The Language
Araki is spoken today by about 8 native speakers; it is progressively being replaced by the neighbouring language of Tangoa. The rest of the island's population have a passive knowledge of Araki language, which allows them to understand it, and even make whole phrases and sentences. Nevertheless, a large portion of the Araki vocabulary, as well as idiosyncratic syntactic and phonetic phenomena of the language have been forgotten. Speakers of Araki can also speak the English-based pidgin Bislama; but this lingua franca is mainly used in the two towns of the country, Port-Vila and Luganville, and seldom in rural areas.
Araki was described in 2002 by the linguist Alexandre François.
Read more about this topic: Araki Language
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“Which I wish to remark—
And my language is plain—
That for ways that are dark
And for tricks that are vain,
The heathen Chinee is peculiar:
Which the same I would rise to explain.”
—Bret Harte (1836–1902)
“The necessity of poetry has to be stated over and over, but only to those who have reason to fear its power, or those who still believe that language is “only words” and that an old language is good enough for our descriptions of the world we are trying to transform.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)