Paicî language

Paicî is the most widely spoken of the two dozen languages on the main island 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, compared to other languages of New Caledonia, but it has an unusually large number of nasal vowels. Paicî syllables are restricted to (C)V.

Consonants

		Bilabial		Post- alveolar	Palatal	Velar
		plain	labial
Nasal		Template:IPA link	Template:IPA link	Template:IPA link	Template:IPA link	Template:IPA link
Plosive	voiceless	Template:IPA link	Template:IPA link	Template:IPA link	Template:IPA link	Template:IPA link
	prenasalized	Template:IPA link	Template:IPA link	Template:IPA link	Template:IPA link	Template:IPA link
Tap				Template:IPA link
Approximant				Template:IPA link	Template:IPA link	Template:IPA link

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	Template:IPA link	Template:IPA link	Template:IPA link	Template:IPA link	Template:IPA link	Template:IPA link
Close-mid	Template:IPA link	Template:IPA link	Template:IPA link	Template:IPA link	Template:IPA link	Template:IPA link
Open-mid	Template:IPA link		Template:IPA link		Template:IPA link
Open			Template:IPA link	Template:IPA link

Tones

Like its neighbour Cèmuhî, Paicî is one of the few Austronesian languages which have developed contrastive tone, 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.

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)