| Nakanai | |
|---|---|
| Lakalai | |
| Spoken in | Papua New Guinea |
| Native speakers | 13,000 (date missing) |
| Language family | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | nak |
The Nakanai language is spoken by the Nakanai tribe in West New Britain, a province of Papua New Guinea. It is an Austronesian language, belonging to the Malayo-Polynesian subgroup.
The name Nakanai is natively pronounced Lakalai, as the alveolar nasal [n] has disappeared from the phonemic inventory of the language and has been replaced by [l].
Nakanai syllables may be of the shape V or CV, with no codas or consonant clusters to be found anywhere in the language.