Nakanai language

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Nakanai
Lakalai
Native to Papua New Guinea
Native speakers
unknown (13,000 cited 1981)[1]
Language codes
ISO 639-3 nak
Glottolog naka1262[2]

Nakanai is spoken by the Nakanai tribe in West New Britain, a province of Papua New Guinea. It is an Austronesian language, belonging to the Malayo-Polynesian subgroup.

The name Nakanai is natively pronounced Lakalai, as the alveolar nasal [n] has disappeared from the phonemic inventory of the language and has been replaced by [l].

Phonology

Nakanai syllables may be of the shape V or CV, with no codas or consonant clusters to be found anywhere in the language.

References

  1. Nakanai at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
  2. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  • Johnston, Raymond Leslie. 1980. Nakanai of New Britain: The Grammar of an Oceanic Language. Pacific Linguistics: Series B-70.
  • Spaelti, Philip. 1997. Dimensions of Variation in Multi-Pattern Reduplication. Doctoral Dissertation: University of California, Santa Cruz.

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