Kaikiwan

Kaikiwan
káikwi/túlelù káikwi
Pronunciation	[kái.kʷi] [ʔɤ́ʎɨ̯ʎù kái.kʷi]
Created by	Jukethatbox
Date	2023-2024
Native to	Kaikiwi Island
Native speakers	5-10 (2023) L2: 6,000-10,000
Language family	Kaikiwi–Tol-Sun Kaikiwic Kaikiwan
Standard form	OPKLC Standard Kaikiwan
Dialects	Eastern dialect(Mwípék) Northern dialect(Tùwanòpék) Diasporic dialects Hawaiian dialects
Writing system	Latin
Official status
Recognised minority language in	New Zealand Hawai'i
Regulated by	OPKLC (Organisation for the Preservation of Kaikiwan Language and Culture)

Kaikiwan is a Kaikiwi–Tol-Sun language spoken natively on the island of Kaikiwi. It is a critically endangered language with a native speaker population of around 10 at the highest estimates. Very few native Kaikiwans still inhabit Kaikiwi Island; instead, the vast majority of said native speakers live in New Zealand or Hawai'i; the youngest of these native speakers, 78-year-old Mániwamaé, was born and raised in Oahu.

Although there are not many remaining native speakers of the language, the L2(second-language) community is thriving. Thousands of non-native Kaikiwan speakers live in New Zealand, Hawai'i and Japan, with even the most conservative estimates putting the number of L2 speakers at around 6,000, with the most optimistic estimates putting it as high as 10,000.

Aesthetics

Kaikiwan is heavily aesthetically influenced by the Polynesian languages, mainly Hawaiian and Māori, and much of its vocabulary is borrowed from said languages as well as English and Japanese. However, its grammar is entirely unique and not based on any prevailing natlangs, and any similarities are coincidental unless specified otherwise.

Phonology

Orthography

Kaikiwan uses the Latin alphabet, although with 15 letters instead of the usual 26.

Aa

Ee

Gg

Hh

Ii

Kk

Ll

Mm

Nn

Oo

Pp

Ss

Tt

Uu

Ww

The Kaikiwan alphabet is mostly directly phonetic, with almost all the letters only corresponding to one allophone, although ⟨Tt⟩ represents /ʔ/ in onset positions and ⟨Uu⟩ represents /ɤ/ and /u/ in both of their usages.

Phonetic tone is distinguished by putting accents on vowels.

Áá

Àà

Éé

Èè

Íí

Ìì

Óó

Òò

Úú

Ùù

Consonants

	Bilabial/ Labial-velar	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Plosive	p	t		k · g	ʔ
Nasal	m	n	ɲ
Fricative		s
Approximant/ Lateral Approximant	w		ʎ

Vowels

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i	ɨ	u
Close-mid			ɤ · o
Open	a	(ä)

Prosody

Intonation

Kaikiwan uses intonation to quite an extent in morphology, though it is rarely found in grammar(e.g. particles, noun declension suffixes, verb conjugations) and even less in loanwords from Polynesian languages or more recently, English or Japanese.

The language has two types of tones: rising and falling, and they are only used on independent vowels and diphthong-initial vowels e.g. /a/ → /á/ and /ai/ → /ái/.

There is some historical evidence that Kaikiwan may at one point had tone on nasal consonants, especially /m/, though modern Kaikiwan only uses tone on consonants for ideophones, like in English "hmm?".

Kaikiwan intonation is technically phonemic, meaning semantics can change based on tone pronunciation alone, though in practice very few words distinguish between themselves solely on tone. A commonly used example of this in the language itself would be the word for the islands of Hawai'i, húwui, and the word for "salmon", hùwui, although hùwui is an archaic term, and most modern speakers prefer the term sámo, based on the English term.

Phonotactics

Kaikiwan has a (C/W)V(V)(C/W) syllable structure, where W is /w/ or any labialised consonant, like /pʷ/.

Morphophonology

Kaikiwan has a sandhi system similar to the French liaison. The most common type of sandhi in Kaikiwan is what the OPKLC calls naso-palatal sandhis, or when one word ends with a /n/ and the next word begins with a /ʎ/, in which case the two sounds combine into one /ɲ/. A less common sandhi is the alveolo-labial sandhi, where a /t/ and a /w/ side by side merge into a /tù/.

Morphology

Numerals

Many Kaikiwan numerals are derived from Proto-Polynesian. Thus, this table also shows their respective etymologies. If the etymology box is empty, then it is unknown or derived from Proto-Kaikiwic.

Kaikiwan numerals

English	Kaikiwan	Pronunciation	Etymology
one	mima	mima
two	lwa	ʎʷa	From Proto-Polynesian *rua.
three	olu	olu	From Proto-Polynesian *tolu.
four	keno	kɨ̯no
five	mwó	mʷó
six	ono	ono	From Proto-Polynesian *ono.
seven	sima	sima	From English seven.
eight	lwakeno	ʎʷakɨ̯no	lwa, "two" + keno, "four".
nine	iwa	iwa	From Proto-Polynesian *hiwa.
ten	tumi	ʔɤmi̩	From Hawaiian ‘umi.

Nouns

Collective nouns

In English, collective nouns are used to indicate mainly groups of animals, like "a murder of crows" or "a rafter of turkeys". In Kaikiwan, there are collective nouns for almost all non-abstract nouns, and different collective nouns are used based on the number of said noun.

For example, take the word tona; "person". When there are one or two people, there is no collective noun nor plural declension; it is simply mima tona or lwa tona(lit. "one person", "two person"). After three, the plural declension is used. Then, at 5 people, the collective noun iku, roughly translating to "group" is used, and at 10 people, the word mwéké("army") is used.

Thus, there are two categories of collective nouns: 5+ and 10+.