Car (') is the most widely spoken of the
Nicobarese languages
The Nicobarese languages or Nicobaric languages, form an isolated group of about half a dozen closely related Austroasiatic languages, spoken by most of the inhabitants of the Nicobar Islands of India. They have a total of about 30,000 speakers ...
spoken in the
Nicobar Islands of
India
India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...
.
Although related distantly to
Vietnamese
Vietnamese may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to Vietnam, a country in Southeast Asia
** A citizen of Vietnam. See Demographics of Vietnam.
* Vietnamese people, or Kinh people, a Southeast Asian ethnic group native to Vietnam
** Overse ...
and
Khmer, it is typologically much more akin to nearby
Austronesian languages such as
Nias
Nias ( id, Pulau Nias, Nias language: ''Tanö Niha'') (sometimes called Little Sumatra in English) is an island located off the western coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. Nias is also the name of the archipelago () of which the island is the centre, ...
and
Acehnese, with which it forms a
linguistic area.
Car is a
VOS language and somewhat
agglutinative
In linguistics, agglutination is a morphological process in which words are formed by stringing together morphemes, each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative lang ...
. There is a quite complicated verbal
suffix system with some
infixes, as well as distinct genitive and "interrogative" cases for nouns and pronouns.
Phonology
Consonants
* The alveolar flap can typically be pre-stopped. Before a voiceless consonant, its pre-articulation is voiceless as , and elsewhere it is voiced .
Vowels
* /æ/ only occurs because of the occurrence of English loanwords.
* Vowel sounds are also typically short when occurring before an /h/.
Vocabulary
Paul Sidwell
Paul James Sidwell is an Australian linguist based in Canberra, Australia who has held research and lecturing positions at the Australian National University. Sidwell, who is also an expert and consultant in forensic linguistics, is most notab ...
(2017)
[Sidwell, Paul. 2017.]
Proto-Nicobarese Phonology, Morphology, Syntax: work in progress
. International Conference on Austroasiatic Linguistics 7, Kiel, Sept 29-Oct 1, 2017. published in ICAAL 2017 conference on Nicobarese languages.
Morphology
Shared morphological alternations: the old AA causative has two allomorphs, prefix ha- with monosyllabic stems, infix -um- in disyllabic stems (note: *p > h onset in unstressed σ).
* ɲa - 'to eat' / haɲaː 'to feed'
* pɯɲ - 'to cry' / hapɯɲ-ɲɔː 'to make cry'
* kucik - 'be palatable' / kumcik 'to taste'
* kale - 'brave' / kumle 'bravery'
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Car Language
Languages of India
Agglutinative languages
Nicobarese languages
Verb–object–subject languages