The vowel inventory of Nakanamanga

Abstract

Nakanamanga is an Oceanic language spoken by approximately 10,000 speakers in central Vanuatu (Lynch and Crowley, 2001), including northern Efate island and Nguna and other small islands to the north. Previous work on Nakanamanga indicates that it has five distinctive vowel qualities (/i,e,a,o,u/), as is typical of Oceanic languages, and some evidence of long vowels (Schütz, 1969). However, whether vowel length is contrastive remains unclear, and there are suggestions that vowel length exhibits complex relationships with consonantal and prosodic patterns (Schütz, 1969; McClintock, 1991; Schmidt, 2023). We present findings of a pilot study targeting vowel length in Nakanamanga, based on phonological evidence and acoustic phonetic data. A wordlist consisting of words of CVCV structures was designed after consultation with a native speaker, and recorded with the speaker in Mere-Sauwia village on Nguna. Data was processed and analysed using Praat, EMU-SDMS and R (Boersma and Weenink, 2023; Winkelmann et al., 2017; R Core Team, 2023). Results for vowel duration and first and second formant frequency at vowel midpoints provide strong evidence that Nakanamanga has ten distinct vowels, with a length contrast for all five vowel qualities. Findings lay the groundwork for larger-scale investigations of the phonetics and phonology of Nakanamanga.