Aneityum or AnejomÃÂ (also spelled Anejom, and formerly Aneiteum, Aneityumese) is an Oceanic language spoken by 900 people () on Aneityum Island, Vanuatu. It is the only indigenous language of Aneityum.
The alternate names for Aneityum are AnejomÃÂ, Anejom, Aneiteum, Aneiteumese, Aneytum and Annatom.
AnejomÃÂ is part of the Austronesian language family, and is part of the large subgroup of Oceanic languages. AnejomÃÂ falls under the Southern Oceanic Languages subgroup, and more specifically Southern Vanuatuan Languages. It constitutes its own separate branch of Southern Vanuatuan languages. While AnejomÃÂ is now considered to be only one language, some historical reports have suggested that AnejomÃÂ might have consisted of two very distinct dialects. Its closest relatives are preliminarily thought to be more closely related to the languages of Tanna (e.g. Kwamera, South-West Tanna, Lenakel) than Erromango languages.
The island of Aneityum is the southernmost inhabited island of the nation of Vanuatu. It is closest to the islands of Tanna and Futuna. The island's geographic location made AnejomÃÂ develop in isolation. The first speakers of the language are believed to have lived on hillsides near coasts in order to access resources. However, due to land degradation and population pressure, the speakers moved to the valleys.
Aneityum is thought to have been settled around 874 BCE ñ 60 years by people coming over from Tanna. Original settlers (and speakers of the language) are thought to have lived on hillsides near the coasts in order to access resources from the ocean and land. However, the combination of land degradation and population forced the Aneityumese to move onto valley flats instead.
The original political system was like much of Melanesia; it was composed of multiple chiefs (natimarid) ruling over many chiefdoms (neclau). According to oral tradition, the island had two chiefdoms but they split to then form seven chiefdoms each "further divided into a number of districts between fifty and sixty in number".
The first contact with Europeans was in 1830, when the brig Alpha landed in Aneityum with hopes of establishing a sandalwood trading business.
The population of the Aneityumese has greatly declined over the years (along with the number of speakers); however, the population has seen a bit of a resurgence in the present. Most of the population was decimated by two major epidemics in the 1830s and 1840s and never fully recovered as can be seen below:
Like much of the rest of Melanesia, the church has played an important role in language ideology on Aneityum. The first missionaries to land on the island were Samoan Presbyterians who arrived in 1841. After them followed European Presbyterian missionaries who established themselves in 1848. With the large missionary presence on the island, many schools were founded to spread the message of Christianity. In these schools, the classroom was mainly conducted in AnejomÃÂ, however numeracy was conducted in English. The missionary presence on the island was so prevalent that the island was considered the "first successfully missionized island in Melanesia" and housed the headquarters of the Presbyterian Mission to the New Hebrides.
The missions on Aneityum promoted the use of English.
Vanuatu came under joint British and French rule in 1887, which then became formalized in 1906 where Vanuatu became known as the "Anglo-French Condominium". Colonialization along with the big mission presence on the island led to the languages of French and English to become prestige languages. Other languages of Vanuatu also became prestigious (such as Nguna) because these language were chosen by missionaries to spread their teachings. With prolonged contact with English speakers, another language also arose: Bislama. Bislama, a pidgin of English, is now an extremely widely used language and has had a huge role in language change within AnejomÃÂ.
AnejomÃÂ has 5 vowels and 20 or 21 consonants. The sound [ÃÂ] is sometimes counted as phoneme.
Vowel and consonant length is contrastive in this language and is shown in orthography by writing the vowel or consonant twice.
AnejomÃÂ was never a written language and so traditionally did not have an orthography. The first orthography was made by the missionary John Inglis in 1882. It was considered to be a fairly good orthography of its time (having a one-to-one correspondence between letters and phonemes); however, it did contain several key problems.
A new orthography more accepted by AnejomÃÂ speakers now is shown below.
The moderately phonemic glottal stop is an allophone of /h/ when it occurs before a consonant. It also occurs as an allophone before vowels that occur in the word initial position.
The phoneme /ò/ becomes [jÃÂ] after a high vowel.
Stops and affricates in AnejomÃÂ change in voicing depending on where they occur between segments as described and illustrated below.
There are three types of pronouns in AnejomÃÂ: personal, demonstrative, and interrogative pronouns.
AnejomÃÂ's personal pronouns distinguish:
<nowiki>*</nowiki>The focal pronouns aek and aen are only used in writing or when a speaker speaks slowly. Most of the time the pronouns aak and aan, respectively, are used instead (and are generally pronounced with short vowels instead of long vowels). Below is an example of a focal pronoun.
Object pronouns are free morphemes and occur after verbs and certain "case-marking prepositions" as seen below.
<nowiki>**</nowiki>The 2SG and 3SG object pronouns normally occur as yic and yin, however when a vowel precedes these pronouns then they change to the suffixes -c and -n respectively.
Possessive pronouns occur as suffixes and can be attached to "directly possessed nouns and possessive markers, some case-markers, and to members of one sub-class of verbs". See below:
There are two interrogative pronouns in AnejomÃÂ: di ('who') and panid and its less widely used alternate, panida ('which').
However, <nowiki/>'di is "inherently singular" and requires a coordinate phrase with im, as seen in the example here, to express plurality.
Panid and panida can only be used to refer to inanimate objects.
Demonstrative pronouns also have singular, dual, trial and plural forms like personal pronouns (see below).
In AnejomÃÂ, demonstrative pronouns can also take the suffix -sak which denotes that the speaker is "pointing at or in some other way indicating the location of the thing referred to."
AnejomÃÂ has several categories for nouns: temporal, locative, personal, obligatorily possessed and optionally possessed nouns. The latter two categories (obligatorily possessed and optionally possessed nouns), are further distinguished based on animacy (as seen below).
Examples of common temporal nouns can be seen below.
Locative nouns in AnejomÃÂ do not need the case marker "a" to occur in front of it as shown in the example below.
Locative nouns also include the following words:
Personal nouns include kinship terms as well as names of people.
These nouns must "be marked as being possessed by some other noun or pronoun", which tends to be marked by suffixation. Most of the obligatorily possessed nouns are kinship terms.
An example of direct suffixation can be seen in the examples below.
There are some nouns that do not take direct suffixation but rather use possessive markers such as the word for "child", "nephew", "niece", and "sister," to name a few.
Unlike obligatorily possessed nouns, these nouns do not, or do not have to, take possession markers.
AnejomÃÂ has a distinction between animate and inanimate nouns which is further divided into obligatorily possessed and optionally possessed nouns.
Animate nouns are usually marked by using the subject marker "a" for singular and the prefix "elpu-" for plural.
Pluralization of the word meaning 'man' to 'men' seen below.
natamÃÂañ â elpu-atamÃÂañ
Inanimate nouns are not marked in either the singular or plural.
AnejomÃÂ has several key prefixes that serve important roles:
<nowiki>*</nowiki>Inta- is used sparingly compared to the other prefixes. Most of the time, instrumental nouns are compounds that include the word '<nowiki/>nitai', which is most likely where <nowiki/>'inta comes from.
The n-/in- prefix is a frequently used as well as frequently occurring underlying morpheme: it accounts for around 85% of AnejomÃÂ nouns. The other approximate 15% of nouns that don't use this prefix tend to be highly specific groups of nouns.
AnejomÃÂ also has a different set of prefixes that are referred to as collective prefixes, as they refer to large groups of things:
In AnejomÃÂ, the possessive form of personal pronouns are attached directly to the noun when "the possessor is a personal pronoun".
For all other nouns that cannot be directly possessed, a "possessive or construct suffix is added to a possessive marker" as seen below.
Verbs in AnejomÃÂ are words that can occur as the head of a verb phrase. In AnejomÃÂ, verbs are distinguished by transitivity; there are transitive, intransitive and (the family small class of) ambi-transitive verbs. Examples of these verbs can be seen below.
<nowiki>*</nowiki>Many transitive verbs also have intransitive pairings as can be seen by the two verbs that mean 'to eat' in the table above.
Both of these verbs are unusual in that they do not follow the regular pattern.
Yek is an existential verb that is different from the majority of AnejomÃÂ verbs in a number of ways.
This verb marks the reflexive or reciprocal and takes an agreeing possessive suffix as seen below.
The vowel (i) is only added if it occurs before a consonant.
AnejomÃÂ does have reduplication although it is not used very often. It most commonly occurs as complete reduplication as seen below.
Not including the verbs which take possessive suffixes, there are three main types of ways in which transitive verbs are marked. The types of verbs are: 1) unmarked verbs, 2) "verbs that take the transitive suffix "-i" with all objects", 3) verbs that only take "-i" with animate objects and "-ñ" with inanimate objects.
These suffixes attach to the end of the verb and will come after a transitive suffix if one occurs.
Distance suffixes have to combine with horizontal or vertical suffixes; they cannot be alone. The ordering of these suffixes are as follows: 1) vertical, 2) horizontal, 3) distance.
In a verb phrase, a subject marking morpheme tends to occur first (except if it is an imperative, optionally conjoined, or subordinate clause). In AnejomÃÂ, subject-tense-aspect marking is undergoing radical change.
There seems to be a lot of change in present day subject-tense marking, especially in the plural subject-tense marking category by younger speakers. Here are all the (competing) subject-tense markers used in modern AnejomÃÂ.
AnejomÃÂ has several markers (different from the subject-markers) which indicate a variety of mood, aspect and tense.
Compounding is a key historical and modern feature of AnejomÃÂ; it has both compound nouns and compound verbs. Compound nouns generally consist of a noun followed by either a noun, verb, modifier or a possessive construction, and compound verbs tend to be a combination of two verbs, although sometimes a verb is followed by a noun. Compounding is so prevalent, that historical linguistics use modern (as well as fossilized compounds) to trace genealogical relationships between Oceanic languages. Another one of the key uses of compounding in AnejomÃÂ is that it is used to form the instrumental case. Examples of compounding can be seen below.
AnejomÃÂ word order is fairly strict and does not allow for much variation. The preferred word order in AnejomÃÂ is VOS (or verb, followed by object, then subject). This word order is extremely unusual within the languages of Vanuatu and makes AnejomÃÂ the "only non-Polynesian language in Vanuatu to have this preferred word order." Below are a couple of examples of intransitive and transitive sentences.
While AnejomÃÂ has a fairly strict word order, there are times that the language departs from the standard VOS order.
AnejomÃÂ has multiple cases that are denoted by several different case markers summed up below.
Temporal phrases can be marked with or without a case depending on the phrase.
Unmarked temporal phrases take a temporal noun and unmarked locative phrases take either a locative noun or a locative demonstrative. There are two types of local demonstratives: the first type is the one seen in the table below and the second is formed adding locative suffixes (see table earlier on page) to the root au'.
Locative demonstratives that are formed by adding the locative suffixes to the root au- must follow a specific order:
Marked temporal phrases and place phrases (that don't have a non-personal noun at the head), take the case marker <nowiki/>'a'. For non-personal place phrases, the case marker <nowiki/>'u'<nowiki/> is used instead. When a place phrase uses a personal noun or pronoun, ehele- is used instead of either <nowiki/>'a'<nowiki/> or <nowiki/>'u.
There are two types of questions: yes/no and content questions.
Yes/no questions can be asked in two ways. One way to indicate a question is by ending a phrase on a raised intonation. The second way is to add the word '<nowiki/>ka a'o'<nowiki/> (which means or no<nowiki/>') to the end of a sentence.
Unlike yes/no questions, content questions use interrogative morphemes such as:
There are several different ways to combine clauses together:
In simple clause chaining, no conjunctions are markings are used to link two separate clauses together. Simple clause chaining can be used either for clauses of the same or different subject and for both verbal and verbless clauses.
There are three conjunctions that combine clauses in AnejomÃÂ: '<nowiki/>ka<nowiki/>', '<nowiki/>jai', and '<nowiki/>jam which are the equivalents of 'or', 'but' and 'but' respectively.
'Ka'
'<nowiki/>Jai<nowiki/>' and '<nowiki/>jam'<nowiki/> have the same meaning, however <nowiki/>'jai'<nowiki/> is used when the subjects of the two combining clauses are different and jam'<nowiki/> is used when the two combining subjects are the same. '<nowiki/>Jai<nowiki/>' is also used when a subject-tense marker occurs at the beginning of the clause following it, regardless of the subject.
'Jai'
'Jam'
AmÃÂ and pÃÂar are also conjunctions that respectively mean 'and' and 'and then, so'. However, they don't function like normal conjunctions but rather aspect markers as seen below.
M- is attached "to the first word in the verb phrase of a non-initial clause which has the same subject as the preceding clause". It can also denote continuous aspect.
While verb serialization does not occur much in AnejomÃÂ in comparison to other Western Oceanic Languages, it occurs more commonly than in its closest related languages. Most of the verb-serializations in AnejomÃÂ contain directional motion verbs in the non-initial clause as seen below:
Relative clauses in AnejomÃÂ do not have relative pronouns and they directly follow the noun phrase that it is modifying. For example: