Rapa Nui language
Rapa Nui or Rapanui, also known as Pascuan or Pascuense, is an Eastern Polynesian language. It is spoken on Easter Island, also known as Rapa Nui.
The island is home to a population of just under 6,000 and is a special territory of Chile. According to census data, there are 9,399 people who identify as ethnically Rapa Nui. Census data does not exist on the primary known and spoken languages among these people. In 2008, the number of fluent speakers was reported as low as 800. Rapa Nui is a minority language and many of its adult speakers also speak Spanish. Most Rapa Nui children now grow up speaking Spanish and those who do learn Rapa Nui begin learning it later in life.
History
The Rapa Nui language is isolated within Eastern Polynesian, which also includes the Marquesic and Tahitic languages. Within Eastern Polynesian, it is closest to Marquesan morphologically, although its phonology has more in common with New Zealand Māori, as both languages are relatively conservative in retaining consonants lost in other Eastern Polynesian languages.One of the most important recent books written about the language of Rapa Nui is Verónica du Feu's Rapanui .
Very little is known about the Rapa Nui language prior to European contact. The majority of Rapa Nui vocabulary is inherited directly from Proto–Eastern Polynesian. Due to extensive borrowing from Tahitian there now often exist two forms for what was the same word in the early language. For example, Rapa Nui has Tahitian alongside original for 'to see', both derived from Proto-Eastern Polynesian *kitea. There are also hybridized forms of words such as 'to teach', from native and Tahitian.
According to archaeologist José Miguel Ramírez "more than a dozen Mapuche - Rapa Nui cognates have been described", chiefly by Sebastian Englert. Among these are the Mapuche/Rapa Nui words toki/''toki, kuri/uri and piti/iti''.
Language notes from 1770 and 1774
In 1770 a Spanish expedition led by cartographer Felipe González de Ahedo visited the island and recorded 94 words and terms. Many are clearly Polynesian, but several are not easily recognizable. For example, the numbers from one to ten seemingly have no relation to any known language. They are compared with contemporary Rapa Nui words, in parentheses:- cojána
- corena
- cogojú
- quirote
- majaná
- teúto
- tejéa
- moroqui
- vijoviri
- queromata-paúpaca quacaxixiva
A British expedition led by Captain James Cook visited the island four years later, and had a Tahitian interpreter with him, who, while recognizing some Polynesian words, was not able to converse with the islanders in general. The British also attempted to record the numerals and were able to record the correct Polynesian words.
Post-Peruvian enslavement
In the 1860s the Peruvian slave raids began, as Peruvians were experiencing labor shortages and came to regard the Pacific as a vast source of free labor. Slavers raided islands as far away as Micronesia, but Rapa Nui was much closer and became a prime target.In December 1862 eight Peruvian ships landed their crewmen and between bribery and outright violence they captured some 1,000 Rapanui, including the king, his son, and the ritual priests. It has been estimated that 2,000 Rapanui were captured over a period of years. Those who survived to arrive in Peru were poorly treated, overworked, and exposed to diseases. Ninety percent of the Rapa Nui died within one or two years of capture.
Eventually the Bishop of Tahiti caused a public outcry and an embarrassed Peru rounded up the few survivors to return them. A shipload headed to Rapa Nui, but smallpox broke out en route and only 15 arrived at the island. They were put ashore. The resulting smallpox epidemic nearly wiped out the remaining population.
In the aftermath of the Peruvian slave deportations in the 1860s, Rapa Nui came under extensive outside influence from neighbouring Polynesian languages such as Tahitian. While the majority of the population that was taken to work as slaves in the Peruvian mines died of diseases and bad treatment in the 1860s, hundreds of other Islanders who left for Mangareva in the 1870s and 1880s to work as servants or labourers adopted the local form of Tahitian-Pidgin. Fischer argues that this pidgin became the basis for the modern Rapa Nui language when the surviving part of the Rapa Nui immigrants on Mangareva returned to their almost deserted home island.
Language notes from 1886
William J. Thomson, paymaster on the USS Mohican, spent twelve days on Rapa Nui from 19 to 30 December 1886. Among the data Thomson collected was the Rapa Nui calendar.Language notes from the twentieth century
Father Sebastian Englert, a German missionary living on Easter Island during 1935–1969, published a partial Rapa Nui–Spanish dictionary in his La Tierra de Hotu Matua in 1948, trying to save what was left of the old language. Despite the many typographical mistakes, the dictionary is valuable, because it provides a wealth of examples which all appear drawn from a real corpus, part oral traditions and legends, part actual conversations.Englert recorded vowel length, stress, and glottal stop, but was not always consistent, or perhaps the misprints make it seem so. He indicated vowel length with a circumflex, and stress with an acute accent, but only when it does not occur where expected. The glottal stop is written as an apostrophe, but is often omitted. The velar nasal is sometimes transcribed with a, but sometimes with a Greek eta,, as a graphic approximation of.
Rongorongo
It is assumed that rongorongo, a possible undeciphered script once used on Rapa Nui, transcribes the old Rapa Nui language if it is indeed a formal writing system.Hispanisation
The island has been under the jurisdiction of Chile since 1888 and is now home to a number of Chilean continentals. The influence of the Spanish language is noticeable in modern Rapa Nui speech. As fewer children learn to speak Rapa Nui at an early age, their superior knowledge of Spanish affects the "passive knowledge" they have of Rapa Nui. A version of Rapanui interspersed with Spanish nouns, verbs and adjectives has become a popular form of casual speech. The most well integrated borrowings are the Spanish conjunctions , and y. Spanish words such as problema, which was once rendered as poroporema, are now often integrated with minimal or no change.Spanish words are still often used within Rapanui grammatical rules, though some word order changes are occurring and it is argued that Rapanui may be undergoing a shift from VSO to the Spanish SVO. This example sentence was recorded first in 1948 and again in 2001 and its expression has changed from VSO to SVO.
Rapa Nui's indigenous Rapanui toponymy has survived with few Spanish additions or replacements, a fact that has been attributed in part to the survival of the Rapa Nui language. This contrasts with the toponymy of continental Chile, which has lost many of its indigenous names.
Phonology
Rapa Nui has ten consonants and five vowels.Consonants
Like all Polynesian languages, Rapa Nui has relatively few consonants.| Labial | Alveolar | Velar | Glottal | |
| Nasal | ||||
| Stop | ||||
| Fricative | ||||
| Flap |
Rapa Nui is the only Eastern Polynesian language to have preserved the original glottal stop *ʔ of Proto-Polynesian.
As present generation Rapa Nui speak Spanish as their first language in younger years and learn Rapa Nui later in life, flap in word-initial position can be pronounced alveolar trill.
Vowels
All vowels can be either long or short and are always long when they are stressed in the final position of a word. Most vowel sequences are present, with the exception of *uo. The only sequence of three identical vowels is, also spelled .Syllable structure
Syllables in Rapa Nui are CV or V. There are no consonant clusters or word-final consonants.Orthography
Written Rapanui uses the Latin script. The Latin alphabet for Rapanui consists of 20 letters:The nasal velar consonant is generally written with the Latin letter, but occasionally as. In electronic texts, the glottal plosive may be written with a saltillo to avoid the problems of using the punctuation mark. A special letter,, is sometimes used to distinguish the Spanish, occurring in introduced terms, from the Rapa Nui. Similarly, has been written to distinguish it from Spanish. The IPA letter is now also coming into use.
Morphology
Reduplication
The reduplication of whole nouns or syllable parts performs a variety of different functions within Rapa Nui. To describe colours for which there is not a predefined word, the noun for an object of a like colour is duplicated to form an adjective. For example:Besides forming adjectives from nouns, the reduplication of whole words can indicate a multiple or intensified action. For example:
There are some apparent duplicate forms for which the original form has been lost. For example:
The reduplication of the initial syllable in verbs can indicate plurality of subject or object. In this example the bolded section represents the reduplication of a syllable which indicates the plurality of the subject of a transitive verb:
The reduplication of the final two syllables of a verb indicates plurality or intensity. In this example the bolded section represents the reduplication of two final syllables, indicating intensity or emphasis: