Unua language
Unua, or Onua, is an Oceanic language spoken in south-east Malekula, Vanuatu. It is said to be a dialect of the same language, Unua-Pangkumu, as Rerep (Pangkumu).[3]
| Unua | |
|---|---|
| Native to | Vanuatu |
| Region | Malekula |
Native speakers | 750 (1999)[1] |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | onu |
| Glottolog | unua1237[2] |
Phonology
The following table lists the contrastive consonant sounds of Unua. There are 16 consonant phonemes for younger Unua speakers and an additional three contrastive velarized labial consonants for older speakers, shown below in parentheses.
Consonant Phonemes of Unua
| Bilabial | Labiovelar | Dental/alveolar | Alveopalatal | Velar | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Voiceless plosives | p | (pʷ) | t | k | |
| Voiced plosives | mb | (mbw) | nd | ɳg | |
| Affricate | tʃ | ||||
| Fricatives | β | (βʷ) | s | ɣ | |
| Nasals | m | n | |||
| Rhotic/Trills | mB | ɾ,r | |||
| Laterals | l |
The following table lists the contrastive vowel sounds of Unua. Younger speakers have five vowel phonemes and older speakers have an additional three, shown in parentheses.
Vowel Phonemes of Unua
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| High | i | (ʉ) | u |
| Mid | e (ø) | (ɵ) | o |
| Low | a |
Grammar
Unua has SVO ordering.
gollark: They're the qualification before those.
gollark: I read it before then, but still. English at school is very evil that way.
gollark: 1984 is actually part of the English GCSE course at my school (and/or exam board or whatever, not sure how that works). It's amazing how picking apart random bits of phrasing or whatever for hours on end ruin your enjoyment of a work.
gollark: Vaguely relatedly I think 1984 is entering the public domain next year. Copyright lasts for an excessively long time in my opinion.
gollark: Okay, but if you're talking about real-world examples I don't see why it's remotely relevant to say that the author of a book vaguely relating to those real-world examples believed X.
References
- Unua at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
- Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Unua". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
- Pearce, Elizabeth (2015). A Grammar of Unua. Boston/Berlin/Munich: De Gruyter Mouton. ISBN 978-1-61451-765-8.
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