| Description:
The Nauruan language (dorerin Naoero) is an Austronesian language spoken in Nauru. It is estimated that it has 7,000 speakers, approximately 50% of the Nauruan population. Almost all speakers are bilingual in English.
It is a member of the Micronesian family of Austronesian languages. Its ISO 639 codes are 'na' and 'nau'. Nauruan is a UN recognized language.
Nauruan has 16-17 consonant phonemes. Nauruan makes phonemic contrasts between velarized and palatalized labial consonants (which are also geminated). Velarization is not apparent before long back vowels and palatalization is not apparent before non-low front vowels.
Between a vowel and word-final /mˠ/, an epenthetical [b] appears.
There are 12 phonemic vowels (six long, six short). In addition to the allophony in the following table from Nathan (1974), a number of vowels reduce to [ə]:
Non-open vowels (that is, all but /aa/, /a/, /ɑɑ/ /ɑ/) become non-syllabic when preceding another vowel, as in /e-oeeoun/ → [ɛ̃õ̯ɛ̃õ̯ʊn] ('hide').
Stress is on the penultimate syllable when the final syllable ends in a vowel, on the last syllable when it ends in a consonant, and initial with reduplications.
In the Nauruan written language, 17..... full article at Wikipedia |
