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Sowa was the original language of south-central Pentecost island in Vanuatu. In recent times it has been totally displaced by Apma, a neighbouring language. Sowa was closely related to Ske, another south Pentecost language. Sowa was originally spoken on both western and eastern sides of Pentecost. Melsisi River formed the language's north-western boundary, and its range extended southwards to a creek near the village of Levizendam. Following the depopulation of Pentecost that occurred after the introduction of European diseases, men from Sowa-speaking areas were forced to marry women from other parts of Pentecost, who were mostly Apma speakers. As a result, by the 1960s, Apma had totally replaced Sowa as the predominant local language. The last native Sowa speaker, Maurice Tabi of Vanvat village, died in 2000. Today, a few local people whose fathers or mothers were Sowa speakers still remember parts of the language, although none speak it fluently. A couple, including Isaiah Tabi Vahka of Waterfall Village and Adam Bulesisbwat of Lesuubelakan, compiled short written notes on Sowa in an attempt to ensure that the language was not lost. The only linguist to have studied Sowa while the language was still alive was David Walsh, who collected a vocabulary list in 1969, although Walsh's main informant (John Bule Seesee of Bwaravet village) was not a native Sowa speaker. Andrew Gray, a British schoolteacher at Ranwadi College, worked with speakers' children in the late 2000s to try to reconstruct the basics of the language. Some people in the former Sowa area see the language as a part of their cultural heritage and lament its loss. There is talk of reviving Sowa, although this is not a high priority for most local people, and records are insufficient to allow a fully authentic restoration of the language. ==Status as a language== Given the close relationship between Sowa and Ske language (the two are reckoned by locals to have been mutually intelligible), a case could be made for classifying the two as dialects rather than as separate languages. In his 1976 survey of ''New Hebrides Languages'', Darrell Tryon classified Sowa as a separate language, calculating its cognacy with Ske at 77% (with 80% being the approximate threshold below which two forms are considered separate languages rather than mere dialects). However, in their 2001 survey, Lynch & Crowley did not recognise Sowa as a language, noting that Tryon's data suffered from significant margins of error. Using an updated word list, Andrew Gray calculated the cognacy of Sowa and Ske at 82%. Sowa's status as a language is therefore borderline if considered on the basis of cognacy figures alone. However, local people perceive Sowa very much as a distinct language and not as a Ske dialect. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Sowa language」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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