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Car
Pū
Pronunciation
Native to	India
Region	Nicobar Islands
Native speakers	37,000 (2005)
Language family	Austroasiatic Nicobarese Car
Writing system	Latin script
Language codes
ISO 639-3	caq
Glottolog	carn1240
ELP	Car Nicobarese
CarShow map of Andaman and Nicobar IslandsCarShow map of Bay of Bengal
Coordinates: 9°11′N 92°46′E / 9.19°N 92.77°E / 9.19; 92.77

Car (Pū) is the most widely spoken Nicobarese language of the Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal.

Although a member of the Austroasiatic language family, it is typologically much more akin to nearby Austronesian languages such as Nias and Acehnese, with which it forms a linguistic area. Car is a VOS language and somewhat agglutinative. There is a quite complicated verbal suffix system with some infixes, as well as distinct genitive and "interrogative" cases for nouns and pronouns.

Phonology

Consonants

• The alveolar flap can typically be pre-stopped. Before a voiceless consonant, its pre-articulation is voiceless as , and elsewhere it is voiced .

Vowels

• /æ/ only occurs in English loanwords.
• Vowel sounds are also typically short when occurring before an /h/.

Vocabulary

Paul Sidwell (2017) published in ICAAL 2017 conference on Nicobarese languages.

Morphology

Shared morphological alternations: the old AA causative has two allomorphs, prefix ha- with monosyllabic stems, infix -um- in disyllabic stems (note: *p > h onset in unstressed σ).

• ɲa - 'to eat' / haɲaː 'to feed'
• pɯɲ - 'to cry' / hapɯɲ-ɲɔː 'to make cry'
• kucik - 'be palatable' / kumcik 'to taste'
• kale - 'brave' / kumle 'bravery'

References

1. Car at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
2. Cysouw, Michael; Quantitative explorations of the world-wide distribution of rare characteristics, or: the exceptionality of north-western European languages Archived 2009-05-14 at the Wayback Machine; pp. 11-12
3. WALS: Nicobarese
4. Whitehead, Rev. G.; Dictionary of the Car (Nicobarese) language; published 1925 by American Baptist Mission Press; pp. xxvi-xxxii
5. Sidwell, Paul (2015). Car Nicobarese. The Handbook of Austroasiatic Languages: Leiden: Brill. pp. 1231–1240.
6. Sidwell, Paul. 2017. "Proto-Nicobarese Phonology, Morphology, Syntax: work in progress". International Conference on Austroasiatic Linguistics 7, Kiel, Sept 29-Oct 1, 2017.

• Languages of India
• Agglutinative languages
• Nicobarese languages
• Verb–object–subject languages
• Languages written in Devanagari