Car language

Car
Car
Native to India
Region Nicobar Islands
Native speakers
37,000 (2005)[1]
Language codes
ISO 639-3 caq
Glottolog carn1240[2]

Car is the most widely spoken of the Nicobarese languages spoken in the Nicobar Islands of India.

Although related distantly to Vietnamese and Khmer, it is typologically much more akin to nearby Austronesian languages such as Nias and Acehnese, with which it forms a linguistic area.[3]

Car is a VOS language and somewhat agglutinative.[4] There is a quite complicated verbal suffix system with some infixes, as well as distinct genitive and "interrogative" cases for nouns and pronouns.[5]

References

  1. Car at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
  2. Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Car Nicobarese". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
  3. Cysouw, Michael; Quantitative explorations of the world-wide distribution of rare characteristics, or: the exceptionality of north-western European languages; pp. 11-12
  4. WALS: Nicobarese
  5. Whitehead, Rev. G.; Dictionary of the Car (Nicobarese) language; published 1925 by American Baptist Mission Press; pp. xxvi-xxxii
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