Paicî language

Paicî is the most widely spoken of the two dozen languages on the main island of New Caledonia. It is spoken in a band across the center of the island, in the communes of Poindimié, Ponérihouen, Koné and Poya.

Paicî
Native to	New Caledonia
Region	East coast between Poindimié and Ponérihouen and inland valleys
Native speakers	7,300 (2009 census)[1]
Language family	Austronesian Malayo-Polynesian Oceanic Southern Oceanic New Caledonian – Loyalties New Caledonian Northern New Caledonian Central Northern Paicî
Language codes
ISO 639-3	pri
Glottolog	paic1239
Paicî is not endangered according to the classification system of the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger
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Phonology

Paicî has a rather simple inventory of consonants, compared to other languages of New Caledonia, but it has an unusually large number of nasal vowels. Paicî syllables are restricted to (C)V.^[2]

Consonants

		Bilabial		Post- alveolar	Palatal	Velar
		plain	labial
Nasal		m	mʷ	n̠	ɲ	ŋ
Plosive	voiceless	p	pʷ	t̠	c	k
	prenasalized	ᵐb	ᵐbʷ	ⁿ̠d̠	ᶮɟ	ᵑɡ
Tap				ɾ̠
Approximant				l̠	j	w

The palatal stops could be considered affricates because they occur with a heavily fricated release. The lateral and tap do not occur word-initially, except in a few loanwords and the prefix /ɾɜ/ they.^[2]

Because nasal stops are always followed by nasal vowels, but prenasalized stops are always followed by oral vowels, it might be argued that nasal and prenasalized stops are allophonic, which would reduce the Paicî consonant inventory to 13.

Vowels

Paicî has a symmetrical system of ten oral vowels, all found both long and short without any significant difference in quality, and seven nasal vowels, some of which may also be long and short. Because sequences of two short vowels may carry two tones but long vowels are restricted to carrying one tone, they appear to be phonemically long vowels rather than sequences.^[2]

Paicî vowel phonemes

	Front		Central		Back
	Oral	Nasal	Oral	Nasal	Oral	Nasal
Close	i	ĩ	ɨ	ɨ̃	u	ũ
Close-mid	e	ɛ̃	ɘ	ɜ̃	o	ɔ̃
Open-mid	ɛ		ɜ		ɔ
Open			a	ɐ̃

Tones

Like its neighbour Cèmuhî, Paicî is one of the few Austronesian languages which have developed contrastive tone,^[3] involving three registers: high, mid, low. Additionally, there are vowels with no inherent tone, whose tone is determined by their environment. Words commonly have the same tone on all vowels, so tone may belong to the word rather than the syllable.