Ниуэанский язык: особенности и диалекты

Polynesian language of Niue

Niuean was spoken by 1,600 people on Niue Island (97.4% of the inhabitants) in 1991, as well as by speakers in the Cook Islands, New Zealand, and Tonga, for a total of around 8,000 speakers. There are thus more speakers of Niuean outside the island itself than on the island. Most inhabitants of Niue are bilingual in English. In the early 1990s, 70% of the speakers of Niuean lived in New Zealand.

Niuean consists of two main dialects, the older Motu dialect from the north of the island and the Tafiti dialect of the south. The words mean, respectively, the people of the island and the strangers (or people from a distance). The differences between the dialects are mainly in vocabulary or in the form of some words. Examples of differences in vocabulary are volu (Tafiti) vs matā (Motu) for scrape, scraper and lala (Tafiti) vs kautoga (Motu) for guava (plant); examples of differences in form include hafule (T) / afule (M), aloka/haloka, nai/nei, ikiiki/likiliki, and malona/maona.

Hiatus is the separate pronunciation of two adjacent vowels, as opposed to diphthongs, which are written as two letters but pronounced as one sound. These two vowels may be the same or be different ones. Hiatus typically occurs across morpheme boundaries, such as when a prefix ending with a vowel comes before a root beginning with that same vowel. It may also occur, rarely, within monomorphemic words (words that consist of only one morpheme) as a result of the elision of a historical intervocalic consonant. Two adjacent identical short vowels are always pronounced separately, as are combinations of any two long vowels or a short and a long vowel; two adjacent different short vowels may undergo hiatus or form a diphthong. This must be determined from the morphology or etymology of the word.

The basic structure of a Niuean syllable is (C)V(V); all syllables end in a vowel or diphthong, and may start with at most one consonant. Consonant clusters in borrowed words are broken up with epenthetic vowels, e. g. English 'tractor' becomes tuleketā.

The stress on a Niuean word is nearly always on the penult (second to last syllable), though multi syllable words ending in a long vowel put primary stress on the final long vowel and secondary stress on the penult. Long vowels in other positions also attract a secondary stress.

The Niuean language does not contain the glottal stop, which is present in its closest relative, Tongan. This has caused some distinct words to merge. For example, Tongan ('year') and tau ('fight') have merged in Niuean as tau ('year; fight').

Niuean orthography is largely phonemic; that is, one letter stands for one sound and vice versa.

The traditional alphabet order, given with the traditional names of the letters, is ā, ē, ī, ō, ū, fā, gā, hā, kā, lā, mō, nū, pī, tī, vī, rō, sā. Note that rō and sā as introduced letters are ordered at the end. Sperlich (1997) uses an alphabetical order based on English for his dictionary: a, ā, e, ē, f, g, h, i, ī, k, l, m, n, o, ō, p, s, t, u, ū, v (r is left out since no words start with this letter). He recommends that consonants be named consistently with a following ā: fā, gā, hā, kā, lā, mā, nā, pā, tā, vā, rā, sā. Vowel length can be marked with a macron; however, this is not always done.

As with many languages, writing was brought to Niue in connection with religion, in this case with Christianity by missionaries educated in Samoa. This has led to some Samoan influences in morphology and grammar and also to a noticeable one in spelling: as in Samoan, the sound (Help:IPA) is written g, rather than ng as in Tongan and some other Polynesian languages with this sound. (McEwen (1970) uses ng in his dictionary; however, this feature of his spelling was not popular, particularly since it conflicted with the spelling used in the Niuean Bible.)

Morphology comprises the ways in which words are built up from smaller, meaningful sub units, or how words change their form in certain circumstances.

Suppletion concerns closely related words (often singular and plural forms of nouns or verbs) which are based on very different forms, for example fano to go (used with a singular subject) and ō to go (used with a plural subject). This can be compared to English go and went, which are forms of the same verb yet differ in form.

Affixes (prefixes and suffixes) are frequently used for a variety of purposes; there is also one circumfix, fe   aki (sometimes fe   naki or fe   taki), which is used to form reciprocal verbs ("to one another"). A common suffix is aga, which is a nominaliser: it forms nouns from verbs. A common prefix with faka , with a variety of meanings, the most common being a causative one (e. g. ako to learn, fakaako to teach). Words may also have more than one prefix or suffix, as fakamalipilipi to break (used with a plural object), from faka , ma , and a reduplicated lipi to break.

Many words are simply formed by joining together other words, for example vakalele aeroplane from vaka canoe and lele fly (i. e. literally, flying canoe). Diane Massam has extensively studied a special type of compounding which she has termed pseudo noun incorporation, a type of noun incorporation.