To'abaita language
| Toqabaqita/To’abaita | |
|---|---|
| Malu’u | |
| Native to | Solomon Islands |
| Region | Malaita Island |
|
Native speakers
|
13,000 (1999) |
|
Austronesian
|
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | toab1237 |
Toqabaqita is the language spoken by the people living at the north-western tip of Malaita Island, of South Eastern Solomon Islands. Toqabaqita, also known as To’abaita as well as To’ambaita, Malu and Malu’u is an Austronesian language. The website Ethnologue records the number of speakers of Toqabaqita as 12,600 in 1999. Lichtenberk, who has written an extensive grammar of Toqabaqita reports that Toqabaqita may be part of a North Malaita group of dialects which includes Baeguu, Baelelae and Fataleka, and possibly Lau. Ethnologue however reports no known dialects of Toqabaqita, but reports that within this group of languages, they are mutually intelligible. Lichtenberk points out that the speakers of Toqabaqita do recognize similarities across the whole island’s languages, but the Toqabaqita people themselves do not have this conception of North Malaita being a language and Toqabaqita as a dialect within this group.
Toqabaqita is classified as member of the Malayo-Polynesian, Oceanic, Central-Eastern Oceanic, Southeast Solomonic language family. Then there is a slight divergence in classification between Lichtenberk and Glottolog. Lichetenberk classifies the next subgrouping as Longgu/Malaita/Makira (San Crisobel), whereas Glottolog does not include Longgu at this point, but instead as a sister subgroup to Malaita/Makira.
Toqabaqita phonemes consist of 17 consonants and 5 vowels.
/k͡p/ and /g͡b/ are doubly articulated, labial-velar plosives. Pre-nasalization is a feature of particular Toqabaqita consonants, including all the voiced plosives, that is /b/, /d/, /g/ and /g͡b/, and for the glide /w/ . The degree of prenasalization varies and is determined by their position in the word.
Vowels can be long, but it is not allowed to have adjacent long vowels. Stress is not indicated by the phonemes, but by the symbols (’) for primary stress and (’) for secondary stress.
Toqabaqita has as its basic constituent order Subject - Predicate – X, with X referring to other elements that the subject and predicate. This can also be categorized as SVO (subject verb object) and SVX (subject verb other). Lynch in his review of Oceanic languages found that this constituent order is in fact the most widely geographically distributed pattern.
Verbs in Toqabaqita can include a variety of affixes, both suffixes and pre-fixes, which mark other grammatical categories of tense aspect, sequentiality and negation. Lexical objects are usually indexed on the verb as a suffix. In Toqabaqita the basic noun phrase consists minimally of a noun or an independent personal pronoun. Noun phrases may contain modifiers, which are generally suffixes. Lexical morphemes consist of at least two syllables in Toqabaqita. Where a monosyllabic word occurs, such as a grammatical morpheme, it then attaches as a clitic to the preceding word, with some notable exceptions. If speech is slow then the grammatical morpheme may have its vowel lengthened and take stress.
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