Ndrumbea language
| Ndrumbea | |
|---|---|
| Naa Dubea | |
| Native to | New Caledonia |
| Region | Southern tip outside Nouméa (Paita on the west coast, Ounia on the east coast) |
|
Native speakers
|
2,000 (1996 census) |
|
Austronesian
|
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | dumb1241 |
Ndrumbea, variously spelled Ndumbea, Dubea, Drubea and Païta, is a New Caledonian language that gave its name to the capital of New Caledonia, Nouméa, and the neighboring town of Dumbéa. It has been displaced to villages outside the capital, with fewer than a thousand speakers remaining. Gordon (1995) estimates that there may only be two or three hundred. The Dubea are the people; the language has been called Naa Dubea (or more precisely Ṇã́ã Ṇḍùmbea) "language of Dubea".
Ndrumbea is one of the few Austronesian languages that is tonal, and it has a series of consonants that are also unusual for the region.
Ndrumbea, like its close relative Numee, is a tonal language, with three contrasting tones, high, mid, and low.
Ndrumbea has seven oral vowels, long and short. The mid front vowels are lower when short than long: /i e ɛ a o ʊ u/; /iː ɪː eː aː oː ʊː uː/. There are five nasal vowels, also long and short: /ĩ ẽ ã õ ũ/; /ĩː ẽː ãː õː ũː/. These interact with nasal consonants, described below. Back vowels do not occur after labialized consonants, /ŋ/, or /ɣ/. In addition to the complementary correlation of nasal vowels with nasal consonants, nasal vowels do not occur after /j, ɽ, ɣ/. /ɣ/–oral vowel derives historically from ŋ–nasal vowel.
Phonetically, a stop–flap consonant cluster will be separated by an obscure epenthetic vowel with the quality of the following phonemic vowel.
Nasal vowels once contrasted after nasal stops, as they still do in Numee. However, in Ndrumbea, nasal stops partially denasalized before oral vowels, so that now prenasalized stops precede oral vowels, and nasal stops precede nasal vowels. Similarly, /j/ only occurs before oral vowels.
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