Kanakanavu language

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Chinese. (January 2013) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the Chinese article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 346 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Chinese Wikipedia article at [[:zh:卡那卡那富語]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|zh|卡那卡那富語}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

Kanakanavu (also spelled Kanakanabu) is a Southern Tsouic language spoken by the Kanakanavu people, an indigenous people of Taiwan (see Taiwanese aborigines). It is a Formosan language of the Austronesian family.

The Kanakanavu live in the two villages of Manga and Takanua in Namasia District (formerly Sanmin Township), Kaohsiung.^[2]

The language is moribund, with only 4 speakers (2012 census).^[3]

The native Kanakanavu speakers were Taiwanese aboriginals living on the islands. Following the Dutch Colonial Period in the 17th century, Han-Chinese immigration began to dominate the islands population. The village of Takanua is a village assembled by Japanese rulers to relocate various aboriginal groups in order to establish easier dominion over these groups.^[4]

There are 14 different consonant phonemes, containing only voiceless plosives within Kanakanavu. Adequate descriptions of liquid consonants become a challenge within Kanakanavu. It also contains 6 vowels; phonetic diphthongs and triphthongs occur where vowels are adjacent. Vowel length is often not clear if distinctive or not, as well as speakers pronouncing vowel phonemes with variance. As most Austronesian and Formosan languages, Kanakanavu has a CV syllable structure (where C = consonant, V = vowel). Very few, even simple words, contain less than three to four syllables.^[5]

/s/ is pronounced [ʃ] before /i/ and /t͜s/ is pronounced [t͜ʃ] before /i/ and /ʉ/.^[5]

Several texts have been transcribed by outsiders in the orthography of the Council of Indiginous Peoples of Taiwan, and a dictionary is available. ⟨C⟩ is used for /t͜s/, ⟨ng⟩ for /ŋ/, ⟨r⟩ and ⟨l⟩ for /ɾ/ and /ɽ/, ⟨ꞌ⟩ for /ʔ/, and ⟨ʉ⟩ for the central vowel.

Kanakanavu language test of Wikipedia at Wikimedia Incubator

• www.kanakanavu.info – language documentation project website
• Yuánzhùmínzú yǔyán xiànshàng cídiǎn 原住民族語言線上詞典 (in Chinese) – Kanakanavu search page at the "Aboriginal language online dictionary" website of the Indigenous Languages Research and Development Foundation
• Endangered Languages
• Kanakanavu teaching and leaning materials published by the Council of Indigenous Peoples of Taiwan (in Chinese)
• Kanakanavu translation of President Tsai Ing-wen's 2016 apology to indigenous people – published on the website of the presidential office