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Olrat was an Oceanic language of Gaua island, in northern Vanuatu. It became extinct in 2009, with the death of its last speaker Maten Womal.[2]

Olrat
Ōlrat
Pronunciation	[ʊlrat]
Native to	Vanuatu
Region	Gaua
Native speakers	3 (2012)[1]
Language family	Austronesian Malayo-Polynesian Oceanic Southern Oceanic Vanuatu North Vanuatu Torres–Banks Olrat
Language codes
ISO 639-3	olr
Glottolog	olra1234
ELP	Olrat
Olrat is classified as Critically Endangered by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger

Name

The name Olrat (spelled natively as Ōlrat [ʊlrat]) is an endonym. Robert Codrington mentions a place south of Lakon village under the Mota name Ulrata.[3] A few decades later, Sidney Ray mentions the language briefly in 1926 under the same Mota name ‒ but provides no linguistic information.[4]

The language

In 2003, only three speakers of Olrat remained, who lived on the middle-west coast of Gaua.[5] Their community had left their inland hamlet of Olrat in the first half of the 20th century, and merged into the larger village of Jōlap where Lakon is dominant.[1][2]

Alexandre François identifies Olrat as a distinct language from its immediate neighbor Lakon, on phonological,[6] grammatical,[7] and lexical[8] grounds.

Phonology

Olrat has 14 phonemic vowels. These include 7 short /i ɪ ɛ a ɔ ʊ u/ and 7 long vowels /iː ɪː ɛː aː ɔː ʊː uː/.[9][2]

Olrat vowels

	Front	Back
Near-close	i ⟨i⟩ ∙ iː ⟨ii⟩	u ⟨u⟩ ∙ uː ⟨uu⟩
Close-mid	ɪ ⟨ē⟩ ∙ ɪː ⟨ēē⟩	ʊ ⟨ō⟩ ∙ ʊː ⟨ōō⟩
Open-mid	ɛ ⟨e⟩ ∙ ɛː ⟨ee⟩	ɔ ⟨o⟩ ∙ ɔː ⟨oo⟩
Open	a ⟨a⟩ ∙ aː ⟨aa⟩

Historically, the phonologization of vowel length originates in the compensatory lengthening of short vowels when the voiced velar fricative /ɣ/ was lost syllable-finally.[10]

Grammar

The system of personal pronouns in Olrat contrasts clusivity, and distinguishes four numbers (singular, dual, trial, plural).[11]

Spatial reference in Olrat is based on a system of geocentric (absolute) directionals, which is typical of Oceanic languages.[12]

Notes and references

References

Bibliography

• François, Alexandre (2007), "Noun articles in Torres and Banks languages: Conservation and innovation" (PDF), in Siegel, Jeff; Lynch, John; Eades, Diana (eds.), Language Description, History and Development: Linguistic indulgence in memory of Terry Crowley, Creole Language Library 30, Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 313–326
• —— (2011), "Social ecology and language history in the northern Vanuatu linkage: A tale of divergence and convergence" (PDF), Journal of Historical Linguistics, 1 (2): 175–246, doi:10.1075/jhl.1.2.03fra, hdl:1885/29283.
• —— (2012), "The dynamics of linguistic diversity: Egalitarian multilingualism and power imbalance among northern Vanuatu languages" (PDF), International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2012 (214): 85–110, doi:10.1515/ijsl-2012-0022, S2CID 145208588
• —— (2015). "The ins and outs of up and down: Disentangling the nine geocentric space systems of Torres and Banks languages" (PDF). In Alexandre François; Sébastien Lacrampe; Michael Franjieh; Stefan Schnell (eds.). The languages of Vanuatu: Unity and diversity. Studies in the Languages of Island Melanesia. Canberra: Asia-Pacific Linguistics. pp. 137–195. hdl:1885/14819. ISBN 978-1-922185-23-5.
• —— (2016), "The historical morphology of personal pronouns in northern Vanuatu" (PDF), in Pozdniakov, Konstantin (ed.), Comparatisme et reconstruction : tendances actuelles, Faits de Langues, vol. 47, Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 25–60
• —— (2022). "Presentation of the Olrat language and audio archive". Pangloss Collection. Paris: CNRS. Retrieved 29 Sep 2022.

External links

• Linguistic map of north Vanuatu, showing range of Olrat on Gaua.
• A book of traditional stories, monolingual in Olrat language (site of linguist A. François)
• Access to audio recordings in Olrat language (section of the Pangloss Collection, CNRS)
• Petition to create ISO code for Olrat

На других языках

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- [en] Olrat language

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[fr] Olrat

L’olrat est une langue parlée dans l’ouest de l’île Gaua, dans les îles Banks, au nord du Vanuatu.

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