Ura language (Vanuatu)
| Ura | |
|---|---|
| Native to | Vanuatu |
| Region | Erromango |
|
Native speakers
|
6 (1998) |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | urav1235 |
Ura is a moribund language of the island Erromango in Vanuatu. It was thought to be extinct, after massive depopulation of the island in the nineteenth century, until Terry Crowley discovered a handful of elderly speakers in the 1990s.
Ura is a moribund language that is found in the Republic of Vanuatu, an archipelago of about 80 islands off of New Caledonia. The first inhabitants settled there around 4,000 years ago, and the population has grown about 2.3% per year according to a 1999-2009 census. Specifically, Ura is found on the southern island of Erromango, home to 1950 people (Daniel, 2010). The language originated just north of Elisabeth Bay and as far as Potnuma, eventually moving to other inland areas including the large caldera (Crowley, 1999). According to Terry Crowley’s count in the 1990s it is spoken fluently by 6 people and semi-fluently by a couple dozen others. All the speakers of the Ura language are multilingual. They speak Sye, which is the main language in the island, as well as Bislama, which is their pidgin English. Ura itself may have once been referred to as Aryau or Arau, words that are based on the first person singular possessive pronoun of the language. This naming system is characteristic of other Erromangan languages (Crowley, 1999).
Ura contains 18 consonant phonemes. /p/ is a voiceless labial stop, /t/ is a voiceless alveolar stop, and /k/ is a voiceless velar stop. The difference between these three segments is the place of articulation, which is organized from the front of the mouth to the back. Similarly, /b/, /d/, and /g/ are recognized as prenasalised voiced stops at the labial, alveolar, and velar points of articulation respectively. The difference with this second set is the voiced sound which occurs as a result of the vocal chords slightly closing, causing air to vibrate as it passes through. One of the main differences between Ura and Sye is that /f/ and /v/ in Ura are contrasting consonants, while Sye contains no contrasting fricatives. /v/ is a voiced labial fricative and /f/ is a voiceless labial fricative. “/s/ is pronounced as a voiceless grooved post-alveolar fricative” (Crowley, 1999) and /h/ is a voiceless glottal fricative; the only glottal articulation of this language. /γ/ is a voiced velar fricative. “There are three phonemically contrastive nasals, [which are] the bilabial nasal realized as [m], the alveolar nasal realized as [n], and the velar nasal realized as [ŋ]” (Crowley, 1999). /w/ and /y/ are the two glide phonemes. /w/ is classified as both labial and velar because it’s pronounced by rounding the lips and raising the tongue to the back of the velar, while /y/ is alveolar, as the tongue is raised toward the hard palate. /r/ is an apical alveolar flap or trill, and is sometimes confused with /l/ which is an alveolar lateral, even though there is clear phonetic contrast. This may be due to a speaker’s lack of articulation or because /r/ and /l/ are phonetically close phonemes (Crowley, 1999).
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