Contents

Dorig language

Dorig
Dōrig
Pronunciation	[ⁿdʊˈriɣ]
Native to	Vanuatu
Region	Gaua
Native speakers	300 (2012)[1]
Language family	Austronesian Malayo-Polynesian Oceanic Southern Oceanic North-Central Vanuatu North Vanuatu Torres-Banks Dorig
Language codes
ISO 639-3	wwo
Glottolog	weta1242
ELP	Dorig
Dorig is classified as Definitely Endangered by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger

Dorig (formerly called Wetamut) is a threatened Oceanic language spoken on Gaua islandinVanuatu.

The language’s 300 speakers live mostly in the village of Dorig (IPA: [ⁿdʊˈriɰ]), on the south coast of Gaua. Smaller speaker communities can be found in the villages of Qteon (east coast) and Qtevut (west coast).

Dorig's immediate neighbours are Koro and Mwerlap.^[2]

The name Dorig is derived from the name of the village where it is spoken.

Dorig has 8 phonemic vowels. These include 7 short monophthongs /i ɪ ɛ a ɔ ʊ u/ and one long vowel /aː/.^[3]

Dorig has 15 consonant phonemes.^[4][5]

The phonotactic template for a syllable in Dorig is: /CCVC/ — e.g. /rk͡pʷa/ ‘woman’ (< *rVᵐbʷai); /ŋ͡mʷsar/ ‘poor’ (< *mʷasara); /wrɪt/ ‘octopus’ (< *ɣurita). Remarkably, the consonant clusters of these /CCVC/ syllables are not constrained by the Sonority Sequencing Principle. Historically, these /CCVC/ syllables reflect former trisyllabic, paroxytone words */CVˈCVCV/, after deletion of the two unstressed vowels:^[6] e.g. POc. *kuRíta ‘octopus’ > *wərítə > /wrɪt/.

The system of personal pronouns in Dorig contrasts clusivity, and distinguishes four numbers (singular, dual, trial, plural).^[7]

Spatial reference is based on a system of geocentric (absolute) directionals, which is typical of Oceanic languages.^[8]

• François, Alexandre (2005), "Unraveling the history of the vowels of seventeen northern Vanuatu languages" (PDF), Oceanic Linguistics, 44 (2): 443–504, doi:10.1353/ol.2005.0034, S2CID 131668754
• —— (2010), "Phonotactics and the prestopped velar lateral of Hiw: Resolving the ambiguity of a complex segment" (PDF), Phonology, 27 (3): 393–434, doi:10.1017/s0952675710000205
• —— (2011), "Social ecology and language history in the northern Vanuatu linkage: A tale of divergence and convergence" (PDF), Journal of Historical Linguistics, 1 (2): 175–246, doi:10.1075/jhl.1.2.03fra, hdl:1885/29283.
• —— (2012), "The dynamics of linguistic diversity: Egalitarian multilingualism and power imbalance among northern Vanuatu languages" (PDF), International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2012 (214): 85–110, doi:10.1515/ijsl-2012-0022, S2CID 145208588
• —— (2015). "The ins and outs of up and down: Disentangling the nine geocentric space systems of Torres and Banks languages" (PDF). In Alexandre François; Sébastien Lacrampe; Michael Franjieh; Stefan Schnell (eds.). The languages of Vanuatu: Unity and diversity. Studies in the Languages of Island Melanesia. Canberra: Asia-Pacific Linguistics. pp. 137–195. hdl:1885/14819. ISBN 978-1-922185-23-5.
• —— (2016), "The historical morphology of personal pronouns in northern Vanuatu" (PDF), in Pozdniakov, Konstantin (ed.), Comparatisme et reconstruction : tendances actuelles, Faits de Langues, vol. 47, Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 25–60
• —— (2022). "Presentation of the Dorig language, and audio archive". Pangloss Collection. Paris: CNRS. Retrieved 28 Sep 2022.

• Linguistic map of north Vanuatu, showing range of Dorig on Gaua.
• Audio recordings in Dorig language, in open access, by A. François (source: Pangloss Collection).
• A story in Dorig, with audio recording and translation.

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