Xaracuu language
| Xârâcùù | |
|---|---|
| Native to | New Caledonia |
| Region | Canala |
|
Native speakers
|
5,700 (2009 census) |
|
Austronesian
|
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | xara1244 |
Xârâcùù, or Kanala, is an Oceanic language spoken in New Caledonia. It has about 5,000 speakers. Xârâcùù is most commonly spoken in the south Central area of New Caledonia in and around the city of Canala and the municipalities of Canala, Thio, and Boulouparis. Xarâcùù is a strict SVO sentence structure with few exceptions. Efforts to determine how the language evolved to the present has been met with difficulty due to Xârâcùù's lack of reflexive markers in established Proto-Oceanic forms. Xârâcùù has been taught since 1980 at the primary level in the popular Kanak school (EPK or Ecole Populaire Kanak) Canala, only establishment of its kind still existing in 2013, the students can then join public education. The language is also offered at the private Catholic college Francis Rouge-Thio and public college Canala.
Xârâcùù is written with the Latin alphabet combined with many diacritics and digraphs, with a total of 61 graphemes. This writing system was developed in the early 1980s by linguistics laboratory LACITO (LACITO). Previously, missionaries used to transcribe the language (especially to produce versions of the Gospels or catechism) in the same handwriting as the Ajië language.
The language has twenty-six consonant phonemes, ten oral vowels, seven nasal vowels and seventeen corresponding long vowels. Current research has shown that there are numerous phonemic contrasts, which leaves little room for allophonic variation. Xârâcùù has 27 consonants, some of which are nasalized plosives that are quite typical of Oceanic languages.
Xârâcùù has 34 vowels: 17 short (10 oral and 7 nasal) all of which can be elongated.
In comparison to other Oceanic languages, Xârâcùù's noun phrase structure is a little different. Most of the vowel modifiers in Xârâcùù come before the head. Some articles that feature this include a singular, du dual, ké paucal, and mîî~mîrî plural. There are several different morphemes for '10' and '15' which are just examples of a quinary numeral system.
The numeral style of the language allows for few numeral classifiers that often only occur as suffixes to the number one and as prefixes to all of the other numerals in the language.
cicöö/cécöö
jai/jaé
sémâsa/samwâsa
siméé/simaa
nùi/nei
kaù/kae
xwĺnêĺ/xwênêĺ
bumöu/bomöu
síwítí/suwítí
taro patch
anyhow
Grandmother
shell
island
is
how to do
somnambulist
exorcise
Xârâcùù orthography follows many of the same principles of most other New Caledonian languages with voiced letters representing prenasalized sounds. The orthographic representations of consonants are fairly transparent due to the use of only open syllables being permitted. Digraphs are used for a number of phonemes, e.g. bw, gw and ny for /mbw/, /ngw/, and /ñ/. As part of the French influence, ch stands for /∫/ and s for /ç/. The large number of contrasting vowels and the inclusion of vowel clusters and vowel length mean that accents and other diacritics have to be used to represent vowel phonemes.
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