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Ura: A Disappearing Language of Southern Vanuatu (review)

Erromango, the largest island in southern Vanuatu, suffered even more than most Paci2c islands from the demographic collapse consequent on European contact in the nineteenth century. Epidemics reduced its population from an original several thousand to fewer than 400 by the 1930s. Historical records suggest that at least four languages were spoken on Erromango in pre-European times, but the present population all speak just one of these, namely, Sye (Crowley 1998a). Of the others, only Ura is known to us from more than brief lists of words. A few elderly Erromangans still remember it as a living language, and the present volume presents what Crowley has been able to learn from them. Ura appears originally to have been the language of northern Erromango, though the surviving speakers all live at Dillon's Bay on the central west coast. In the 1870s, despite considerable population decline, the missionary Gordon estimated that perhaps one quarter of the island's people (500 of 2,000) were Ura speakers. A century later, at the time of Tryon's initial survey (1970–71), the situation was much as it is today: Sye was spoken by the entire population of the island (about 600 by this time), and Ura was “all but extinct ... remembered by fewer than 10 people” (Tryon 1972:65). The story of Ura might well have ended there; but fortunately, even in the 1990s, Crowley was still able to 2nd a handful of people who could speak it. Others, including both linguists from outside (Arthur Capell, John Lynch) and Erromangans anxious to record this aspect of their cultural heritage (William Mete, Jerry Taki) are duly mentioned as having worked on Ura, but the present description is essentially based on data collected and analyzed by Crowley himself since 1996. The stages in the decline of Ura can only be speculatively sketched in, but Crowley suggests that the crucial period was the 2rst two or three decades of the twentieth