Dorig language

Dorig
Native to Vanuatu
Region Gaua
Native speakers
300 (2012)[1]
Language codes
ISO 639-3 wwo
Glottolog weta1242[2]

Dorig (sometimes called Wetamut) is an Oceanic language spoken on Gaua island in Vanuatu.

The language’s 300 speakers live mostly in the village of Dorig (IPA: [ⁿdʊˈriɰ]), on the south coast of Gaua. Smaller speaker communities can be found in the villages of Qteon (east coast) and Qtevut (west coast).

Dorig's immediate neighbours are Koro and Mwerlap.[3]

Phonology

Dorig has 8 phonemic vowels. These include 7 short monophthongs /i ɪ ɛ a ɔ ʊ u/ and one long vowel /aː/.[4]

Dorig vowels
 FrontBack
Close iu
Near-close ɪʊ
Open-mid ɛɔ
Open a

The phonotactic template for a syllable in Dorig is: /CCVC/ — e.g. /rk͡pʷa/ ‘woman’;/ŋ͡mʷsar/ ‘poor’; /wrɪt/ ‘octopus’. Remarkably, the consonant clusters of these /CCVC/ syllables are not constrained by the Sonority Sequencing Principle.[5]

References

  1. François (2012): 88).
  2. Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Wetamut". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
  3. List of Banks islands languages.
  4. François (2005:445)
  5. François (2010:407)

Bibliography

  • François, Alexandre (2005), "Unraveling the history of the vowels of seventeen northern Vanuatu languages", Oceanic Linguistics, 44 (2): 443–504, doi:10.1353/ol.2005.0034
  • François, Alexandre (2010), "Phonotactics and the prestopped velar lateral of Hiw: Resolving the ambiguity of a complex segment", Phonology, 27 (3): 393–434, doi:10.1017/s0952675710000205
  • François, Alexandre (2012), "The dynamics of linguistic diversity: Egalitarian multilingualism and power imbalance among northern Vanuatu languages", International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 214: 85–110, doi:10.1515/ijsl-2012-0022
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