Araki (autonym ) is a nearly extinct language spoken in the small island of Araki, south of Espiritu Santo Island in Vanuatu. Araki is gradually being replaced by Tangoa, a language from a neighbouring island.
Name The name Araki comes from the Tamambo language (with the locative marker a-).See entry “Araki” in: Its native name is Raki .See entry “Raki” in François (2008) (p.62 of the Pdf version).
Classification Araki belongs to the Oceanic branch of the Austronesian languages, more specifically the Espiritu Santo group.
Current situation Araki was estimated to have 8 native speakers in 2012 with ongoing language shift towards the neighboring language Tangoa. The rest of the island's population have a passive knowledge of Araki, meaning they understand it but have limited ability to speak it. A large portion of the Araki vocabulary, as well as idiosyncratic syntactic and phonetic phenomena of the language have been lost. The pidgin Bislama is also spoken by many speakers of Araki as the country's lingua franca (although it is rarely used in rural areas).
Araki was described in 2002 by the linguist Alexandre François.All information contained in this entry comes from François (2002).
Year Source 1897 103 103 Miller (1990) 1972 72 Tryon (1972) 1989 112 80 Tryon and Charpentier (1989) 1996 105 105 Grimes (1996) 1998 121 34 Vari-Bogiri (2008)
Phonology Araki has a phonological inventory of 16 consonant phonemes and 5 vowels.
Consonants Araki has 16 consonants.François (2002), p. 14. They generally appear at the beginning of a syllable, with some exceptions. + Araki Consonants Bilabial Linguolabial Alveolar Velar Glottal Nasal Plosive Affricate Fricative Flap Trill Lateral
Only fluent speakers of Araki distinguish between the flap and the trill ;François (2002), p. 18. and only they can distinguish and pronounce the linguolabial consonants. Passive users of the language replace these consonants either with bilabial consonants or alveolar consonants.François (2002), p. 6.
Araki is one of the few languages of Vanuatu, and indeed of the world, that has a set of linguolabial consonants. It also lacks voiced stops, as well as prenasalised stops, both of which are prevalent in the Oceanic language group. Additionally, Araki has an unusually high number of alveolar consonants (particularly notable is the existence of a contrast between the alveolar trill and the alveolar flap).
Vowels Araki has 5 vowel phonemes:
+VowelsFrontBackHighMidLow
Araki does not have phonemic long vowels or diphthongs. However, strings of consecutive vowels are possible, indeed prevalent, in the language. In these cases, each vowel belongs to a separate syllable.
Historically, this system is conservative of the Proto-Oceanic vowel system as it can be reconstructed.
Syllable structure and stress Most syllables in Araki are open (CV). Diachronic effects of word stress have led to the irregular loss of some syllables, and the creation of the new phonotactic patterns of CVC and CCV, with many word-final consonants, though not as pervasive compared to the Torres–Banks languages. Although a cluster of more than two consonants is impossible within a word, longer consonant clusters may appear in longer linguistic sequences.
Word stress in Araki normally falls on the penultimate syllable, at least when the last syllable of the word is of the form (C)V. A secondary stress may be heard on every second syllable toward the left of the word. Stress is assigned only after the lexeme has received all its affixes to form the whole phonological word. A process of final high vowel deletion (which is common in Vanuatu languages) does not affect the stress rule.
Writing system After François (2002) proposed an initial system for the orthography, he later amended it in agreement with the community.Notes on the orthography of Araki, by A. François. The new orthography is indicated here:
+ Araki alphabet Letter a e h i j k l m m̈ n ng o p p̈ r r̄ s t u v v̈ Pronunciation
The older orthography used for , for , for , and for .
Grammar Araki syntax can be divided into an open set of lexemes, including nouns, adjectives, verbs, adjuncts, adverbs, numerals and demonstratives, and a closed set of morphemes, which are often monosyllabic clitics or affixes.
Word order The sentence order in Araki is strictly subject–verb–object (SVO). There is a clear formal boundary between the direct object (always internal to the predicate phrase, whether incorporated or not) and the oblique arguments: adverbs, prepositional phrases and indirect objects (which always appear outside the verb phrase).
Nouns As in many Oceanic languages, not only verbs but also nouns (as well as other syntactic categories) are predicative in Araki. Nouns differ from verbs in being directly predicative, which means that they do not have to be preceded by a subject clitic. Also, only nouns are able to refer directly to entities of the world, and make them arguments entering into larger sentence structures.
Syntactically speaking, a noun can be either the subject of a sentence, the object of a transitive verb or the object of a preposition, all syntactic slots which are forbidden to verbs or adjectives. Proper names, both place names and personal names, can be said to belong to the global category of nouns in Araki.
Noun-phrase structure Contrary to many languages of Vanuatu, Araki did not retain the noun article *na of Proto Oceanic, nor any other obligatory noun determiner. As a consequence, a noun root on its own can form a valid NP in a sentence.
A noun phrase must have a head: this can be a noun, an independent pronoun or certain demonstratives. an adjective cannot be a NP-head, but needs the support of the empty head mara. All other elements are optional. A maximal NP should follow the following order of constituents, most of which are optional:
an article: plural rai, partitive r̄e, definite va a noun or the empty head mara, or a 'possessive bundle', formed by {possessed noun + (a possessive classifier +) a possessor} an adjective the anaphoric marker ri a demonstrative word a numeral preceded by a subject clitic (usually mo), similar to a clause a relative clause a prepositional phrase
It is rare to meet more than three or four elements in one NP.
Articles and reference-tracking devices Semantically speaking, a noun without an article can be specific as well as non-specific, and definite as well as indefinite. Moreover, not only is there no gender-distinction, but even number is most of the time under-specified; only the context, and partly the personal marker on the verb, help distinguish between singular and plural reference.
Several devices are available, though always optional, in Araki to help track the reference of a particular NP. These are the clitics va, ri, mara, rai, r̄e, mo hese, which appear as shown in the above list.
The pro-clitic va and the post-clitic ri both mark anaphoric relations. va is placed immediately before the noun, and codes for discourse-internal anaphora (that is, reference to a term that has already been introduced in the earlier context). ri immediately follows the noun, and seems to refer to the immediate context preceding it (comparable with the English anaphoric use of 'this').
The construction {va N ri} does not exist. This indicates that the two clitics must have different uses.
The empty head mara can be found at the beginnings of NPs. It never occurs alone, but is always followed by an adjective or a place name. Its role is to refer to a set of human individuals defined by the next word, in a similar way to English 'one' in the small one(s). mara can be described as a personal nominalizer. It does not involve definiteness or number.
The plural marker rai makes explicit the plurality of the NP, which is otherwise never coded for, and often left implicit. As all other markers mentioned in this section, it too is optional.
The specific indefinite mo hese, a numeral quantifier meaning 'one', is very commonly, if not obligatorily, used when a referent is introduced for the first time into the discourse. mo hese may be used as a numerical predicate, contrasting with other numbers, but it is most frequently used as a kind of article following the NP in order to mark it as being indefinite, that is, newly introduced into the discourse.
The partitive–indefinite pro-clitic r̄e is used when the NP refers to a new, non-specific instance of a notion. In order to understand this concept, compare the English sentences 'I ate a banana ' with 'I want to eat a banana '. Besides being indefinite in both cases, in the first sentence a banana is specific, because it refers to a specific banana; in the second sentence a banana is non-specific, because it can refer to any banana, not one in particular. Although this semantic difference is not grammaticalized in English, it is in Araki, using re as a marker for non-specific indefinite reference.
The function of the aforementioned reference-tracking devices can be summarized as follows: Definite Indefinite Specific N // va N // N ri 'The cake is ready' N // N mo hese 'I ate a cake' Non-specific N 'I like cake' N // r̄e N 'I want to eat a cake'
Verbs Verbs are predicative words, which are preceded by subject clitics. Unlike nouns, they cannot form a direct predicate (that is, without a clitic), and cannot refer to an entity, nor form the subject of a sentence. They cannot directly modify a noun by just following it. From the semantic point of view, verbs refer to actions, events or states. Each verb in Araki must be marked with either realis or irrealis mood.
The only obligatory elements of a verb phrase are the head and the subject clitic. This can be extended not only to phrases headed by a verb, but also to phrases headed by an adjective or a numeral. Under certain conditions, a noun can also be the head of a so-called 'VP', provided that it is endowed with mood-aspectual properties, such as negation.
From a syntactic point of view, Araki contrasts intransitive with transitive verbs.
Intransitive verbs Intransitive verbs never take either object NPs or transitive suffixes.
They are morphologically unvarying (that is, receive no morphological markings).
Transitive verbs Transitive verbs take object arguments, as NPs and/or as object suffixes. Most transitive (or transitivised) verbs, though not all of them, can be morphologically marked as such. This usually implies the presence of a transitivity suffix -i and/or of an object personal suffix.
Some verbs can be described as having oblique transitivity, since they are usually followed by an oblique (generally, prepositional) complement.
Araki does not normally allow for ditransitive verbs. Where English would have two direct objects, as in I'll give you some money, Araki would have one complement as a direct object, while the other would be assigned the oblique case. Therefore, one complement appears inside the VP and the other outside it.
Symmetrical verbs Some verbs in Araki allow its syntactic subject to be marked with either the case role of patient or agent.
However, this phenomenon is more limited in Araki than it is in English.
Verb serialization Araki allows two verb roots to appear in one single verb phrase, thus forming a sort of complex verb {V1, V2}; usually no more than two verbs can appear at a time. This series of two verbs share one mood-subject clitic and the same aspect markers. This does not imply that they semantically have the same subject. No object or other complement can insert between these two verbs. The transitivity suffix -i, as well as the object suffix, appear on the right of the second verb, provided this is authorized by the morphology of V2 and by the syntactic context.