| Tirax | |
|---|---|
| Mae, Dirak | |
| Native to | Vanuatu |
| Region | Malekula |
Native speakers | 1,000 (2001) [1] |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | mme |
| Glottolog | maee1241 [2] |
Tirax (Dirak, Mae) is an Oceanic language spoken in north east Malakula, Vanuatu.
| Tirax | |
|---|---|
| Mae, Dirak | |
| Native to | Vanuatu |
| Region | Malekula |
Native speakers | 1,000 (2001) [1] |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | mme |
| Glottolog | maee1241 [2] |
Tirax (Dirak, Mae) is an Oceanic language spoken in north east Malakula, Vanuatu.
The name Tirax refers to ‘inland person’. The original homeland of the Tirax speakers is the mountainous interior of North Central Malakula, neighbouring Big Nambas. As the Tirax speakers embraced Christianity in the early twentieth century, they began to migrate towards the east coast, where they founded the villages of Mae, Rori and Bethel. [3]
Tirax speakers often refer to their own language as resan, "language, speech", or Resan Tirax. Tirax is called “Dirak” by the speakers of Northeast Malakula. [4] Dirak is the name used to refer to Tirax in John Lynch and Terry Crowley’s 2001, Languages of Vanuatu: A New Survey and Bibliography. Because it is the language of Mae village, the Tirax language is referred to as "Mae" in the Ethnologue listing, and also in Darrell Tryon's 1976, New Hebrides languages: An internal classification. See Mae language. Tirax speakers prefer not to use "Mae" as the language name, as it is also the language of Rori and Bethel. [5]
Tirax has many features in common with other North Vanuatu languages. It has no tense marking, but has "obligatory subject-mood markers distinguishing realis and irrealis mood". It has "inalienable and alienable possessive marking", with a range of "possessive classifiers for alienable possession" including specific markers for food, drink and paths. Also like other Malakula languages, numbers have verbal morphology. Tirax has "nuclear verb serialisation, and a range of strategies for paratactic linkage. Several morphosyntactic processes, such as object marking and plural marking, are sensitive to the animacy of the referent". [6]
There is evidence that Tirax had an apicolabial (linguolabial consonant) series, likely borrowed from Big Nambas. The apicolabials are no longer part of the Tirax phoneme system, but have recently shifted to their dental consonant counterparts. [7]
Until 2004, Tirax was an oral language; a writing system is a relatively recent development. Tirax narratives show previously undescribed structural features not found in written narratives. There is a linking device between paragraphs, termed "transition clauses". Transition clauses are associated with a misalignment of prosodic and discourse-semantic levels of structure. [8] And there are a small set of circumstances in which story events are related out of chronological order, which runs counter to traditional theories of narrative. [9]
The Nafsan language, also known as South Efate, is a Southern Oceanic language spoken on the island of Efate in central Vanuatu. As of 2005, there are approximately 6,000 speakers who live in coastal villages from Pango to Eton. The language's grammar has been studied by Nick Thieberger, who is working on a book of stories and a dictionary of the language.
Malakula Island, also spelled Malekula, is the second-largest island in the nation of Vanuatu, in the Pacific Ocean region of Melanesia.
The Central Vanuatu languages form a linkage of Southern Oceanic languages spoken in central Vanuatu.
Terence Michael Crowley was a linguist specializing in Oceanic languages as well as Bislama, the English-lexified Creole recognized as a national language in Vanuatu. From 1991 he taught in New Zealand. Previously, he was with the Pacific Languages Unit of the University of the South Pacific in Vanuatu (1983–90) and with the Department of Language and Literature at the University of Papua New Guinea (1979–83).
The Southern Oceanic languages are a linkage of Oceanic spoken in Vanuatu and New Caledonia. It was proposed by Lynch, Ross, and Crowley in 2002 and supported by later studies. They consider it to be a linkage rather than a language group with a clearly defined internal nested structure.
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Vera’a[feraʔa], formerly known by its Mota name Vatrata, is an Oceanic language spoken on the western coast of Vanua Lava Island, in the Banks Islands of northern Vanuatu.
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