Olrat language

Not to be confused with OLRAT.

Olrat was an Oceanic language of Gaua island, in northern Vanuatu. It became extinct in 2009, with the death of its last speaker Maten Womal.^[2]

Olrat
Ōlrat
Pronunciation	[ʊlrat]
Native to	Vanuatu
Region	Gaua
Native speakers	3 (2012)[1]
Language family	Austronesian Malayo-Polynesian Oceanic Southern Oceanic North-Central Vanuatu North Vanuatu Torres-Banks Olrat
Language codes
ISO 639-3	olr
Glottolog	olra1234
ELP	Olrat
Olrat is classified as Critically Endangered by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger

Name

The name Olrat (spelled natively as Ōlrat [ʊlrat]) is an endonym. Robert Codrington mentions a place south of Lakon village under the Mota name Ulrata.^[3] A few decades later, Sidney Ray mentions the language briefly in 1926 under the same Mota name ‒ but provides no linguistic information.^[4]

The language

A. François with †Maten Womal, the last storyteller of Olrat (Gaua, Vanuatu, 2003)

In 2003, only three speakers of Olrat remained, who lived on the middle-west coast of Gaua.^[5] Their community had left their inland hamlet of Olrat in the first half of the 20th century, and merged into the larger village of Jōlap where Lakon is dominant.^[1][2]

Alexandre François identifies Olrat as a distinct language from its immediate neighbor Lakon, on phonological,^[6] grammatical,^[7] and lexical^[8] grounds.

Phonology

Olrat has 14 phonemic vowels. These include 7 short /i ɪ ɛ a ɔ ʊ u/ and 7 long vowels /iː ɪː ɛː aː ɔː ʊː uː/.^[9][2]

Olrat vowels

	Front	Back
Near-close	i ⟨i⟩ ∙ iː ⟨ii⟩	u ⟨u⟩ ∙ uː ⟨uu⟩
Close-mid	ɪ ⟨ē⟩ ∙ ɪː ⟨ēē⟩	ʊ ⟨ō⟩ ∙ ʊː ⟨ōō⟩
Open-mid	ɛ ⟨e⟩ ∙ ɛː ⟨ee⟩	ɔ ⟨o⟩ ∙ ɔː ⟨oo⟩
Open	a ⟨a⟩ ∙ aː ⟨aa⟩

Historically, the phonologization of vowel length originates in the compensatory lengthening of short vowels when the voiced velar fricative /ɣ/ was lost syllable-finally.^[10]

Grammar

The system of personal pronouns in Olrat contrasts clusivity, and distinguishes four numbers (singular, dual, trial, plural).^[11]

Spatial reference in Olrat is based on a system of geocentric (absolute) directionals, which is typical of Oceanic languages.^[12]