Iaai language

language
name=Iaai
familycolor=Austronesian
spoken=Ouvéa Island, New Caledonia
speakers=1,562 (1996 census)
fam1=Austronesian
fam2=Malayo-Polynesian
fam3=Central-Eastern
fam4=Eastern
fam5=Oceanic
fam6=Central-Eastern
fam7=Remote
fam8=Loyalty Islands
iso2=map
iso3=iai

The Iaai language 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 the most convincing evidence for front rounded vowels occurring outside of their stronghold in Eurasia north of the Himalayas [Maddieson, Ian. "Front Rounded Vowels", in Martin Haspelmath et al. (eds.) "The World Atlas of Language Structures", pp. 50-53. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-19-925591-1.] . It also has an unusually rich variety of nasals, including voiceless ones, and for the presence of coarticulated labial-velar phonemes, including a voiceless labial-velar and retroflex nasals which it may be the only language in the world to possess.

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.

Vowels

Consonants [Ian Maddieson (with a chapter contributed by Sandra Ferrari Disner); Patterns of sounds; Cambridge University Press, 1984. ISBN 0-521-26536-3]

References