Terry Crowley

A Disappearing Language of Southern Vanuatu

The Paamese Language of Vanuatu

This is one of four monographs on Malakula languages that Terry Crowley had been working on at the time of his sudden death in January 2005. One of the four, Naman: a vanishing language of Malakula (Vanuatu) , had been submitted to Pacific Linguistics a couple of weeks earlier, and the remaining three were in various stages of completion, and John Lynch was asked by the Board of Pacific Linguistics to prepare all four for publication, both as a memorial to Terry and because of the valuable data they contain. Avava currently falls into the category described in Lynch and Crowley (2001:14-19) as being among the most poorly documented of all languages in Vanuatu . Published documentation of this language by a linguist is restricted to two fairly short wordlists in Tryon (1976). In addition to this recent data, there is also a very small amount of published data on the Umbbuul variety of this language that can be extracted from Deacon (1934:125), which derives from his anthropological fieldwork in the area in 1926. This data, however, is restricted to just a small number of kin terms for each variety, with no other vocabulary having been recorded.

The Avava Language of Central Malakula (Vanuatu)

John Lynch

Malcolm Ross

This new volume of the Language Family Series presents an overview of the Oceanic subgroup of the Austronesian languages, spread across a region embracing eastern Indonesia, Melanesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia. It provides sufficient phonological and grammatical data to give typologists and comparativists a good idea of the nature of these languages, and of how much typological variety there is in this single subgroup. The references will allow those interested in particular topics, geographical areas or specific languages to delve further. Divided into two major parts, the first five chapters of the book place the Oceanic languages in their geographic, demographic and social context. Both the place of the Oceanic subgroup within the wider Austronesian family, and the internal subgrouping of Oceanic itself are dealt with. A typological overview of Oceanic languages is provided, as well as an outline of the reconstructed phonology and morphosyntax of Proto Oceanic. The second part of the book consists of grammar sketches of 43 Oceanic languages that are not at all well known in the linguistic literature. For many of these languages, the sketch in this volume is the first grammatical treatment to appear in print.

The Oceanic Languages

The languages of southern Vanuatu are structurally different from other Oceanic languages. Sye has an unusually complex morphological system and it offers a number of typological surprises for Oceanic linguists. It differs syntactically from many other Oceanic languages of Melanesia in that it does not have widespread verb serialization, though it, along with the other languages of southern Vanuatu, has developed what can be referred to as a system of "echo verbs." This volume describes Sye's phonology and morphosyntax in terms that are intended to be accessible to followers of a variety of linguistic theories, with considerable exemplification of points to allow linguists to reanalyze data according to their own theoretical interests.

An Erromangan (Sye) Grammar

This book is a comprehensive, practical guide to field linguistics. It deals in particular with the problems arising from the documentation of endangered languages. Terry Crowley shows how to prepare for that task, and how to record, analyse, and describe languages in the filed. Mixing formal instruction and anecdote, the author shares his rich experience with the new generation of linguistic fieldworkers.

A Beginner's Guide

Field Linguistics

Terry Crowley submitted the manuscript of this book to Pacific Linguistics just a few weeks before his sudden and untimely death in January 2005. Terry had been visiting the island of Malakula in Vanuatu since the end of 1999, and had undertaken studies of four languages spoken there: Naman, Tape and Nese, which are all moribund languages, and Avava, still actively spoken. Descriptions of all four were well advanced at the time of his death, though this one was the only one to have been actually submitted for publication. Naman, the subject of this linguistic description, is a moribund language that is spoken on the island of Malakula in the Republic of Vanuatu . Vanuatu is located in the southwest Pacific to the west of Fiji and to the east of northern Queensland (Map 1). Before it gained its independence from joint colonial control by France and the United Kingdom in 1980, it was known in English as the New Hebrides and in French as les Nouvelles-Hébrides.

A Vanishing Language of Malakula (Vanuatu)

Naman

"A new Bislama dictionary is a substantially updated version of the first edition, which reflects the ever-changing vocabulary of Bislama, the national language of Vanuatu."--Back cover.

A New Bislama Dictionary

Bislama is the national language of Vanuatu, the world's most linguistically diverse nation with at least 80 actively spoken Oceanic languages used by about 200,000 people. Bislama began as a plantation pidgin based on English in the nineteenth century, but it has since developed into a unique language with a grammar and vocabulary very different from English. It is one of very few national languages for which there is no readily available reference grammar. This book aims to fill this gap by providing an extensive account of the grammar of Bislama as it is used by ordinary Ni-Vanuatu. It does not, therefore, aim to describe any kind of artificial written norm but sets out to capture a range of different kinds of ways that Ni-Vanuatu will say things in various contexts, both written and spoken, formal and informal. The thrust of this volume is to show that Bislama has a grammar—an unfamiliar concept for those educated in Vanuatu. It also shows that Bislama is a language of considerable complexity, which will come as a surprise to many of its users, who have been taught to view their language as somehow "simple" and even "deficient."

Terry Crowley

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