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Concept
Nauruan language
Summary
The Nauruan or Nauru language (dorerin Naoero) is an Austronesian language, spoken natively in the island country of Nauru. Its relationship to the other Micronesian languages is not well understood.
Nauruan has 16–17 consonant phonemes. Nauruan makes phonemic contrasts between velarized and palatalized labial consonants. Velarization is not apparent before long back vowels and palatalization is not apparent before non-low front vowels.
Voiceless stops are geminated and nasals also contrast in length. Dental stops t and d become tʃ and dʒ respectively before high front vowels.
The approximants become fricatives in "emphatic pronunciation." transcribes them as j and w but also remarks that they contrast with the non-syllabic allophones of the high vowels.
Depending on stress, r may be a flap or a trill. The precise phonetic nature of rj is unknown. transcribes it as r̵ and speculates that it may pattern like palatalized consonants and be partially devoiced.
Between a vowel and word-final mɣ, an epenthetic b appears.
There are 12 phonemic vowels (six long, six short). In addition to the allophony in the following table from , a number of vowels reduce to [ə]:
Non-open vowels (that is, all but /aa/, /a/, /ɑɑ/ /ɑ/) become non-syllabic when preceding another vowel, as in /e-oeeoun/ → [ɛ̃õ̯ɛ̃õ̯ʊn] ('hide').
Stress is on the penultimate syllable when the final syllable ends in a vowel, on the last syllable when it ends in a consonant, and initial with reduplications.
In the Nauruan written language, 17 letters were originally used:
The five vowels: a, e, i, o, u
Twelve consonants: b, d, g, j, k, m, n, p, q, r, t, w
The letters c, f, h, l, s, v, x, y and z were not included. With the growing influence of foreign languages (most of all German, English and Gilbertese and some minority of Pama-Nyungan) more letters were incorporated into the Nauruan alphabet. In addition, phonetic differences of a few vowels arose, so that umlauts and other similar-sounding sounds were indicated with a tilde.
Official source
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