| Also Known As: Iaai Language,Yai,Iai
Description:
The Iaai language (pronounced [jaːi]) is a language of Ouvéa Island, New Caledonia. Although it had only 1,500 speakers as of 1996, it is becoming taught in schools in New Caledonia in an effort to preserve it.
Iaai is remarkable for its large inventory of unusual phonemes, which include one of the few certain cases of front rounded vowels outside of their geographic stronghold in Eurasia north of the Himalayas. It also has an unusually rich variety of voiceless nasals and approximants; it may be the only language in the world to possess a voiceless retroflex nasal.
Given its presence near the only Polynesian languages spoken in New Caledonia - Polynesian languages being known for small phoneme inventories - Iaai's large phoneme inventory seems very surprising and the explanation for the unusual phonemes of many Kanak languages still is not known.
Iaai has ten vowel qualities, all of which may occur long and short. There is little difference in quality depending on length.
The vowel /ø øː/ is only known to occur in a half dozen words. In all of these but /ɲ̊øːk/ "dedicate", it appears between a labial (b, m) and velar (k, ŋ) consonant.
After the plain (palatalized?) labial..... full article at Wikipedia |
