Paicî is an Austronesian language spoken in parts of New Caledonia. It is spoken in a band across the center of the island, in the communes of Poindimié, Ponérihouen, Koné and Poya.
Phonology
Paicî has a rather simple inventory of consonants, in comparison to other languages of New Caledonia, however it contains an unprecedented number of nasal vowels. Paicî syllables are restricted to (C)V.Gordon & Maddieson (1996).
Consonants
Bilabial Post-alveolar Palatal Velarplainlabial Nasal Plosive voiceless prenasalized Tap Approximant
The palatal stops could be considered affricates because they occur with a heavily fricated release. The lateral and tap do not occur word-initially, except in a few loanwords and the prefix they.
Because nasal stops are always followed by nasal vowels, but prenasalized stops are always followed by oral vowels, it might be argued that nasal and prenasalized stops are allophonic, which would reduce the Paicî consonant inventory to 13.
Vowels Paicî has a symmetrical system of ten oral vowels, all found both long and short without any significant difference in quality, and seven nasal vowels, some of which may also be long and short. Because sequences of two short vowels may carry two tones but long vowels are restricted to carrying one tone, they appear to be phonemically long vowels rather than sequences.
+ Paicî vowel phonemes Front Central Back Oral Nasal Oral Nasal Oral Nasal Close Close-mid Open-mid Open
Tones Like its neighbour Cèmuhî, Paicî is one of the few Austronesian languages which have developed contrastive tone,Rivierre (1974). involving three registers: high, mid, low. Additionally, there are vowels with no inherent tone, whose tone is determined by their environment. Words commonly have the same tone on all vowels, so tone may belong to the word rather than the syllable.
Notes
References
Rivierre, Jean-Claude. 1983. Dictionnaire paicî - français, suivi d'un lexique français - paicî. Paris : Société d'Etudes linguistiques et anthropologiques de France, 1983. 375p.
External links
Alphabet and pronunciation at Omniglot Information on Paicî, with a list of references and a recorded text (website of LACITO-CNRS)