Car language

Car
Car
Spoken in India
Region Nicobar Islands
Native speakers 22,100  (date missing)
Language family
Language codes
ISO 639-3 caq

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 nearly Austronesian languages such as Nias and Acehnese, with which it forms a linguistic area.[1]

Car is a VOS language and somewhat agglutinative.[2] There is a quite complicated verbal suffix system with some infixes, as well as distinct genitive and "interrogative" cases for nouns and pronouns.[3]

References

  1. ^ Cysouw, Michael; Quantitative explorations of the world-wide distribution of rare characteristics, or: the exceptionality of north-western European languages; pp. 11-12
  2. ^ WALS: Nicobarese
  3. ^ Whitehead, Rev. G.; Dictionary of the Car (Nicobarese) language; published 1925 by American Baptist Mission Press; pp. xxvi-xxxii