Nauruan language
| Nauruan | |
|---|---|
| Dorerin Naoero | |
| Native to | Nauru |
| Ethnicity | Nauruan people |
|
Native speakers
|
(6,000, decreasing cited 1991) L2 speakers: perhaps 1,000? (1991) |
| Official status | |
|
Official language in
|
 Nauru
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-1 | na |
| ISO 639-2 | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | naur1243 |
The Nauruan language (Nauruan: dorerin Naoero) is an Oceanic language, spoken natively by around 6,000 people in the island country of Nauru. Its relationship to the other Micronesian languages is not well understood.
Nauruan has 16–17 consonant phonemes. Nauruan makes phonemic contrasts between velarized and palatalized labial consonants. Velarization is not apparent before long back vowels and palatalization is not apparent before non-low front vowels.
Voiceless stops are geminated and nasals also contrast in length. Dental stops /t/ and /d/ become [tʃ] and [dʒ] respectively before high front vowels.
The approximants become fricatives in "emphatic pronunciation." Nathan (1974) transcribes them as ⟨j⟩ and ⟨w⟩ but also remarks that they contrast with the non-syllabic allophones of the high vowels.
Depending on stress, /r/ may be a flap or a trill. The precise phonetic nature of /rʲ/ is unknown. Nathan (1974) transcribes it as ⟨r̵⟩ and speculates that it may pattern like palatalized consonants and be partially devoiced.
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]:
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