Ethnicity Konyak Glottolog kony1248 Spoken by Konyak | ISO 639-3 nbe Native speakers 250,000 | |
Language family Sino-Tibetan languages, Sal languages, Konyak languages | ||
Ayo singing in konyak language nagaland
Konyak is a Sino-Tibetan language spoken by the Konyak people of Nagaland, northeastern India.
Contents
Dialects
Ethnologue lists the following dialects of Konyak.
Tableng is the standard dialect spoken in Wanching and Wakching.
Phonology
There are three lexically contrastive contour tones in Konyak – rising (marked in writing by an acute accent – á), falling (marked by a grave accent – à) and level (unmarked).
Vowels
The vowels /a/, /o/ and /u/ are lengthened before approximants. /ə/ doesn't occur finally.
Consonants
The stops /p/ and /k/ contrast with the aspirated /pʰ/ and /kʰ/. /p/ and /c/ become voiced intervocalically across morpheme boundaries. The dental /t/ is realised as an alveolar if preceded by a vowel with a rising tone. The approximants /w/ and /j/ are pronounced laxer and shorter after vowels; /w/ becomes tenser initially before high vowels. If morpheme-initial or intervocalic, /j/ is pronounced with audible friction. /pʰ/, /kʰ/, /c/, /ɲ/, /s/, /h/ and /l/ do not occur morpheme-finally, while /ʔ/ does not appear morpheme-initially. Except for morpheme-initial /kp/ and /kʰl/, consonant clusters occur only medially.