Nese language
language
Nese is a moribund Oceanic language or dialect known by no more than twenty people in the Matanvat area of the northwest tip of the island of Malakula in Vanuatu. It is now rarely spoken, having been replaced as a primary mode of communication by Bislama.
Nese is one of the few languages to have linguolabial consonants.
Name
The name Nese literally means "what".
Phonology
Consonants
Vowels
Grammar
Some nouns are required to be possessed, typically those expressing inalienable possession. These are followed by a possessive suffix marking the person and number of the possessor For those nouns where possession is optional, a possessive pronoun attaches to a possessive classifier, which has different forms if the possessed noun is intended to be eaten, or if it is intended to be drunk.
Verbs are marked for the person and number of both their subject and object. The subject prefixes co-occur with overt arguments, while the object suffixes cannot. An irrealis marker follows the subject prefix in appropriate contexts, though it is fused into a portmanteau morpheme with the first person singular marker. The language has no class of adjectives that can be distinguished from intransitive stative verbs, which may occur within the noun phrase, or function as a predicate.
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This entry incorporates text from “Nese language” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.