NAKANAI LANGUAGE

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pronounced Lakalai, as the alveolar nasal [n] has disappeared from the phonemic inventory of the language and has been replaced by [l].

Contents

Phonology

References

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

★ Gordon, Raymond G., Jr. (ed.), 2005. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Fifteenth edition. Dallas, Tex.: SIL International.

★ 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.