Raga language

Raga is the language of northern Pentecost Island in Vanuatu. Like all Vanuatu languages, Raga belongs to the Oceanic subgroup of the Austronesian languages family. In old sources the language is sometimes referred to by the names of villages in which it is spoken, such as Bwatvenua, Lamalanga, Vunmarama and Loltong.
It is the most conservative language of Pentecost Island, having preserved final vowels while also retaining the five-vowel system inherited from Proto-Oceanic, compared to other languages spoken on the island, which have all developed additional vowels in addition to pervasive vowel deletion.
With an estimated 6,500 native speakers, Raga is the second most widely spoken of Pentecost's five native languages, and the seventh largest vernacular in Vanuatu as a whole. There are significant communities of Raga speakers on Maewo island and in Port Vila and Luganville as a result of emigration from Pentecost. Walter Lini, the independence leader of Vanuatu, was a native Raga speaker.
The Raga spoken by most people today is heavily mixed with Bislama, Vanuatu's national language. The Turaga indigenous movement, based at Lavatmanggemu in north-eastern Pentecost, have attempted to purge the language of foreign influences by coining or rediscovering native words for introduced concepts such as "torch battery" and "hour". Members of the Turaga movement write in Raga language using Avoiuli, a unique writing system inspired by local sand drawings.
Raga is generally considered an easy language to speak and learn, and is widely spoken as a second language by native speakers of other Vanuatu languages.
Modern Raga is relatively homogeneous, with no significant dialectal variation. A distinctive southern dialect of Raga, Ḡasai, is now extinct; its last native speaker died in 1999.
Several grammatical sketches, vocabulary lists and short papers on Raga have been published, beginning with the work of R H Codrington and von der Gabelentz in the late 19th century, and a number of religious texts have been translated into the language.

Name

The name Raga refers to the native name of Pentecost Island in the language, which can appear with the locative marker a-, giving Araga. In Tamambo, spoken in Malo Island, a cognate form Araha refers to the same island. The name Hano literally means "what".

Phonology

The consonants of Raga are as follows,
The sounds and , which are written n̄ and ḡ. G is typically pronounced like the ch in Scottish "loch".
Prenasalization of the voiced plosives, such that b becomes mb and d becomes nd, occurs when the preceding consonant is nasal. Thus mabu "rest" is pronounced mambu.
V, vw are labiodental, unlike in Apma to the immediate south, where they are bilabial. Descriptions describe v as and g as more commonly than as or, but there is evidently some variation.
can be in free variation with a trill.
Raga has the five basic vowels. Vowels are not generally distinguished for length.
Word roots in Raga nearly always end with a vowel. However, word-final vowels are often dropped within phrases, so that, for example, tan̄a "basket" and maita "white" combine to make tan̄ maita "white basket".
Stress occurs on the penultimate syllable of a word.

Grammar

Basic word order in Raga is subject–verb–object.

Pronouns

Personal pronouns are distinguished by person and number. They are not distinguished by gender. The basic pronouns are as follows:

Nouns

ity is indicated by placing ira before a noun:
Nouns may be suffixed to indicate whom an item belongs to. For example:
Possession may also be indicated by the use of possessive classifiers, separate words that occur before the noun and take possessive suffixes. These classifiers are:

no- for general possessions
bila- for things that are cared for, such as crops and livestock
ga- for things to be eaten
ma- for things to be drunk

Historically there was also a classifier wa- for sugarcane to be chewed ; this has fallen out of use among younger speakers.
The possessive suffixes are as follows:
A verb may be transformed into a noun by the addition of a nominalising suffix -ana:
Modifiers generally come after a noun:

Verbs

Verbs in Raga are usually preceded by a subject pronoun and by a tense–aspect–mood marker.
The subject pronouns are as follows:
There is no 3rd person singular subject pronoun.
Raga has five sets of tense–aspect–mood markers:

	Used for	Marker	Marker
Imperfective	Actions in the present tense Temporary or changing states	mwa	-m
Perfective	Actions in the past tense Fixed states	nu	-n
Potential	Things that may happen in the future	vi	-v or -i
Prospective	Things that are about to happen	men	-men
Hypothetical	Things that have not happened and probably won't	si	-s

The full forms of these markers are used in the 3rd person singular, when there is usually no subject pronoun:
Elsewhere, short forms of these markers are suffixed to the subject pronoun:
There are also dual forms incorporating a particle ru "two":
Historically there were trial forms incorporating a particle dol or tol, but these have fallen out of use.
Imperatives can consist of a verb with no marker. In third person forms, there is a marker na-:
There is a pattern of verb-consonant mutation whereby v at the start of a verb changes to b, vw to bw, g to ḡ, and t to d. This mutation occurs in imperfective aspect, and in the presence of the additive marker mom:
Negative sentences are indicated with the two-part marker hav...te "not", which encloses the verb and anything suffixed to it:
The passive voice can be formed by attaching the suffix -ana to the verb:
The direct object immediately follows the verb. Some object pronouns take the form of suffixes attached to the verb:

Person	Raga	English
1st person singular	-u	"me"
2nd person singular	-go	"you"
3rd person singular	-a or -e	"him" / "her" / "it"
3rd person plural	-ra	"them"

In some cases a particle -ni- interposes between the verb and the object pronoun:

Sample phrases

English	Raga
Where are you going?	Gomen van behe?
Where have you come from?	Gon mai behe?
Where is it?	Mwa ⁿdo behe?
It's here	Mwa ⁿdo teti
Come here!	Mai teti!
Go away!	Van dagai!
What's your name?	Ihamwa be ihei?
My name is...	Ihaku be...
Where are you from?	Giḡo ata behe? / Giḡo nin behe?
I am from...	Inau ata... / Inau nin...
How much? / How many?	Gaiviha?
one	tea / gaituvwa
two	rua
three	tolu
four	vasi
five	lima
six	ono
seven	bitu
eight	vwelu
nine	sivo
ten	han̄vulu
Thank you	Tabeana
It's just fine	Nu tavuha n̄ano