Iduna is an

Austronesian Austronesian may refer to: *The Austronesian languages *The historical Austronesian peoples The Austronesian peoples, sometimes referred to as Austronesian-speaking peoples, are a large group of peoples in Taiwan, Maritime Southeast Asia, M ...

language spoken on Goodenough Island of Milne Bay Province of Papua New Guinea.

Phonology

Consonants

The inventory of the Iduna language consists of 14 consonant phonemes.. Voiced plosives generally contrast with their unvoiced counterparts, except for the bilabial series, where /b/ varies freely between and Moreover, the phoneme /g/ is commonly realized as though for some speakers it may be pronounced as a voiced fricative �without contrast. Finally, /t/ has also two allophonic realizations: occurs word initially and word medially before non-front vowels /a/, /o/ or /u/, whereas only appears before

front vowel A front vowel is a class of vowel sounds used in some spoken languages, its defining characteristic being that the highest point of the tongue is positioned as far forward as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would otherw ...

s /i/ or /e/. Other minor allophonic realizations may occur. Among these variations only the last one is reflected in the orthography.

Vowels

There are 5 vowel phonemes in Iduna. Vowels have allophones too. The major allophonic variations are described in the following table. These include the double realization of /a/, which corresponds to when found in stressed syllables, while it approximates �in unstressed environments, and the nasal allophonic variant of /u/. The language also has 4 monomoraic

diphthong A diphthong ( ; , ), also known as a gliding vowel, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of the speech o ...

s: /ai/, /au/, /ao/ and /oi/. These are distinguished from vowel sequences, which instead are bimoraic, e.g. the word ''giyauna'' i.jau.nʌ"he scrapes it" contrasts with ''giyauna'' i.ja.u.nʌ"he unties it".

Phonotactics

In Iduna consonant clusters are forbidden, therefore there are only open syllables of type V, CV and CVV. Also, the special kind of sequence CuV is generally interpreted as CʷV.

Writing system

The Iduna alphabet is shown in the following table:

Notes

References

* * * * Nuclear Papuan Tip languages Languages of Milne Bay Province {{PapuanTip-lang-stub