Ndrumbea language

Ndrumbea
Naa Dubea
Native to	New Caledonia
Region	Southern tip outside Nouméa (Paita on the west coast, Ounia on the east coast)
Native speakers	(946 cited 1996)
Language family	Austronesian Malayo-Polynesian Oceanic Southern Oceanic New Caledonian – Loyalties New Caledonian Southern Extreme Southern Ndrumbea
Language codes
ISO 639-3	duf

Ndrumbea, variously spelled Ndumbea, Dubea, Drubea and Païta, is a New Caledonian language that gave its name to the capital of New Caledonia, Nouméa, and the neighboring town of Dumbéa. It has been displaced to villages outside the capital, with fewer than a thousand speakers remaining. Gordon (1995) estimates that there may only be two or three hundred. The Dubea are the people; the language has been called Naa Dubea (or more precisely Ṇã́ã Ṇḍùmbea) "language of Dubea".

Ndrumbea is one of the few Austronesian languages that is tonal, and it has a series of consonants that are also unusual for the region.

Phonology

Ndrumbea, like its close relative Numee, is a tonal language, with three contrasting tones, high, mid, and low.

Vowels

Ndrumbea has seven oral vowels, long and short. The mid front vowels are lower when short than long: /i e ɛ a o ʊ u/; /iː ɪː eː aː oː ʊː uː/. There are five nasal vowels, also long and short: /ĩ ẽ ã õ ũ/; /ĩː ẽː ãː õː ũː/. These interact with nasal consonants, described below. Back vowels do not occur after labialized consonants, /ŋ/, or /ɣ/. In addition to the complementary correlation of nasal vowels with nasal consonants, nasal vowels do not occur after /j, ɽ, ɣ/. /ɣ/–oral vowel derives historically from ŋ–nasal vowel.

Phonetically, a stop–flap consonant cluster will be separated by an obscure epenthetic vowel with the quality of the following phonemic vowel.

Consonants

Nasal vowels once contrasted after nasal stops, as they still do in Numee. However, in Ndrumbea, nasal stops partially denasalized before oral vowels, so that now prenasalized stops precede oral vowels, and nasal stops precede nasal vowels. Similarly, /j/ only occurs before oral vowels.

	Labial	Palatal	Velar	Uvular
Plosive			k	q
(Pre)nasal stop			ŋ ~ ŋɡ	ɴ ~ ɴq
Fricative	v		ɣ
Approximant/Tap		j	w	ɢ̆

References

• Gordon, Matthew (October 1995). "The phonetics of Ndumbea". Fieldwork Studies of Targeted Languages III (91). UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics: 25–44. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Shintani T. L. A. & Païta Y. (1990a) Grammaire de la langue de Païta. Nouméa: Sociéte d'Etudes Historiques de Nouvelle-Calédonie.
• Shintani T. L. A. & Païta Y. (1990b) Dictionnaire de la langue de Païta. Nouméa: Sociéte d'Etudes Historiques de Nouvelle-Calédonie.