Onge language
The Onge language, also rendered Önge, is one of two known Ongan languages, spoken on the Andaman Islands in India. It is spoken by the Onge people on Little Andaman Island.
Status
Onge used to be spoken throughout Little Andaman as well as in smaller islands to the north, and possibly in the southern tip of South Andaman Island. Since the middle of the 19th century, with British colonization and the massive inflow of Indian settlers from the mainland, the number of Onge speakers has steadily declined, although a moderate increase has been observed in recent years. Currently, there are only 94 native speakers of Onge, confined to a single settlement in the northeast of Little Andaman island. It is an endangered language.Phonology
Consonants
- /ʔ/?
- Blevins states that /c, ɟ/ are actually affricates, and that retroflexes may or may not be phonemic.
- /kʷ/ delabializes to /k/ before /u, o/.
- Phonemic /d/ surfaces as intervocalically, while arguably some words have phonemic /r/ which alternates with surface .
Vowels
Phonotactics
Words may be monosyllabic or longer, even in content words. Words may begin with consonants or vowels, and maximal syllables are of the form CVC. All Onge words end in vowels, except for imperatives, e.g. kaʔ 'give'.Consonant-final stems in Jarawa often have cognates with final e in Onge, e.g. Jarawa iŋ, Onge iŋe 'water'; Jarawa inen, Onge inene 'foreigner'; Jarawa dag, Onge dage 'coconut'. Historically these vowels must have been excrescent, as nonetymological word-final e doesn't surface when number markers are suffixed, and the definite article appears as -i after etymological e but as -gi after excrescent e, e.g. daŋe → daŋe-gi 'tree; dugout'; kue → kue-i 'pig'.
NC clusters sometimes optionally reduce to single C, e.g. ~ 'to drink'.
Voiced obstruents may optionally nasalize in syllable onset when the coda is nasal, e.g. bone/''mone'' 'resin, resin torch'.