| Kagayanen | |
|---|---|
| Native to | Philippines |
| Region | easternPalawan |
Native speakers | 30,000 (2007)[1] |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | cgc |
| Glottolog | kaga1256 |
| This article containsIPA phonetic symbols. Without properrendering support, you may seequestion marks, boxes, or other symbols instead ofUnicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, seeHelp:IPA. | |
TheKagayanen language is spoken in theprovince ofPalawan in thePhilippines. It belongs to theManobo subgroup of theAustronesian language family and is the only member of this subgroup that is not spoken onMindanao or nearby islands.
Kagayanen is spoken in the following areas:[2]
| Labial | Coronal | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | m | n | ŋ | |||||||
| Stop | p | b | t | d | k | g | ʔ | |||
| Fricative | s | (h) | ||||||||
| Approximant (Lateral) | ð̞ | j | w | |||||||
| l | ||||||||||
| Rhotic | r | |||||||||
[h] occurs only in loan words, proper names, or in words that have[h] in the cognates of neighboring languages.[4] Outside of loanwords,/d/ becomes[r] between vowels.[5]
Comparative and historical evidence suggests that/ð̞/ and/l/ were incomplementary distribution before a split occurred likely with pressure from contact withEnglish,Spanish, andFilipino.[6]
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Close | i | ə | u |
| Open | a |
/i/ ranges between[i] and[e], except in unstressed syllables (as well as beforeconsonant clusters) where it lowers to[ɪ] or[ɛ].[8] Similarly,/u/ lowers to[ʊ] in unstressed syllables, before consonant clusters, and word-finally. It is otherwise[u].[9]
Most roots in Kagayanen do not have a definedpart of speech but can function in predication (like verbs), referring (like nouns), or modifying (like adjectives and adverbs). For example,kaan is a root often used to refer to "cooked rice", but when inflected as a verb, the same root can mean "eat".[10] Verbs are inflected formood,volition,voice (transitive/intransitive in Pebley's terminology), and whether the absolutive argument is a typical affected patient (applicative marking).[11] As with other Austronesian languages, one argument of a verb is always treated specially by the syntax. Pebley refers to this unmarked noun phrase (which is often but not always in apatient role when another argument is present) simply as the "absolutive" argument. (Van Valin 2005) refers to this as the PSA, the "privileged syntactic argument",[12] but linguists use a variety of terms to refer to this type of argument.