Ninde language

Ninde, or Labo (also Nide, Meaun, Mewun) is an Oceanic language spoken by about 1,100 people in the Southwest Bay area of Malekula island, in Vanuatu.

Ninde
RegionMalekula, Vanuatu
Native speakers
1,100 (2001)[1]
Latin script
Language codes
ISO 639-3mwi
Glottologlabo1244[2]

One unusual feature is that it has both a voiced and a voiceless bilabial trill.[3]

In an episode of the British television programme An Idiot Abroad, Karl Pilkington meets the chief of a local tribe, who comments upon the Ninde language. He explains that “all the words of Ninde begin with /n/”, such as the word nimdimdip for palm tree, naho for fruit, or nuhuli for leaf. They then visit the grave of a woman who was named Nicola.

However, this general statement is actually not true. The only words of Ninde that start with /n/ are the inanimate common nouns of the language; the /n/ reflects an old nominal article which has been fused to the radical of these common nouns. As for the name Nicola, which is a borrowed European name, it cannot be taken as representative of the Ninde language.

gollark: To clarify, I'm saying you can't really usefully predict someone's behaviour by saying "well, they went serotonin and dopamine", since those are too low-level.
gollark: I'm responding to TF3, not you.
gollark: That's not exactly true (humans are not anything like rational [WHATEVER NEUROCHEMICAL] maximizers), and even if they *were* it wouldn't be very helpful since the processes involved are intractably complex.
gollark: Sometimes I move from my chair to retrieve food and such.
gollark: It feels awesome to have wanted to vomit? How?

Notes
  1. Lynch & Crowley (2001).
  2. Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Ninde". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
  3. LINGUIST List 8.45: Bilabial trill. Linguistlist.org. Retrieved on 2010-12-08.

References
  • Lynch, John and Crowley, Terry. 2001. Languages of Vanuatu: A New Survey and Bibliography. Pacific Linguistics. Canberra: Australian National University.


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