Erromangan

Erromangan (Sye) is the language spoken on the island Erromango in the Tafea region of the Vanuatu islands. The islands of Vanuatu are 2.000 km to the North-East from Australia. Although the island is quite large (887 km²), the total number of speakers of Erromango is estimated at around 1400. The population density is very low (only 1.4 people/km²).

Linguistic Situation

Sye is the only remaining language on Erromango. There have been the four languages Sye, Sorung, Ura and Utaha. The latter three can be regarded as extinct, however, until recently there was a very small number of speakers of Ura. Terry Crowley counted six speakers in the mid 1990's. The branch of South Vanuatu languages was constituted by the above four languages.

Erromango was quite diverse linguistically. In the nineteenth century a massive depopulation took place and the languages were realigned. Crowley states that there would have been three different languages prior to European contact.

Work on the Language

The earliest published account of Erromangan languages is Gordon (1889), whose notes, which he has taken on the island, were published posthumously. Capell produced a description of the language in the 1920s on the basis of the same materials that were used before by Ray, another scholar. This sketch was never published but it is referred to in detail, however, in unpublished correspondence dated 1927 from Dempwolff to Ray, so he obviously had copies past on to others.

Lynch gathered new material from speakers of Erromangan in the 1960s and 1970s. A description combining the resources of both his and Capell’s work was felt to be feasible and a detailed grammatical sketch was published by Lynch and Capell. Capell’s description bases on translated sources, while Lynch’s notes base on the spoken language. They published in 1983 and made clear that their work had to be regarded as provisional and to be supplemented.

Dialects

The Erromangan language today is dialectically fairly homogeneous. There is very little difference spoken on the coast of the island. While the pre-contact population of the island has been estimated at around 6.000 people³, this number dropped to 400 by 1931. Entire villages became unviable through loss of population and people were apparently and constantly building and reconstituting new villages, larger than the old ones and on a different place on the island. This huge demographic change took place in recent historical times. It is not too surprising that there is relatively little dialectal diversity.

Erromangans will point out quickly the differences in the language of the people from Potnarvin and Dillon’s Bay but for an outsider these are very small. There are just some differences in very low frequented lexical items.

Phonology

Consonants

Just /s/ and /r/ underlie allophonic variations.

::‘Who (plural) are you sitting with?’

Affixation

Verbs are obligatorily marked by prefixes that express a wide range of subject categories and a number of orders of optional prefixes, which appear between the prefixes and the stem. Because this aspect is rather complex the example, which shows the prefixation of /tovop/ is preceded by a brief overview of the prefix order:

SUBJECT (PRIOR PAST) (ITERATIVE) (NEGATIVE) (EM-) STEM.

:::‘We led the dogs and crossed the river and went up past the gardens.’
::‘You will cut a stick.’
::‘You will cut a stick.’
::‘How many stones did you get?’

Accompanying adjectives are also marked for number.

Subject Markers

Subjects are marked by verbal prefixes, while objects are indicated through verbal suffixes. Both are common in Oceanic languages. There is a huge number of distinct inflectional sets of subject markers on verbs expressing a variety of tense-aspect-mood categories. Not only is this an unusually large number of inflectional categories, but many of these categories are discontinuously marked by combinations of morphotactically separate prefixes for which the constituent forms do not always have definable meanings of their own.

Verb Morphology

A complex scheme of root-initial mutation is a salient feature of the verb morphology of Erromangan languages in general. Different root forms are determined by the nature of the preceding morphological environment. This stands in typological contrast to the other Central Vanuatu languages which have root forms that are invariant. Sye shares this pattern with the languages of Central Vanuatu, though the patterns of these languages are different in some other respects.

Possession

A characteristic of Sye is its lack of separately marked possessive constructions for a variety of alienable categories, such as food and drink possession. These forms are typical for Oceanic languages. But Sye has separate constructions which are typically associated with the expression of alienable and inalienable possession.

Abbreviations used

*ACC.PL: plural accompanitive
*ACC.SG: singular accompanitive
*BR: basic root
*CONST: construct suffix
*DISTPAST: distant past
*DL: dual
*ES: echo subject
*EXCL: exclusive
*FUT: future
*INCL: inclusive
*INDEF: indefinite
*MR: modified root
*NONSG: non-singular
*PL: plural
*PRES: present
*RECPAST: recent past
*SG: singular
*TOP: toponymic

Literature

*Capell, A. and Lynch, J. 1983. Sie vocabulary. In Lynch (1983a) Studies in the languages of Erromango, pp. 75-147. Pacific Linguistics, Series C, No. 79. Canberra: AUSTRALIAN National University.
*Crowley, Terry. 1999. Ura : a disappearing language of Southern Vanuatu Canberra. Pacific Linguistics, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies. The Australian National University.
*Crowley, Terry. 1998. An Erromangean (Sye) Grammar. University of Hawai’i Press.
*Crowley, Terry. 1991. Parallel development and shared innovation: some developments in Central Vanuatu inflectional morphology. Oceanic Linguistics 30(2): 179-222.
*Gordon, Rev. J. D. 1889. Sketch of the Erromangan Grammar. In Rev. D. MacDonald (ed.) Three New Hebrides languages (Efatese, Eromangan, Santo), pp. 61-84. Melbourne: Melbourne Public Library.