Northeast Malakula, or Uripiv-Wala-Rano-Atchin, is a
dialect chain spoken on the islands of
Uripiv
Uripiv is a small inhabited island in Malampa Province of Vanuatu in the Pacific Ocean. Uripiv lies off the north coast of Malekula Island. The estimated terrain elevation above the sea level is some 8 meters.
Population
As of 2015, the officia ...
,
Wala __NOTOC__
Wala may refer to:
Places
* Wala (island), a small island in Vanuatu, and a popular destination for cruise ships
* Wala, Panama, a community in Kuna de WargandÃ, Panama
*Kingdom of Wala, a pre-colonial polity in the north of modern Gha ...
,
Rano, and
Atchin
Atchin is an islet off the north-eastern coast of Malakula in Vanuatu
Vanuatu ( or ; ), officially the Republic of Vanuatu (; ), is an island country in Melanesia located in the South Pacific Ocean. The archipelago, which is of volcanic or ...
and on the mainland opposite to these islands. Uripiv-Wala-Rano-Atchin is spoken today by about 9,000 people. Literacy rate of its speakers in their own language is 10–30%.
Uripiv-Wala-Rano-Atchin forms a
dialect chain. The Uripiv dialect is the most southerly of these and has 85% of its words in common with Atchin, the most northerly dialect. Uripiv is spoken on the north-east coast of
Malakula
Malakula, also spelled Malekula, is the second-largest island in the nation of Vanuatu, formerly the New Hebrides, in Melanesia, a region of the Pacific Ocean.
Location
Malakula is separated from the islands of Espiritu Santo and Malo Island, Ma ...
.
The Uripiv dialect is one of the few documented languages that use the rare
bilabial trill
The voiced bilabial trill is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents the sound is , a small capital version of the Latin letter b, and the equivalent X-SAMPA ...
, a feature that is not found in the Atchin dialect.
Phonology
Consonants
* The sound is considered rare, and its phonemic status is unclear.
* Some speakers may pronounce sounds /s, ts/ as
ƒ, tʃin free variation.
Vowels
:
:
:* Sounds /e, o, Å“/ are heard as
›, É”, É™in unstressed closed-syllable position.
References
Further reading
*Duhamel, Marie (2015) Ethnolinguistic vitality of the language of Atchin, central Vanuatu: A survey of the language's status, institutional support and demography. Fourth International Workshop on the Sociolinguistics of Language Endangerment. Payap University.
Malekula languages
Languages of Vanuatu
{{Vanuatu-stub