Catriona Malau

This is a trilingual dictionary of Vur√´s, with meanings provided in both English and Bislama, the national language of Vanuatu. Vur√´s is an Oceanic language spoken on the island of Vanua Lava in Vanuatu. The dictionary is a companion volume to A Grammar of Vur√´s, Vanuatu (Malau 2016). There is no established tradition of writing in Vur√´s and most speakers are not literate in their own language. This dictionary is intended to have a dual purpose: to support the learning of literacy skills in the Vur√´s community, and as a reference work for linguists. There are four parts to the dictionary. The main part is the most comprehensive and provides the English and Bislama definitions of Vur√´s words, as well as example sentences for many of the entries, additional encyclopaedic information, scientific names for identified species, lexical relations, and etymological information for some entries. The dictionary contains approximately 3,500 headwords and has a strong emphasis on flora and fauna with close to a third of the entries belonging to these semantic domains. The dictionary has benefited from collaboration with a marine biologist and botanists, who have provided scientific identifications for named species. The main dictionary is followed by English‚ÄìVur√´s and Bislama‚ÄìVur√´s finderlists. The final part of the dictionary is a thesaurus, in which Vur√´s words are grouped according to semantic categories. The thesaurus has been included primarily so that it can be used to support teaching of literacy skills and cultural knowledge within the community.

A Dictionary of Vur√´s, Vanuatu

Catriona Malau

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