Borrowed moieties, borrowed names: sociolinguistic contact between Tanna and Futuna-Aniwa, Vanuatu

Abstract

There is a history of considerable contact between the people of Tanna, Futuna, and Aniwa, three islands in the Tafea (Southern) District of Vanuatu. This essay addresses one aspect of that contact, which involves elements of social organization: Tanna societies appear to have borrowed a moiety system from Futuna or Aniwa, but Futuna and Aniwa have borrowed the Tannese names for these moieties. l The people of Futuna and Aniwa speak two fairly closely related dialects of a Polynesian Outlier language. The languages of Tanna are also Oceanic, but not Polynesian, and have undergone considerable change in the phonological structure of words. Borrowings in either direction, therefore, are relatively easy to identify, which makes the nature of the contact easier to reconstruct than in some other parts of the Pacific, where the languages in contact are relatively similar phonologically and borrowings are consequently more difficult to identify. Only one area of borrowing has been documented in detail to date. This concerns maritime vocabulary: The Tanna languages have borrowed very heavily indeed from Futuna-Aniwa in a range of semantic fields such as fish names, names of winds, names of parts of the canoe, fishing technology, and so on (Lynch nd.). Considerable borrowing (probably more by the Tanna languages from Futuna-Aniwa than in the reverse direction) is apparent in other areas of material culture, although these have not been fully documented as yet.

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