Vitu language

"Witu language" redirects here. Not to be confused with Wiru language, which is also called Witu.

Vitu
Spoken in	Papua New Guinea
Native speakers	7,000  (date missing)
Language family	Austronesian Malayo-Polynesian Oceanic Meso-Melanesian ? Bali–Vitu Vitu
Writing system	Latin alphabet
Language codes
ISO 639-3	wiv
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Vitu (also spelled Witu or Vittu) or Muduapa is an Oceanic language spoken by about 7,000 people on the islands northwest of the coast of West New Britain in Papua New Guinea.

Classification

Vitu is so closely related to the neighbouring Bali language that the two are sometimes considered to be a single language, called Bali–Vitu.

Vitu and Bali appear to be members of a Meso-Melanesian cluster of the Oceanic languages.

Phonology

Vowels

	Front	Back
High	i	u
Mid	e	o
Low	a

Consonants

		Bilabial	Dental	Coronal	Velar
Stop	Voiceless	p		t	k
	Prenasalized	ᵐb		ⁿd	ᵑɡ
Fricative	Voiceless			(s)
	Voiced	β	ð		ɣ
Nasal		m		n	ŋ
Lateral				l
Rhotic				r

/t/ is realized as [tʃ] before /i/.

/s/ occurs only in loanwords from Tok Pisin, such as sikul "school".

Phonotactics

No consonant clusters or final consonants are allowed in native Vitu words: all syllables have a CV or V structure. Loanwords, however, may have different structures.

Writing system

Vitu is written in the Latin alphabet. Only between 15% and 25% of speakers of Vitu are literate in the language, but many more are literate in Tok Pisin, the national language of Papua New Guinea.

A a	B b	D d	E e	G g	H h	I i	K k	L l	M m
/a/	/ᵐb/	/ⁿd/	/e/	/ᵑɡ/	/ɣ/	/i/	/k/	/l/	/m/
N n	Ng ng	O o	P p	R r	S s	T t	U u	V v	Z z
/n/	/ŋ/	/o/	/p/	/r/	/s/	/t/	/u/	/β/	/ð/

Grammar

Morphology

Complex voice systems so characteristic of Austronesian languages of Taiwan and the Philippines undergo significant reduction in most Austronesian languages of Eastern Indonesia and Oceania. Vitu is unusual in terms of morphology when compared to most other Oceanic languages spoken in Melanesia. It is one of very few Melanesian languages that have a passive voice-marking system.

Syntax

The usual word order of Vitu is SVO.

References

• Ross, Malcolm D. (2002). "Bali–Vitu". In John Lynch, Malcolm Ross, Terry Crowley, eds.. The Oceanic languages. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon. pp. 362–386. ISBN 9780700711284. OCLC 48929366. 
• Van den Berg, René; Peter Bachet (June 2006). "Retained and Introduced Final Consonants in Vitu". Oceanic Linguistics 45 (1): 43–52. doi:10.1353/ol.2006.0001. OCLC 89063907. 
• Van den Berg, René (June 2007). "An Unusual Passive in Western Oceanic: The Case of Vitu". Oceanic Linguistics 46 (1): 54–70. doi:10.1353/ol.2007.0027. 

External links

• Ethnologue report for Muduapa
• Vitu organised phonology data