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Vamale language
Vamale (Pamale) is a Kanak language of northern New Caledonia. The Hmwaeke dialect, spoken in Tiéta, is fusing with Haveke and nearly extinct. Vamale is nowadays spoken in Tiendanite (called "Usa Vamale"), We Hava, Téganpaïk and Tiouandé. It was spoken in the Pamale valley and its tributaries Vawe and Usa until the colonial war of 1917, when its speakers were displaced.
Vamale has five phonemic vowel articulations, and 35 consonant phonemes.
While Vamale distinguishes five vowel phonemes, nasality and length are phonemic as well. Compare /tã/ 'oven' and /ta/ 'go up', /ˈfa.ti/ 'speech' and /ˈfaː.ti/ 'to stick, to glue'.
Depending on the length of the vowel, and on the final consonant of the syllable, /e/ and /o/ can be realized more open: plosives and short syllables trigger open vowels (e.g. [tɔːt] 'grass' [sɛn] 'poison'), while open syllables, and long ones closed by nasals, feature closed vowels.
As is typical of Northern New Caledonian languages, Vamale has a wealth of consonants. The distinction reconstructible since Proto-Oceanic is between nasals, semi-nasals (pre-nasalized voiced plosives, i.e. /ᵐb/, /ⁿɟ/ etc.), and orals.
In Vamale, disyllabic words have penultimate stress, as is typical in Oceanic settings. Trisyllabic, morphologically simple, non-derived nouns take stress on the first syllable. These are rare, though loanwords now increase their number. Longer words are morphologically complex and put stress on the penultimate stress-bearing unit, which is often a syllable of the root, but not always. While some morphological factors complicate the picture, regular phonological aspects predict most stress positions. A closed syllable will be stressed over an open one, a fortis onset will usually top a tenuis onset, and a long syllable will be stressed above all else. This gives us a hierarchy of factors:
Long syllable > fortis onset > closed syllable > penultimate syllable
Some monosyllabic morphemes do not count in the stress pattern. One frequent example is the extrametrical suffix -ke 'TR', whose phonological non-importance makes the third syllable in /fʷan.ˈɟi.mʷa.ke/ 'ask something' the penultimate of the phonological word. -ke may be related to the proclitic ka which marks subjects and possessors.
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Vamale language
Vamale (Pamale) is a Kanak language of northern New Caledonia. The Hmwaeke dialect, spoken in Tiéta, is fusing with Haveke and nearly extinct. Vamale is nowadays spoken in Tiendanite (called "Usa Vamale"), We Hava, Téganpaïk and Tiouandé. It was spoken in the Pamale valley and its tributaries Vawe and Usa until the colonial war of 1917, when its speakers were displaced.
Vamale has five phonemic vowel articulations, and 35 consonant phonemes.
While Vamale distinguishes five vowel phonemes, nasality and length are phonemic as well. Compare /tã/ 'oven' and /ta/ 'go up', /ˈfa.ti/ 'speech' and /ˈfaː.ti/ 'to stick, to glue'.
Depending on the length of the vowel, and on the final consonant of the syllable, /e/ and /o/ can be realized more open: plosives and short syllables trigger open vowels (e.g. [tɔːt] 'grass' [sɛn] 'poison'), while open syllables, and long ones closed by nasals, feature closed vowels.
As is typical of Northern New Caledonian languages, Vamale has a wealth of consonants. The distinction reconstructible since Proto-Oceanic is between nasals, semi-nasals (pre-nasalized voiced plosives, i.e. /ᵐb/, /ⁿɟ/ etc.), and orals.
In Vamale, disyllabic words have penultimate stress, as is typical in Oceanic settings. Trisyllabic, morphologically simple, non-derived nouns take stress on the first syllable. These are rare, though loanwords now increase their number. Longer words are morphologically complex and put stress on the penultimate stress-bearing unit, which is often a syllable of the root, but not always. While some morphological factors complicate the picture, regular phonological aspects predict most stress positions. A closed syllable will be stressed over an open one, a fortis onset will usually top a tenuis onset, and a long syllable will be stressed above all else. This gives us a hierarchy of factors:
Long syllable > fortis onset > closed syllable > penultimate syllable
Some monosyllabic morphemes do not count in the stress pattern. One frequent example is the extrametrical suffix -ke 'TR', whose phonological non-importance makes the third syllable in /fʷan.ˈɟi.mʷa.ke/ 'ask something' the penultimate of the phonological word. -ke may be related to the proclitic ka which marks subjects and possessors.