This book presents topics in the grammar of South Efate, an Oceanic language of Central Vanuatu as spoken in Erakor village on the outskirts of PortVila. It is one of the first such grammars to take seriously the provision of primary data for the verification of claims made in the analysis. The research is set in the context of increasing attention being paid to the state of the world’s smaller languages and their prospects for being spoken into the future. In addition to providing an outline of the grammar of the language, the author describes the process of developing an archivable textual corpus that is used to make example sentences citable and playable, using software (Audiamus) developed in the course of the research. An included DVD provides a dictionary and finderlist, a set of interlinearized example texts and elicited sentences, and playable media versions of most example sentences and of the example texts.

Bislama is the national language of Vanuatu, the world's most linguistically diverse nation with at least 80 actively spoken Oceanic languages used by about 200,000 people. Bislama began as a plantation pidgin based on English in the nineteenth century, but it has since developed into a unique language with a grammar and vocabulary very different from English. It is one of very few national languages for which there is no readily available reference grammar. This book aims to fill this gap by providing an extensive account of the grammar of Bislama as it is used by ordinary Ni-Vanuatu. It does not, therefore, aim to describe any kind of artificial written norm but sets out to capture a range of different kinds of ways that Ni-Vanuatu will say things in various contexts, both written and spoken, formal and informal. The thrust of this volume is to show that Bislama has a grammar—an unfamiliar concept for those educated in Vanuatu. It also shows that Bislama is a language of considerable complexity, which will come as a surprise to many of its users, who have been taught to view their language as somehow "simple" and even "deficient."

This is a dictionary of Nafsan, the language spoken in Vanuatu in the south of Efate Island in the villages of Erakor, Pango, and Eratap. Nafsan is one of 130 distinct languages spoken in Vanuatu. Over several decades, linguist Nicholas Thieberger worked in close collaboration with the Erakor community to record this unique language and to refine its written presentation. The resulting publication offers insight into the diversity of meanings available to speakers of Nafsan, providing some 3,400 senses for Nafsan words and an English-Nafsan finderlist. In addition, the book gives an overview of the Nafsan sound system, provides a list of existing literature on the language dating back to early missionary translations, and includes maps of Efate locating nearly 200 place names. Readers will also find South Efate cultural knowledge embedded in the explanations of the Nafsan words and their usages. A welcome companion to Thieberger’s A Grammar of South Efate (2006), this book complements and significantly augments other multimedia resources made available online by the author.

The volume contains five background chapters: The Oceanic Languages, Sociolinguistic Background, Typological Overview, Proto-Oceanic and Internal Subgrouping. Part of 2 vol set. Author Ross from ANU.

Cover -- Contents -- List of Tables -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- Map of the Admiralty Islands -- Part A Sketch Grammar -- Chapter 1 Introduction -- 1.1 Description of the Meier Corpus -- 1.2 The Language Name -- 1.3 Classification and Dialects -- 1.4 Sources for Titan/'Moanus' -- 1.4.1 Published Sources -- 1.4.1.1 Schnee (1901) -- 1.4.1.2 Thilenius (1903) -- 1.4.1.3 Meier (1906-1909, 1912) -- 1.4.1.4 Parkinson (1999) -- 1.4.1.5 Mead (1942) -- 1.4.1.6 Fortune (1935) -- 1.4.1.7 Goebel (1956) -- 1.4.1.8 Smythe and Z'Graggen (1975) -- 1.4.1.9 Other published works -- 1.4.2 Unpublished Materials -- 1.5 Methods -- Chapter 2 Phonology -- 2.1 Consonant Phonemes -- 2.1.1 Consonant Inventory -- 2.1.2 Notes on Phonemic Interpretation -- 2.1.2.1 Alternation ∼ -- 2.1.2.2 Palatal Consonants -- 2.1.2.3 Velarized Labials: [pw] and [mw] -- 2.1.2.4 Trills: [mb], [n(d)r], [r] -- 2.1.2.5 Glottal Consonants: [?] and [h] -- 2.2 Vowel Phonemes -- 2.3 Orthography -- 2.4 Syllable Structure and Phonotactics -- 2.4.1 Consonant Clusters -- 2.4.2 Vowel Clusters -- 2.4.3 Number of Syllables in the Word -- 2.4.4 Phonotactics -- 2.5 Lexical Stress -- 2.6 Morphophonemic Alternations -- Chapter 3 Nouns -- 3.1 The Word Class of Nominals -- 3.2 Number -- 3.3 Possession -- 3.3.1 Inalienable Possession: Suffixation -- 3.3.2 Parataxis with Body Parts -- 3.3.3 Alienable Possession -- 3.3.4 Variable Marking -- 3.3.5 Food Possessive -- 3.3.6 Body Part Possession by Compounding -- 3.3.7 Possessors with Null Heads -- 3.4 Compounds -- 3.4.1 Order of Compounded Elements -- 3.4.2 Inalienable Possession -- 3.4.3 Descriptive or Delimiting Compounds -- 3.4.4 Locational Compounds -- 3.4.5 Determinative Compounds -- 3.4.6 Compounded Compounds -- 3.5 Proper Nouns -- 3.6 Derivation in Nominals -- 3.6.1 Derivational Suffixes -- 3.6.2 Reduplication -- 3.6.3 k- Prefixation.

This work describes the grammar of Kokota, a highly endangered Oceanic language of the Solomon Islands, spoken by about nine hundred people on the island of Santa Isabel. After several long periods among the Kokota, Dr. Palmer has written an unusually detailed and comprehensive description of the language. Kokota has never before been described, so this work makes an important contribution to our knowledge of the Oceanic languages of island Melanesia. Kokota Grammar examines the phonology of the language and includes a lengthy section on stress assignment. It continues with chapters on nouns and noun phrases, minor participant types, possession, argument structure, the verb complex, clause structure, imperative and interrogative constructions, and subordination and coordination (including verb serialization). The typological interest of Kokota, along with its degree of endangerment and the paucity of information on Northwest Solomonic languages in general, combined with the level of detail given in the volume, make this a work of considerable interest to Austronesian linguists, typologists, syntacticians, phonologists, and all who are involved in describing and documenting endangered languages.

Based on a reconstruction of ancient Chamic, with care taken to identify inherited Austronesian words as well as loan words and their sources, this text points out what the linguistic evidence tells us about the history of the region, and sketches the major consequences of historical contact on linguistic change in the history of Chamic.