Xârâcùù (), or Kanala, is an
Oceanic language
The approximately 450 Oceanic languages are a branch of the Austronesian languages. The area occupied by speakers of these languages includes Polynesia, as well as much of Melanesia and Micronesia. Though covering a vast area, Oceanic languages ...
spoken in
New Caledonia
)
, anthem = ""
, image_map = New Caledonia on the globe (small islands magnified) (Polynesia centered).svg
, map_alt = Location of New Caledonia
, map_caption = Location of New Caledonia
, mapsize = 290px
, subdivision_type = Sovereign st ...
. It has about 5,000 speakers.
Xârâcùù is most commonly spoken in the south Central area of New Caledonia in and around the city of
Canala
Canala is a commune in the North Province of New Caledonia, an overseas territory of France in the Pacific Ocean.
History
On 25 April 1995 about 47% of the territory of Canala was detached and became the commune of Kouaoua
Kouaoua (; in Aj ...
and the municipalities of Canala,
Thio, and
Boulouparis.
Current status
Xârâcùù is considered a recognized teaching language, and is part of New Caledonian culture. It is predominantly used as the main language in the
Nouméa
Nouméa () is the capital and largest city of the French special collectivity of New Caledonia and is also the largest francophone city in Oceania. It is situated on a peninsula in the south of New Caledonia's main island, Grande Terre, a ...
area, and is not considered endangered by UNESCO due to it being one of the most spoken languages in the area,
with more than 90% of Canala residents being able to speak some form of it. Xârâcùù is the fourth-most spoken language in New Caledonia Kanak, with a teaching school in the Canala area, although primary language use is at home. Xârâcùù is taught in the Canala area due to the EPK (''École Populaire Kanak''), founded by Marie-Adele Néchérö Jorédié. It is the only language that is being taught in the area and is taught in nursery, primary, two secondary schools, Thio (maternal Kouare village school and also in college) and in kindergartens in La Foa and Sarramea.
Xârâcùù has been taught since 1980 at the primary level in the popular Kanak school (EPK or Ecole Populaire Kanak) Canala, only establishment of its kind still existing in 2013, the students can then join public education. The language is also offered at the private Catholic college Francis Rouge-Thio and public college Canala.
Phonology and spelling
Phonology
The language has twenty-seven consonant phonemes, ten
oral vowels
A nasal vowel is a vowel that is produced with a lowering of the soft palate (or velum) so that the air flow escapes through the nose and the mouth simultaneously, as in the French vowel or Amoy []. By contrast, oral vowels are produced with ...
, seven Nasal vowel, nasal vowels and seventeen corresponding Vowel length, long vowels. Current research has shown that there are numerous phonemic contrasts, which leaves little room for allophonic variation.
Xârâcùù has 27 consonants, some of which are nasalized plosives that are quite typical of
Oceanic languages
The approximately 450 Oceanic languages are a branch of the Austronesian languages. The area occupied by speakers of these languages includes Polynesia, as well as much of Melanesia and Micronesia. Though covering a vast area, Oceanic languages ...
. is only found in loanwords.
Xârâcùù has 34 vowels: 17 short (10 oral and 7 nasal) all of which can be elongated.
Efforts to determine the phonological history of the language have been met with difficulty due to Xârâcùù's lack of reflexes of established
Proto-Oceanic
Proto-Oceanic (abbr. ''POc'') is a proto-language that historical linguists since Otto Dempwolff have reconstructed as the hypothetical common ancestor of the Oceanic subgroup of the Austronesian language family. Proto-Oceanic is a descendant ...
forms.
Orthography
Xârâcùù is written with the
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the o ...
combined with many
diacritics
A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacritic ...
and
digraphs, with a total of 61
graphemes
In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest functional unit of a writing system.
The word ''grapheme'' is derived and the suffix ''-eme'' by analogy with ''phoneme'' and other names of emic units. The study of graphemes is called ''graphemics' ...
. This writing system was developed in the early 1980s by (from
CNRS
The French National Centre for Scientific Research (french: link=no, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science agency in Europe.
In 2016, it employed 31,637 ...
-
LACITO
LACITO (''Langues et Civilisations à Tradition Orale'') is a multidisciplinary research organisation, principally devoted to the study of cultures and languages of oral tradition.
LACITO is a branch of the Centre National de la Recherche Scienti ...
). (Previously, missionaries used to transcribe the language (especially to produce versions of the Gospels or catechism) with the same conventions as the
Ajië language
Ajië (also known as ''Houailou (Wailu)'', ''Wai'', and ''A'jie'') is an Oceanic language
The approximately 450 Oceanic languages are a branch of the Austronesian languages. The area occupied by speakers of these languages includes Polynesia, ...
.
)
The orthography of Xârâcùù follows many of the same principles as most other New Caledonian languages: e.g. symbols usually used for voiced consonants (''b'', ''d'', ''g'', ''j'', etc.) represent
prenasalized consonant
Prenasalized consonants are phonetic sequences of a nasal and an obstruent (or occasionally a non-nasal sonorant such as ) that behave phonologically like single consonants. The primary reason for considering them to be single consonants, rathe ...
s. Digraphs are used for a number of phonemes, e.g. ''bw'', ''gw'' and ''ny'' for /ᵐbʷ/, /ᵑɡʷ/, /ɲ/ respectively; ''ch'' stands for /ʃ/, as in
French. The large number of contrasting vowels and the inclusion of vowel clusters and vowel length mean that accents and other diacritics have to be used to represent vowel phonemes.
Like in other languages of New Caledonia,
nasal vowel
A nasal vowel is a vowel that is produced with a lowering of the soft palate (or velum) so that the air flow escapes through the nose and the mouth simultaneously, as in the French vowel or Amoy []. By contrast, oral vowels are produced wit ...
s are mostly indicated using a circumflex diacritic.
Grammar
Xârâcùù has a strict Subject–verb–object, SVO sentence structure, with few exceptions.
Pronouns
† Used only in the past tense.
‡ Used with certain inalienable nouns.
* Used after the particle ''rè'' with vowel assimilation e.g. ''nea rè+rö'' > ''nea röö'' "your knife"
Noun phrase structure
In comparison to other Oceanic languages, Xârâcùù's noun phrase structure is a little different. Most of the vowel modifiers in Xârâcùù come before the head. Some articles that feature this include ''a'' singular, ''du'' dual, ''ké'' paucal, and ''mîî~mîrî'' plural.
There are several different morphemes for '10' and '15' which are just examples of a
quinary numeral system
Quinary (base-5 or pental) is a numeral system with five as the base. A possible origination of a quinary system is that there are five digits on either hand.
In the quinary place system, five numerals, from 0 to 4, are used to represent any ...
.
Numerals
The numeral style of the language allows for few
numeral classifiers
A classifier (abbreviated or ) is a word or affix that accompanies nouns and can be considered to "classify" a noun depending on the type of its referent. It is also sometimes called a measure word or counter word. Classifiers play an importan ...
that often only occur as suffixes to the number one and as prefixes to all of the other
numerals
A numeral is a figure, symbol, or group of figures or symbols denoting a number. It may refer to:
* Numeral system used in mathematics
* Numeral (linguistics), a part of speech denoting numbers (e.g. ''one'' and ''first'' in English)
* Numerical d ...
in the language.
Prepositions
Xârâcùù has at least 17 known
prepositions
Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions (or broadly, in traditional grammar, simply prepositions), are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in'', ''under'', ''towards'', ''before'') or mark various ...
, at least half referring to direction or location. Three prepositions express types of
comitative relationships.
Possession
Like many Oceanic languages, Xârâcùù features indirect and direct possession constructions. The following phrases demonstrate that "inalienable" nouns are directly possessed with the possessor, whether pronoun or noun, being directly suffixed to the possessed noun.
Indirect possession comes in two syntactic types varying by familiarity and a classification system. Seven possessive classifications have possessive pronominal suffix or are joined by the possessed noun. These classifiers usually refer to food ''nênê-'' (allomorph ''nânâ-''), starchy foods or ''nèkê-'', meat or ''(nê)wînè'', food to be chewed or ''nèxêê-'', drinks or ''(nê)wînyè-'', tubers to be planted or harvested or ''nêngê-'', and goods possessions or ''ngêê'' or ''êê''. There are also three other qualifiers including: ''xû'' or topic of story telling, ''(rö)wâ'' or passive, and ''rè'' or general. In these cases the possessed noun comes first followed by the classifier and the possessor. A pronominal possessor does not occur as a suffix but rather a free form.
Morphology
There are only a few forms of verbal
morphology
Morphology, from the Greek and meaning "study of shape", may refer to:
Disciplines
* Morphology (archaeology), study of the shapes or forms of artifacts
* Morphology (astronomy), study of the shape of astronomical objects such as nebulae, galaxies ...
in Xârâcùù. These include the nonproductive
transitive suffix ''–ri'', the causative ''fa-'', the resultative/stative ''mê-'', and the intransitivizer ''ù-''. While transitive suffix do exist they are few and far between leaving the language to follow a strict SVO format for morphological marking.
Verb phrases
The examples also show that the object of a sentence can be topicalized by fronting the transitive suffix as in ''vèè a-'' moving to the front of the sentence in example two. There is also reduplication, which acts like a functions intensifier. While there is a small amount of verbal morphology, each verb phrase can contain a preverbal subject-marking pronoun. Subject and Predicate phrase order is unmarked in Xarâcùù. There are ten tense-aspect markers (some are preverbal others postverbal) and one or more modifiers can be included (also pre-verbal or post-verbal).
As seen above in example (1), preverbal subject markers are unused if the subject is a noun phrase. But there are cases when there is a topicalized afterthought subject that follows the verb as seen in the second example where ''pa dopwa'' appears at the end rather than the beginning. Polar interrogatives also exist in Xarâcùù but are marked by the particle ''kae''. The ''kae'' article follows the constituent that is the focus of the interrogation.
In comparison to many other Oceanic languages outside of
New Caledonia
)
, anthem = ""
, image_map = New Caledonia on the globe (small islands magnified) (Polynesia centered).svg
, map_alt = Location of New Caledonia
, map_caption = Location of New Caledonia
, mapsize = 290px
, subdivision_type = Sovereign st ...
, Xarâcùù uses unusual phrase structure for nouns. The modifiers precede the head and the only thing that follows are demonstratives and markers of totality.
Sample texts
Various Xârâcùù stories were recorded by Claire Moyse-Faurie. They can be read and heard, on two archives
on Paradisec an
on Pangloss
;Sample sentences
''Dou regula daa nä jina.'' -All because of that fateful day.
''è wâ ket name: "wèi, jööpè nä, jè faxwata.'' -He asked for news
''è cen xwata döbwa ke ket.'' -She would not listen to what you said.
;Story of a flower
A traditional Xârâcùù short story about a flower and a girl who speaks with the flower and hear its life story.
;A small poem about the sky and the land of Canala
;Jari kè Xôkwé Ka: History
A historical tale about a taro field and those who tended it.
Documentation
There have been two dictionaries written on the Xârâcùù language in the last one hundred years.
The earlier work is a short English/Xârâcùù dictionary published in 1975 by
George William Grace, titled ''Canala dictionary (New Caledonia)''.
A more substantial dictionary is the one published in 1986 by , titled ''Dictionnaire Xârâcùù-Français (Nouvelle-Calédonie)''.
Another key publication is Moyse-Faurie's 1995 grammar ''Le xârâcùù: Langue de Thio-Canala (Nouvelle-Calédonie)''.
Notes and references
COLLECTIVE:collective
INTERROG:interrogative
References
External links
Alphabet and pronunciationat ''Omniglot''
Interview with Marie-Adèle Jorédié on her language, XârâcùùVideos on SorosoroOpen-access collection of recordingsin Xârâcùù and
Xârâgurè, by –
(archive: Paradisec
The Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC) is a cross-institutional project that supports work on endangered languages and cultures of the Pacific and the region around Australia. They digitise reel-to ...
).
Corpus of audio and video recordings in Xârâcùù by Claire Moyse-Faurie –
(archive: Pangloss Collection
The Pangloss Collection is a digital library whose objective is to store and facilitate access to audio recordings in endangered languages of the world. Developed by the LACITO centre of CNRS in Paris, the collection provides free online access to ...
).
Bibliography
*
*
New Caledonian languages
Languages of New Caledonia
Subject–verb–object languages
{{Portal, Languages