k͡pʷ/ respectively.
Vowels
The seven vowels of Volow are all short monophthongs:
{ | class="wikitable" style="text-align:center" |+ Vowels ! ! Front ! Back |- !Close | | |- !Near-close | | |- !Open-mid | | |- !Open | colspan="2"| |}
External links
Presentation of the Volow language, by linguist A. François. Access to the Volow corpus (Pangloss Collection of CNRS). A story in Volow presented in bilingual (Volow–French) format, with audio recording (Pangloss Collection of CNRS). This story was recorded by anthropologist Bernard Vienne in 1969 from the last fluent speaker Wanhand [†1986], and was translated by A. François in 2003, with the help of Wanhand's son.
Notes
References
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