Mele-Fila (Ifira-Mele) is a
Polynesian language spoken in
Mele and
Ifira on the island of Efate in
Vanuatu. In spite of their differences, Mele and Fila are two dialects of the same language and are mutually intelligible. French and English are also fairly common among the residents of Efate.
Mele-Fila is an everyday language for residents of Mele village and Fila Island. Mele village, with a population of 1,000, is located roughly 7 km north-west of
Port Vila, the nation’s capital. Fila Island, with a population of 400, is located about 1.5km west of Vila.
History
Based on archaeological evidence, it is understood that peoples speaking Austronesian languages originated on the island of
Taiwan
Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia, at the junction of the East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, with the People's Republic of China (PRC) to the northwest, Japan to the northe ...
about 6000 years ago. Some of their descendants formed the
Lapita civilisation
The Lapita culture is the name given to a Neolithic Austronesian people and their material culture, who settled Island Melanesia via a seaborne migration at around 1600 to 500 BCE. They are believed to have originated from the northern Philipp ...
, who sailed to
Remote Oceania
Remote Oceania is the part of Oceania settled within the last 3,000 to 3,500 years, comprising south-eastern Island Melanesia and islands in the open Pacific east of the Solomon Islands: Fiji, Micronesia, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Polynesia, t ...
, including
Vanuatu, roughly 3,200 years ago.
[Bedford, Stuart; Spriggs, Matthew. 2008]
Northern Vanuatu as a Pacific Crossroads: The Archaeology of Discovery, Interaction, and the Emergence of the "Ethnographic Present"
''Asian Perspectives'' 47 (1), 95-120.
The population of Mele-Fila belongs to the ''
Polynesian outliers'', who historically came from Central Polynesia (Tonga, Samoa) during the last two millennia.
Phonology
This language is unusual among Polynesian languages for its phoneme /tɕ/. In the Fila dialect, /p/ and /m/ are not distinct from their
labialized
Labialization is a secondary articulatory feature of sounds in some languages. Labialized sounds involve the lips while the remainder of the oral cavity produces another sound. The term is normally restricted to consonants. When vowels involv ...
counterparts.
Mele vowels are similar to other Polynesian vowels as there are /i e a o u/ long and short. More than half of the words used in the language hail from Proto Polynesian language.
Stressed initial vowels were kept, while unstressed initial vowels were removed.
:"Ex: English: then, Mele: gafuru, PPN: angafulu"
:"Ex: English: yesterday, Mele: nanafi, PPN: ananafi"
Articles and verbal particles with unstressed long vowels often have their unstressed vowel shortened:
:Ex: ruú ́́are - “The two houses”
:Ex: ru pókasi - “the two pigs”
Consonant clusters (strings of consonants without a vowel) exist, but can only be formed from these three combinations:
[
# a sonorant and an obstruent
# a ]fricative
A fricative is a consonant manner of articulation, produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two Place of articulation, articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the ba ...
and a stop,
# an obstruent and a nasal
Nasal is an adjective referring to the nose, part of human or animal anatomy. It may also be shorthand for the following uses in combination:
* With reference to the human nose:
** Nasal administration, a method of pharmaceutical drug delivery
** ...
.
Word stress usually falls on the second-to-last syllable. Mele-Fila words usually contain at least three vowels.[
Similar to many Polynesian languages, this requires counting long vowels as two vowels.]Efate language
The Central Vanuatu languages form a linkage of Southern Oceanic languages spoken in central Vanuatu.
Languages Clark (2009)
Clark (2009) provides the following classification of the Central Vanuatu languages, divided into geographic areas. Outli ...
s of Vanuatu.[ It also borrowed from English and ]French
French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to France
** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents
** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...
via Bislama, one of Vanuatu's national languages and creole language
A creole language, or simply creole, is a stable natural language that develops from the simplifying and mixing of different languages into a new one within a fairly brief period of time: often, a pidgin evolved into a full-fledged language. Wh ...
.[ This has caused its syllable structure to allow (C)VC consonants as well as (C)V.][ Consonants can be ]geminated
In phonetics and phonology, gemination (), or consonant lengthening (from Latin 'doubling', itself from '' gemini'' 'twins'), is an articulation of a consonant for a longer period of time than that of a singleton consonant. It is distinct fr ...
(vocally lengthened), which indicates that a noun is plural
The plural (sometimes list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated pl., pl, or ), in many languages, is one of the values of the grammatical number, grammatical category of number. The plural of a noun typically denotes a quantity greater than the ...
.[
]
Syntax
Mele-Fila has a Subject – Verb – Object sentence order.
Verbal particles
Below is a list of "verbal particles":
External links
* Materials on Mele-Fila are included in the open access Arthur Capell collections
AC1
an
AC2
held by Paradisec.
*
*
History of Polynesian Languages
*Bedford, Stuart; Spriggs, Matthew. "Northern Vanuatu as a Pacific Crossroads: The Archaeology of Discovery, Interaction, and the Emergence of the "ethnographic Present"". Asian Perspectives. University of Hawai'i Press. 47 (1): 95–120. JSTOR 42928734.
*The Austronesian Languages By Robert Blust
*WALS Onlin
* The Commonwealth: http://thecommonwealth.org/our-member-countries/vanuatu/history
*Nations Online: https://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/vanuatu.htm
*http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/vanuatu-population/
References
{{Austronesian languages
Polynesian outliers
Languages of Vanuatu
Futunic languages