Mandara, also known as Tabar, is an
Austronesian
Austronesian may refer to:
*The Austronesian languages
*The historical Austronesian peoples
The Austronesian people, sometimes referred to as Austronesian-speaking peoples, are a large group of peoples who have settled in Taiwan, maritime Sout ...
language spoken on the
Tabar Group
The Tabar Group is an island group in Papua New Guinea, located north of New Ireland. It is a part of the Bismarck Archipelago. The Tabar group consists of a short chain of three main islands - Tabar Island (a.k.a. Big Tabar) in the south, Tat ...
of islands,
New Ireland Province
New Ireland Province, formerly New Mecklenburg (), and Nova Hibernia, is the northeasternmost Provinces of Papua New Guinea, province of Papua New Guinea.
Physical geography
The largest island of the province is New Ireland (island), New Irelan ...
,
Papua New Guinea
Papua New Guinea, officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea, is an island country in Oceania that comprises the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and offshore islands in Melanesia, a region of the southwestern Pacific Ocean n ...
. Three dialects have been identified, Simberi, Tatau and Tabar, corresponding to the three main islands in the group.
Phonology
The Simberi-Northern Tatau dialect has 14 phonemic
A phoneme () is any set of similar speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word from another. All languages con ...
consonants and 7 phonemic vowels. The language has four syllable patterns: V, CV, VC and CVC.
Consonants
* /p/, /t/ and /k/ are non-aspirated.
Stress
The final syllable of a word receives stress. There is no evidence of phonemic stress.
References
Languages of New Ireland Province
Meso-Melanesian languages
{{MesoMelanesian-lang-stub