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Documentation of Ifira-Mele, a Polynesian Outlier of Vanuatu

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Language Ifira-Mele
Depositor Catriona Malau
Affiliation The University of Newcastle
Location Vanuatu
Collection ID 0514
Grant ID MDP0369
Funding Body ELDP
Collection Status Collection online
Landing Page Handle http://hdl.handle.net/2196/c4a5b212-4cf4-4e49-bab1-819ac28ef8d7

 

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Summary of the collection

Contained in this collection is documentation of the language known in the literature as Ifira-Mele or Mele-Fila. The language is represented by two dialects spoken by what today are two clearly distinct communities. One dialect is spoken on the island of Ifira or Fila (Vila) in Vila Bay, the bay in which Port Vila, the capital of Vanuatu, sits. This collection currently only includes recordings of the other dialect, Imere, spoken in the large village of Mele, less than 10km from Port Vila. This language is one of three Polynesian Outlier languages spoken in Vanuatu. Fakamae is also documented as part of the same ELDP funded project (http://hdl.handle.net/2196/a48b2822-5873-4c2e-839a-f8a36725358e). The third Polynesian Outlier of Vanuatu is spoken on the small islands of Futuna and Aniwa in the south of the country. This collection consists of data collected on field trips in 2018, 2019 and 2023, over a combined period of 6 months spent with the community.

Within both dialect communities, there are a combined total of about 3,500 speakers of the language. This number is relatively large compared to many of the approximately 138 languages of Vanuatu. However, the language is threatened due to a number of factors, mostly due to the proximity of the communities to the capital, which means that means that members of the community are in contact with speakers of other languages and use Bislama, the lingua franca, much more often in their daily lives.

 

Group represented

All indigenous people of Vanuatu are descended from the Austronesian Lapita people, who settled Vanuatu some 3,000 years ago. The peoples of Emae, Mele and Ifira, and Futuna and Aniwa are distinct from other communities in Vanuatu in that they are descended from groups of people who travelled westwards to Vanuatu subsequent to their ancestors travelling east and settling in Polynesia. For this reason, the three languages spoken in the communities on these small islands are referred to as Polynesian Outliers, as they are more closely related to and clearly descended from Polynesian languages, and yet are found outside the Polynesian triangle.

The Ifira-Mele language is represented by two distinct dialects, Ifira or Fila (Vila) and Imere or Mele. The Ifira dialect is spoken on the island of the same name situated within Vila Bay. The Ifira people are the traditional owners of the land on which the capital, Port Vila, stands today. The people of Mele village originally lived on the small island of Imere (a popular tourist spot and marine sanctuary, known today as Hideaway Island), less than 500m offshore from Efate, in Mele Bay. The tiny island, measuring only about 200m by 125m had become overpopulated, and in 1950 the colonial government ordered that the Imere people move off the island and start a new settlement on the Efate mainland. Today the village of Mele is located less than 1km from the island. The people of Mele, under the Mele Trust, still have control over the island and profit from the resort that is located there. Imere is the endonym for their island, village, community, and language. Mele is the exonym, used throughout Vanutu to refer to the village and community. People from outside the Imere community only know Imere island as Hideaway. Hereafter I will used the endonym to refer to the village and language.

As a community, the Imere people live a semi-traditional lifestyle. Many people work either in the capital, Port Vila, or in local businesses, such as on Hideaway (Imere) Island. As such, many people are using Bislama, and either English or French in their day-to-day life. There is a primary school, Melemaat, located at the entrance to the village, at which the language of instruction is English. Most Imere children attend this school or other schools in Vila if their parents are a little wealthier. There is also a French school, Suango, just outside the village, directly across from Imere Island. Many people from other language groups live within the boundaries of the village, either renting or having purchased land. Thus, along with Imere language, Bislama, English, French and other Vanuatu languages, are spoken in the village on a daily basis. Due to the proximity to the capital and long history of contact with speakers of other languages, there has been considerable loss of language and of cultural knowledge. Despite this, there are still many ways in which the Imere people are engaged in a traditional lifestyle. All Imere villagers, regardless of whether they have a paid job, make food gardens in the land which surrounds the village. Culturally the most important crop is yam, and other staples and greens are planted, such as bananas, manioc, and sweet potatoes. Many men still fish in Mele Bay, although today they use nets, fishing from the shore or from aluminium dinghies, rather than using locally carved canoes. The knowledge of carving canoes has been completely lost and any traditional canoes which are used have been purchased from people on other parts of Efate. Likewise, women traditionally made many artefacts, mats, and baskets from both pandanus and coconut leaves. Today, most of the knowledge of weaving styles has been forgotten. The people of Imere are very proud of their traditional dish tuuluki ‘tuluk’, which all people of Vanuatu associate with the village – grated manioc with seasoned meat inside, baked in a hot stone oven in individual serving sizes, wrapped in heliconia leaves.

 

Special characteristics

Ifira-Mele is a language which has undergone and is still undergoing considerable change. Initially there was influence on the language from the other non-Polynesian languages spoken on Efate. More recently changes have been the result of contact with Bislama. Some of the changes which have taken place are observable by comparing data archived here for this project with recordings made in Mele village in the 1970s and 1980s by Ross Clark. Some of the elicited data recorded for this project targets a number of these observable changes. Some of Ross Clark’s earlier recordings are available in PARADISEC.

Close to 2 hours of the recordings in the collection focus on activities which were part of a wedding that took place in Imere village in July 2019. Some of these recordings have been edited to produce a documentary about traditional wedding practices, Teaavagaraga na Jowi go Marina ‘Jowi and Marina’s Wedding’. A description of this wedding and the process of making the documentary are outlined in an ELAR blog post and the video can be viewed on this page.

 

Deposit contents

There are 145 individual session ‘bundles’ in this collection. Each bundle represents a single recording session, focusing on a particular topic, and generally with a single speaker, although several bundles included multiple speakers. These bundles amount to around 16 hours of recorded speech. Approximately half of the recordings were made in July – October 2018 (66 bundles, totalling just over 7 hours) and half in July 2019 (79 bundles, totalling close to 8 hours), with only 5 bundles, totalling less than an hour, recorded in a short field trip in January 2023. Within the collection, there are 16 elicitation sessions, which were recorded in audio only, amounting to around 1.5 hours of recordings. These are available as a wav audio file. For all other bundles, the session was recorded in video, and within the bundle the recording is available as both an mp4 video file and a wav audio file which has been extracted from the video.

In terms of navigating through the collection and accessing the content of the bundles, start by clicking on ‘Access Collection’ at the bottom of this page. This takes you to a full list of each of the session bundles, presented in alphabetical order of the recording title. Looking at the menu on the left of the collection page, you will see that you can choose to filter and view sessions according to several different factors The information about genre is aimed mostly at linguists, such that you can choose to view recordings which are speeches, expository text, songs or narratives, for example. Refining your selection to look at sessions by choosing a particular topic or keyword focuses on the content of the recording, such as whether it is about weaving, fishing practices, agriculture, weddings, or other cultural practices, etc. You can also search for a session by the participants in the session, also listed in alphabetical order. Apart from participants as speakers in the recordings, a participant can also be someone who recorded the session or a speaker of the language who helped with transcription and translation of the recording. If you are looking for recordings on a particular topic or featuring a particular speaker, you can also use the search box at the top of the collection page.

When you click on the title for a ‘bundle’ or recording session, this takes you to a new page where you can find metadata (that is, detailed descriptive information about the recording session), the recording itself, and other linked files. The metadata always includes a description of the content of the recording, which expands on the brief title. As part of the description, information is given about whether the recording is in video format or audio only. Also, a short explanation is provided about the level of annotation of the recording session, as in whether a transcription, translation and/or glossing is available for that recording.

The standard workflow for this project was that video files were converted from the original to mp4 format and a wav file was extracted while I was with the community. The software SayMore was used for transcription and translation. I set up a SayMore project at the start of fieldwork in 2018 and added sessions for each recording. For each session, the mp4 and wav files were added and linked to metadata about the session. I worked mostly on my own to time-align each session recording in SayMore, using intonation breaks equivalent to a clause or several clauses. The way that SayMore works, this then gives you the option to listen to individual chunks of the recording and type in the transcription for that chunk of speech and enter a linked translation. In the field, I made translations initially into Bislama, the lingua franca of Vanuatu, as the community members who worked with me had varying levels of English and Bislama was our contact language. Once the session had been time-aligned, transcribed, and translated into Bislama, I then exported the file so that it could be further annotated in FLEx (FieldWorks). Within FLEx, I added an English translation and glossed the text. The English translations and glossing were mostly done by me while back in Australia, and then checked to clarify any remaining questions on return visits.

Annotation of the recordings in this collection is still an ongoing process. I am planning to update the translations and glossing available as I continue work on a descriptive grammar during 2023 and 2024. As of April 2023, there are 145 sessions in the collection totalling 16 hours of recordings. Of these recordings, 98 sessions, totalling 12.25 hours, have been time-aligned, transcribed, and translated into Bislama. For those sessions, an ELAN eaf file containing the annotation is part of the bundle. For 72 of those 98 sessions, totalling 8.5 hours of recordings, the session has additionally been translated into English and glossed in FLEx, and a flextext file is part of the bundle. The remaining 3 hours and 45 minutes has not yet been transcribed or translated.

There were several Imere speakers and members of the community who worked with me on various aspects of the language documentation. Jimmy Lulu Sopuso was my first contact and main language consultant for the project. I first contacted Lulu in 2016, and he took on the role of promoting the project to the community and sourcing speakers who would be willing to be recorded. Lulu also worked with me on transcription and translation. I worked with Darren Kalotiti Chillia in 2018 and 2019. Darren worked with me on transcription and translation and did some of the transcription on his own. He also helped me with some speaker contacts. There were three other speakers who worked with me on my longest period of fieldwork in 2018. David-Henri Coulon, Nelly Mansale, and Rima Singia worked with me to transcribe and translate recordings, and collect language use data from the community. Filo Samson and her daughter, Melina, helped with some transcription, translation, and elicitation when they hosted me in their home in 2019.

At this stage, access to the full collection is set at U. What this means is that you need to register for an ELAR account to access the files. Once you have done that and logged in, you will be able to either watch or listen to the recordings online or download them. For users in Vanuatu, please note that the video files are large and will use a lot of data to download. Please contact me by email at catriona.malau@gmail.com if you would like me to send you a copy of any files.

 

Collection history

The deposits ‘Documentation of Ifira-Mele, a Polynesian Outlier of Vanuatu’ and ‘Documentation of Fakamae, a Polynesian Outlier of Vanuatu’ are both part of a larger ELDP funded Major Documentation Project, ‘Documentation of Ifira-Mele and Emae, two Polynesian languages of Vanuatu’ The project ran from January 2018 – February 2023, hosted by the University of Newcastle, Australia. The grant was awarded to Catriona Malau, who is responsible for the Ifira-Mele collection, and Amy Dewar, who is responsible for the Fakamae collection and undertook this language documentation as part of her PhD research, for which her degree was awarded in 2022.

For both collections, the data was mainly recorded in 2018 and 2019. This collection was started at the end of 2018 after a four-month field trip to the Imere community from July to October. The collection was then added in the second half of 2019 with new data collected in July 2019. A final field trip for the project was made in December 2022 – January 2023. The latest update to this collection was made in April 2023, incorporating new data collected in the final field trip and annotations of some of the recordings which were made during the period January 2020 – April 2023, since the 2019 field trip.

 

Acknowledgement and citation

Users of any part of the collection should acknowledge Catriona Malau as researcher. Users should also acknowledge the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme as the funder of the project. Individual speakers whose words and/or images are used should be acknowledged by name. Any other contributor who has collected, transcribed or translated the data or was involved in any other way should be acknowledged by name. All information on contributors is available in the metadata.

To refer to any data from the collection, please cite as follows:

Malau, Catriona. 2018. Documentation of Ifira-Mele, a Polynesian Outlier of Vanuatu. Endangered Languages Archive. Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/2196/00-0000-0000-0010-AB1B-8. Accessed on [insert date here].

I would like to thank the people of Mele village who have helped me in many ways as I worked on this language documentation project. In particular, I would like to thank Jimmy Lulu Sopuso, who was my original contact, and who has been the main person who helped me develop further contacts and promoted our work throughout the community. Many thanks to my dear taatai Filo Langa Samson and her family, who hosted me and my family in her home in 2019 and 2022-23. Filo invited us to treat their home as our own and provided support for many aspects of the project. I also thank the chiefs and the community as a whole, who agreed to support this important work. I thank all the speakers who shared their words with me so that they can be shared with future generations and with interested archive users throughout the world.

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