Emae, or Fakamae, is a Polynesian outlier language of Vanuatu.
Introduction
Population
The language of Emae is spoken in the villages of Makatea and Tongamea on Emae in the country of Vanuatu. Most of the Emae people speak Emae, North Efate (Nguna), English, French and Bislama. Less than 1% of the people who speak Emae as their native language are literate in the language, while 50% to 70% are literate in their second language, whether it be Nguna, English, French or Bislama. Today, only around 400 people speak Emae, mainly in Makatea and Tongamea, 250 more than in the 1960s - around 150 speakers. According to Lewis, Emae is still underused by many of the people in the area, but 50% of children know and speak Emae (2014), and children speaking Emae will help the language thrive.
Classification
Emae belongs to the large group of Austronesian language, which contains more than 1200 languages. Emae is part of the Samoic-Outliers node also known as Polynesian Outliers. The Emae is part of the Futunic group and all nine languages part of this node are the immediate sister languages of Emae. The Futunic group comes from languages linked to the island of Futuna.
Sounds
Consonants
{ | class="wikitable" style="text-align:center" !colspan="2"| ! Labial ! Alveolar ! Velar |- !colspan="2"| Nasal | | | |- !rowspan="2"| Plosive ! | | | |- ! | | | |- !rowspan="2"| Fricative ! | | | |- ! | | | |- !colspan="2"|Trill | | | |- !colspan="2"|Approximant | | | |}
According to Capell (1962), “[h] appears, but is a variant of [f] and sometimes [s]. Not classified as phoneme.”
Vowels
Emae is typologically unusual in that the historical back vowels *u and *o are no longer distinguished from *i and *e by being back vowels, but only in being rounded. (They do still occur as back vowels, but they are variable, and more often are front vowels, sometimes more front than /i/ and /e/.) This asymmetrical distribution is not found in neighboring languages. The round vowels, now and , overlap and may be in the process of merging.
Syllable structure and stress
To create a syllable in "Emae" the pattern is vowel or consonant-vowel only. The V and the CV pattern is shown in "Polynesian, generally neighboring Melanesian languages except, "Makura"." Consonant-consonant sounds don't happen, so the sounds [mb], [nd] and [mw] are said to be single, pre-nasalized phonemes. When placing stress in a word the stress is usually placed on the antepentultimate syllable. An example antepenultimate word is "nanafi", with the stress on "na".
Grammar
Basic word order
Capell says the syntactic pattern of "Emae" is Melanesian, and can be shown by the comparison between the sentence pattern of Maori and Emae (1962). The pattern that Maori, a Polynesian language, follows is the VSO. Capell puts the structures in term of actor, predicate and goal. The actor is the subject, the predicate the verb phrase and the goal is the object of the sentence. Emae follows the SVO pattern, which is the structure that most Melanesian languages use.
Reduplication
Reduplication in "Emae" is not as common as it is in other Polynesian languages. Most of the reduplication in "Emae" is a loan from other languages located around "Emae". In Capell’s book he states that there is presence of both noun and verb reduplication in Emae (1962).
Noun Reduplication
tui - "needle" tuitui - "sew"
Verb Reduplication (Loan from Nguna) lae - "rejoice" laelaea - "rejoicing"
Vocabulary
Indigenous vocabulary
Most words in the ‘’Emae’’ language are general Polynesian words: afi - "fire" ariki - "chief boŋiboŋi - "tomorrow" fafine - "female" fare - "house" po:ki - "to beg; beseech" roto - "inside 'heart'"
Homophones
The homophones are regarded as interesting in Emae because, some of the time, one word is a general Polynesian word yet the other comes from another Pacific language. GP=General Polynesian ara GP "road, path" GP "wake up"
fia
GP "how many?" GP "desire; want"
fua
Maori "to give" GP "egg"
po
Nguna "then; and then" GP "night"
rima
GP "hand" GP "five"