Tuamotuan language

Tuamotuan
Reʻo Paʻumotu
Reko Paʻumotu
Native to French Polynesia
Region the Tuamotus, Tahiti
Ethnicity 15,600 (2007 census?)[1]
Native speakers
 4,000 in Tuamotu (2007 census)[2]
many additional speakers in Tahiti[2]
Language codes
ISO 639-3 pmt
Glottolog tuam1242[3]

Tuamotuan, Paʻumotu or Paumotu (Paumotu: Reʻo Paʻumotu or Reko Paʻumotu) is a Polynesian language spoken by 4,000 people in the Tuamotu archipelago, with an additional 2,000 speakers in Tahiti.[4]:76

The Tuamotuan People today refer to their land as Tuamotu, while referring to themselves and their language as Pa'umotu. The Pa'umotu language is a member of the Austronesian language family, as the vocabulary of the language is mostly Polynesian, although some foreign influence is present. [5] Pa'umotu is one of five Polynesian languages spoken in French Polynesia, the other four languages being Tahitian, Marquesan, Mangarevan, and the language of the Austral Islands.[6]

The writing script used for the Pa'umotu Language is the Latin script.[7]

History & Culture

Little is known regarding the early history of the Tuamotus. It is believed that they were settled c. 700 by people from the Society Islands. [8] Europeans first discovered the islands in 1521, when Ferdinand Magellan reached them while sailing across the Pacific Ocean. Subsequent explorers visited the islands over the centuries, including Thor Heyerdahl, a Norwegian ethnographer who sailed a raft across the pacific in 1947. [8]

The affects of early European visits were marginal as they had no political effects. The language, however, was ultimately affected by the Tahitian language, which was itself affected by European expansion. The eventual arrival of European missionaries in the 19th century also led to changes in language, including the creation of new vocabulary terms for the Tuamotuan's new-found faith, and the translation of the Bible into Tuamotuan. [8] [6]\

The original religion of the Tuamotus involved the worship of a higher being, referred to in some instances as Kiho. Religious chants have been preserved and translated that describe the attributes of Kiho and how he created the world. [9]

In more recent times, the Tuamotus were the site of French nuclear testing on the atolls of Moruroa and Fangataufa. [8]

Classification

The Pa'umotu language is a member of the Austronesian Language Family, in the subfamily of Eastern Malayo-Polynesian, and the genus Oceanic. [10]

Geographic Spread

A rough map of the Tuamotuan Archipelago

The Pa'umotu Language is spoken among the atolls of the Tuamotuan Archipelago, which amount to over 60 small islands. Many of the former inhabitants have moved to Tahiti, causing the language to become less prolific.[6]

In the 1970s, there were a number of Tuamotuans living in Laie, O'ahu, Hawai'i, as well as other locations on the island of O'ahu. Some were reported to live in California and Florida. There were also a number of people living in New Zealand who were reportedly Tuamotuans, although they came from Tahiti. [6]

Dialects

The Pa'umotu language has seven dialects or linguistic areas: covering Parata, Vahitu, Maraga, Fagatau, Tapuhoe, Napuka and Mihiro.[11][4] The native Tuamotuan people are somewhat nomadic, shifting from one atoll to another and thereby creating a wide variety of dialects. [12] The natives refer to this nomadic tendency as "orihaerenoa", from the root words "ori" (meaning "to wander around"), "haere" (meaning "to go") and "noa" (meaning "non-restriction"). [12]

Pa'umotu is very similar to the Tahitian language, and a considerable amount of "Tahitianization" has affected the Pa'umotu language. [12] Primarily due to the political and economical superiorty of Tahiti in the region, many Tuamotuans (especially those from the Western atolls) are bilingual, speaking both Pa'umotu and Tahitian. [6] Many young Tuamotuans who live on atolls nearer to Tahiti speak only Tahitian and no Pa'umotu. This has understandably contributed to the language slowly becoming extinct.

An example is the Pa'umotu use of a voiced velar nasal sound such as "k" or "g", which in Tahitian-Tuamotuan (a blending of the languages) is rather a glottal stop. For example the word for "shark" in plain Pa'umotu is "mago", but in the blending of the two languages it becomes "ma'o", dropping the voiced velar nasal consonant "g". The same is true with words such as "matagi"/"mata'i" and "koe"/" 'oe". [12]

These differences in dialect lead to a split between "Old Tuamotuan" and "New Tuamotuan". Many younger Tuamotuans do not recognize some words that their forbears used, such as the word "ua" for rain. Younger Tuamotuans use the word "toiti" to describe rain in contemporary Tuamotuan.

Grammar

No systematic grammar has been published on the Tuamotuan language. Current Tahitian-Tuamotuan orthographies are based upon the Tahitian Bible and the Tahitian translation of the Book of Mormon. These vary from one mission group to another, and none of them are phonemic, as is the case with most of the languages in the world today. [6]

An available source for Tuamotuan-English comparatives is "The cult of Kiho-Tumu", which contains Tuamotuan religious chants and their English translation. [9]

Phonology

The Segmental Phonemes in Tuamotuan are as follows:

(a) Consonants:

stops: /p, t, k, ' (glottal stop)/

fricatives: /f, h, v/

nasals: /m, n, ŋ/

median: /r/

(b) Vowels:

Tuamotuan Vowel Phonemes[12]
front unrounded central unrounded back rounded
high /i/ /u/
mid /e/
low /a/ /o/

Short vowels contrast with long vowels and vowel length is thereby phonemic. A number of non-identical vowel pairs appear in Tuamotuan, and these are interpreted as pairs of identical vowels and presented by doubling the vowels in all cases. [12]

Vocabulary

Naturally, a lot of similarity between other Polynesian languages can be seen in the vocabulary of Pa'umotu. Woman, for example, is "vahine", very close to the Hawaiian "wahine". Another example is "thing", which in Pa'umotu is "mea", and is the same in Samoan.

Pa'umotu speakers utilize fast deliberate speech, slow deliberate speech, and normal speech patterns. They apply phrase stress, which can be phonemic or morphemic, and primary stress, which is not phonemic.[13]

Endangerment Status

According to UNESCO, the Tuamotuan/Pa'umotu language is "definitely endangered" [14] Much of this is due to the fact that the population of the Tuamotuan archipelago has been declining since before the 1970s. [12] Many of the islanders have migrated to Tahiti for education or work opportunities. This is a possible contributor to the language beginning to go extinct. The language is referred to by some as a "dying language", due to so much of it being absorbed by Polynesian.[15]

Additionally, as of the 1970s, the only language used in education in the Tuamotuan archipelago and in Tahiti was French. No Tahitian or Tuamotuan is taught in schools although Tahitian is the first and primary language of almost every person in Tahiti. [6]

References

  1. ↑ Tuamotuan language at Ethnologue (17th ed., 2013)
  2. 1 2 Tuamotuan at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
  3. ↑ Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Tuamotuan". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
  4. 1 2 See Charpentier & François (2015).
  5. ↑ Treagear, Edward (1895). A Paumotuan dictionary with Polynesian comparatives. Wellington, New Zealand: Whitcombe & Tombs.
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Kuki, Hiroshi (1971). The place of glottal stop in tuamotuan. Gengo Kenkyu: Journal of the Linguistic Society of Japan.
  7. ↑ "Ethnologue".
  8. 1 2 3 4 "Wikipedia: Tuamotus".
  9. 1 2 Stimson, John Francis (1933). The cult of Kiho-tumu. Honolulu, HI: The Bishop Museum.
  10. ↑ "World Atlas of Language Structures".
  11. ↑ Carine Chamfrault (26 December 2008). "L'académie pa'umotu, "reconnaissance d'un peuple"" [The Pa‘umotu Academy , “recognition of a people”]. La Dépêche de Tahiti (in French). Archived from the original on 5 September 2012. Retrieved 4 November 2010.
  12. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Kuki, Hiroshi (1970). Tuamotuan Phonology.
  13. ↑ Kuki, Hiroshi (March 1973). "Predictability of Stress in a Polynesian Language: Stress Patterns in Tuamotuan". Gengo Kenkyu (Journal of the Linguistic Society of Japan).
  14. ↑ Wurm, Stephen (2001). "UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger of Disappearing (2001)". unesco.org.
  15. ↑ Stimson, J. Frank (1965). "A Dictionary of Some Tuamotuan Dialects of the Polynesian Language". American Anthropologist. Vol. 67.

Further reading

  • Charpentier, Jean-Michel; François, Alexandre (2015). Atlas Linguistique de Polynésie Française — Linguistic Atlas of French Polynesia (in French and English). Mouton de Gruyter & Université de la Polynésie Française. ISBN 978-3-11-026035-9.
  • Edward Tregear (1895). A Paumotuan dictionary with Polynesian comparatives. Whitcombe & Tombs Limited (2010 edition: General Books, Wellington, New Zealand (and Nabu Press). p. 118. ISBN 1-245-00811-0. Retrieved 2011-11-05.


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