Mavea language

Language endangerment

Mavea is a moribund language and there are many factors as to why this is.

One factor would be the arrival and Christianization by the Seventh-day Adventist and Church of Christ missionaries in 1839. Only 16% of the population can speak Mavea. These native speakers of Mavea belong to Generation 1, 2, and 3 which ranges from the ages of 20–80 years old. Those born after 1980 ("Generation 4") are less fluent. Commonly, this generation is not taught the language, because the language is inactive and not used in any new domain.

Mavea is not used very commonly outside of the home; in particular, it is not used in school, which reduces the younger speakers’ exposure to the language. Most speakers do not feel concerned with the possible loss of the Mavea language.

Bislama, the national lingua franca of Vanuatu, is used more frequently. This creole is the first language for many people in Vanuatu who live in the city. It is used for business, religious sacraments, politics, and is seen as a way to move upward in society.

Phonology

Mavea has 15 consonants and 8 vowels.

Plosives in Mavea are not aspirated.

Orthography

Linguolabial consonants are represented using the corresponding labial consonant with a diaeresis diacritic on top: p̈ [t̼]; v̈ [ð̼]; m̈ [n̼]. The retroflex [ɖ] is represented in the orthography as d.

Pronouns

There are both free and bound pronouns. Free pronouns are common in many Pacific languages. These free pronouns do not change for gender, but shows numerical differences, including singular, plural, dual, or paucal.

For example:

Proper Nouns

Proper nouns includes personal names, vocatives, relational terms, and locatives. They do not proceed an article and can not be used with a determiner. To show gender distinction, males use the prefix /mol-/. For females, the prefix /vo-/ or /va-/ was added.

Common Nouns

Similar to the proper nouns, there are both bound and free common nouns. Both can be used in an argument, be quantified with a marker, be modified with a determiner, be the head of a relative clause, and be questioned with “who” or “what”. Bound common nouns are separated into nouns of kinship, body parts, bodily functions, and whole part relations. Also shows possessives.

Verbs

Verbal predicates are marked with a subject agreement prefix. There are intransitive verbs, transitive verbs, ambitransitive, ditransitive, and auxiliary.

Intransitive verbs are used when the subject has no direct object receiving the action.

Adverbs

There are two kinds of adverbs: phrasal adverbs and sentential adverbs. Sententail adverbs take up the entire sentence and appear after or before the verb’s core argument. For example: to show frequency, /te pong/ meaning “sometimes” is used as a sentential adverb.

Spatial adverbs are used to show the location of the speaker and the direction the speaker is speaking towards. For example: konaro means “here, at speaker’s location.” This is common in many Pacific languages.

Reduplication

Mavea shows partial reduplication in its grammar. Reduplication is used to show emphasis. For example: sua means “to paddle” and suosua means “to paddle intensely”. Sometimes when using reduplication, the vowels can change. Usually the “a” changes to “o” or “e”.

Adjectives

Adjectives can only be used as noun modifiers. There both adjectives as independent lexical items and also adjectives pulled from transitive verbs by using reduplication. For example: pulua is “paint” and “ima pulpulu” means “painted house”.

Prepositions

There are seven prepositions in Mavea.

Morphology

Personal pronouns in Mavea do not inflect for case or gender, but do show number (singular, dual, paucal, plural). First person non-singular has an inclusive/exclusive distinction. Independent personal pronouns are not obligatory, but are used for emphasis, contrast or focus.

Example:

Bound Pronouns

Bound pronouns are obligatory at the beginning of a predicate phrase. Only 1SG and 3SG inflect for mood.

Object Enclitics

Example:

Counting System

The Mavea counting system is very similar to other Proto Oceanic languages, especially numbers 1 through 5, and 10.

Questions

Intonation is used to distinguish yes-no questions because there is no syntactic way to do so. There are also tag questions which uses the negative tag /te modere/ at the end. In English, /te modere/ means “or not”.

Some monoclausal content questions include:

Negation

Sentential negation is expressed with the bound prefix /sopo/ and appears right after the subject agreement prefix. The order is subject ---> negation ---> verb.

Sometimes /sopo/ can be shorten to /po/.

When the subject agreement marker is absent, the bare negation marker jumps to the front.

To show the aspectual meaning “not yet”, /lo/ is added to the negation marker /sopo/. This refers to events that have not happened yet but are likely to in the future. Added to the end of this form of negation is /pa/ which means “still” or “yet”.

When combined with /me/ the negation changes in to “not anymore, no more”.

Equative clauses are shown by adding the negative marker /sopo/ to the subject marker for third person singular /mo-/. Mosopo meaning “ it is/was/not.”

Negative locational predicates are similar to equative clauses, by adding the locational marker /na/ to the equative clause /mosopo/.