Vitu language
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Vitu | ||
|---|---|---|
| Spoken in: | Papua New Guinea | |
| Total speakers: | 7,000 | |
| Language family: | Austronesian Malayo-Polynesian Central-Eastern Eastern Oceanic Western Meso Melanesian Bali-Vitu Vitu |
|
| Writing system: | Latin alphabet | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | none | |
| ISO 639-2: | map | |
| ISO 639-3: | wiv | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key. | ||
Vitu (also spelled Witu) or Muduapa is an Oceanic language spoken by about 7,000 people on the islands northwest of the coast of West New Britain in Papua New Guinea.
Contents |
[edit] Classification
Vitu is so closely related to the neighbouring Bali language that the two are sometimes considered to be a single language, called Bali-Vitu.
Vitu and Bali are members of the Meso Melanesian cluster of the Western Oceanic language family.
[edit] Phonology
[edit] Vowels
| Front | Back | |
|---|---|---|
| High | i | u |
| Mid | e | o |
| Low | a | |
[edit] Consonants
| Bilabial | Dental | Coronal | Velar | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stop | Voiceless | p | t | k | |
| Prenasalized | ᵐb | ⁿd | ᵑɡ | ||
| Fricative | Voiceless | (s) | |||
| Voiced | β | ð | ɣ | ||
| Nasal | m | n | ŋ | ||
| Lateral | l | ||||
| Rhotic | r | ||||
/t/ is realized as [tʃ] before /i/.
/s/ occurs only in loanwords from Tok Pisin, such as sikul "school".
[edit] Phonotactics
No consonant clusters or final consonants are allowed in native Vitu words: all syllables have a CV or V structure. Loanwords, however, may have different structures.
[edit] Writing system
Vitu is written in the Latin alphabet. Only between 15% and 25% of speakers of Vitu are literate in the language, but many more are literate in Tok Pisin, the national language of Papua New Guinea.
| A a | B b | D d | E e | G g | H h | I i | K k | L l | M m |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| /a/ | /ᵐb/ | /ⁿd/ | /e/ | /ᵑɡ/ | /ɣ/ | /i/ | /k/ | /l/ | /m/ |
| N n | Ng ng | O o | P p | R r | S s | T t | U u | V v | Z z |
| /n/ | /ŋ/ | /o/ | /p/ | /r/ | /s/ | /t/ | /u/ | /β/ | /ð/ |
[edit] References
- Ross, Malcolm D. (2002). "Bali-Vitu", in John Lynch, Malcolm Ross, & Terry Crowley: The Oceanic Languages. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 362–386.
- Van den Berg, René; Bachet, Peter (June 2006). "Retained and Introduced Final Consonants in Vitu". Oceanic Linguistics 45 (1): 43–52.
