Poula is an Angami-Pochuri language that is predominantly spoken by the Poumai Naga people in Senapati district in

Manipur Manipur () is a state in northeastern India with Imphal as its capital. It borders the Indian states of Assam to the west, Mizoram to the south, and Nagaland to the north and shares the international border with Myanmar, specifically t ...

and Phek district in

Nagaland Nagaland () is a States and union territories of India, state in the northeast India, north-eastern region of India. It is bordered by the Indian states of Arunachal Pradesh to the north, Assam to the west, Manipur to the south, and the Naga Sel ...

India India, officially the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area; the List of countries by population (United Nations), most populous country since ...

. The language of Chingjaroi is also closely related to Poula but is distinct. A descriptive grammar of Poula is available.

Grammar

Phonology

The

phonology Phonology (formerly also phonemics or phonematics: "phonemics ''n.'' 'obsolescent''1. Any procedure for identifying the phonemes of a language from a corpus of data. 2. (formerly also phonematics) A former synonym for phonology, often pre ...

of Poula lacks syllable codas and also disallows consonant clusters in onset position. There are 25 consonant

phonemes 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 ...

in Poula.

Consonants

Vowels

There are six vowel

in Poula. In Poula, the phoneme /ə/ is written with the

grapheme In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest functional unit of a writing system. The word ''grapheme'' is derived from Ancient Greek ('write'), and the suffix ''-eme'' by analogy with ''phoneme'' and other emic units. The study of graphemes ...

' ü' (now, many use it as 'ii') in Bible and Hymns which was devised by Bible Society of India. In addition Poula lacks high back round vowel as a monophthong, but is present in nexus of diphthong; for example pou əu`father'.

Tones

Poula is a tonal language, however tone is not currently marked in the

orthography An orthography is a set of convention (norm), conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, punctuation, Word#Word boundaries, word boundaries, capitalization, hyphenation, and Emphasis (typography), emphasis. Most national ...

. There are four tonemes in Poula. Poula is an extremely innovative language–unlike Kuki-Chin languages–for having simple morphology.

Morphology

Nouns and verbs are the two content word classes. There are no ‘adjective’ and ‘adverbs’ words classes, however nominalized verbs may modify nouns and non-finite converbial verbs may modify verbs. There several functional words found.

References

External links

Poumai Naga Language Resource
collection of Poumai Naga (Poula) language documentation in the Computational Resource for South Asian Languages (CoRSAL) archive {{Kuki-Chin–Naga languages Angami–Pochuri languages Languages of Nagaland