Vʼënen Taut language

Vʼënen Taut, also known as Big Nambas, is an Oceanic language spoken by about 3,400 people (as of 2001) in northwest Malekula, Vanuatu. Approximately nineteen villages in the Big Nambas region of the Malekula Interior use the language exclusively, with no variation in dialect. It was studied in depth over a period of about ten years by missionary Greg J. Fox, who published a grammar and dictionary in 1979. A Vʼënen Taut translation of the Bible was recently completed by Andrew Fox.

The consonant phonemes of Vʼënen Taut are as shown in the following table:

• /p, t, k/ are aspirated [pʰ, tʰ, kʰ] word finally. /t̼/ is not noted as behaving likewise.
• /m, p/ are rounded [mʷ, pʷ] before the front vowels /i, e/
• The voiced fricatives /β, ð̼, ɣ/ are devoiced [ɸ, θ̼, x] word initially and finally.
• /l/ is realized as [ɬ] word finally or when adjacent to /t/, and as [ɮ] when adjacent to /n/ word medially.

Vʼënen Taut has a 5-vowel system with the following phonemes:

Vʼënen Taut has a complex syllable structure with a large amount of consonant clusters possible (e.g. drnlak "my ear"). Additionally, clusters of up to four vowels are permitted (e.g. nauei "water"). Stress in Vʼënen Taut is phonemic, but partly predictable. The consonants /t β r l n/ all exhibit phonemic gemination when two identical ones occur between syllables. Linguolabial consonants are often marked with an apostrophe in the orthography to distinguish them from their bilabial counterparts.

Vʼënen Taut is a synthetic, head-marking language.

There are three noun classes in Vʼënen Taut:

1. Obligatorily possessed nouns, most commonly constituent parts of any object (body parts, tree parts, ordinals, possessive)
2. Optionally possessed nouns, with the subclasses:
   1. Nouns taking the third singular possessives nan or nen
   2. Nouns taking the prefix ar- "all"
   3. Title nouns (names and kinship terms)
3. Unpossessed nouns (personal and interrogative pronouns)

Vʼënen Taut features a system of complex nouns, formed by derivation. Derived nouns can be of one of five types:

1. Abstract nouns, formed by suffixing -ien to verb stems (e.g. tkar "be pregnant" vs. tkar-ien "pregnancy")
2. Articled nouns, formed by prefixing na- or n- to a verb stem beginning with a vowel (i-u "it rains" vs. n-u "(the) rain")
3. Ordinal nouns, formed by prefixing the nominalizer ni- and suffixing the possessive -a (tl "three" vs. ni-tl-a "the third of")
4. Determinative nouns, formed by prefixing ter- to some adjective stems (p'arei "long" vs. ter-p'arei "the long one")
5. Reverential nouns, formed by suffixing -et to some nouns (nut "place" vs. nutet "a sacred place", cf. nap' "fire" vs. nep'et "sacred fire")

Nouns in Vʼënen Taut may be compounded by following them with a verb stem.

• Fox, G. J. (1979). Big Nambas Grammar. Pacific Linguistics. ISBN 0-85883-183-X.

• Vʼënen Taut recordings
• Video about the language