1 THE PHONETICS OF NDUMBEA 1 MATTHEW GORDON AND IAN MADDIESON UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES 1. INTRODUCTION. This paper discusses the phonetic properties of Ndumbea, one of the indigenous Austronesian languages of the southernmost part of New Caledonia, a French “Overseas Territory” in the South Pacific. The name Ndumbea more properly belongs to a people who have given their name to the present-day capital of the territory, Nouméa, as well as to Dumbéa, a smaller town to the north of Nouméa. Rivierre (1973) uses the phrase [n¢ a/ ) a) n¢ d¢ u~ mbea] “language of Nouméa” for the name of the language. The spelling Drubea, using orthographic conventions based on those of Fijian, is preferred in Ozanne-Rivierre and Rivierre (1991). We prefer to represent the prenasalization overtly in the spelling of the language name, but our spelling does not note the post-alveolar place of articulation of the initial stop. In the titles of the books by Païta and Shintani (1983, 1990) and Shintani (1990) the language is referred to as Païta. This is the name of one of the clans speaking the language and it has also become the name of a modern town, Païta. The language is no longer spoken in Dumbéa or Païta but survives in a few rural settlements to the northwest of Nouméa, and in an area reserved for the indigenous inhabitants around Unya (also spelled Ounia) on the east coast. The locations referred to are shown on the map in Figure 1. The total number of remaining speakers of Ndumbea is probably on the order of two or three hundred at most. Previous work on Ndumbea includes a small grammatical sketch and word list by Leenhardt (1946), a detailed phonological sketch by Rivierre (1973), a grammatical sketch by Païta and Shintani (1983), an outline grammar by Païta and Shintani (1990), and a dictionary by Shintani (1990). Rivierre’s work is primarily aimed at comparison of the southern New Caledonian languages, a topic that is taken further in Ozanne-Rivierre and Rivierre (1991). Ndumbea is very closely related to the Numee language, spoken in Goro and on the Île Wen, and in a slightly different form ([kwe≠ii] ) on the Île des Pins. These locations are also shown in Figure 1. This paper will concern itself with describing certain salient phonetic properties of Ndumbea. Ndumbea’s phonological and phonetic system is of interest for several reasons. The language is one of relatively few Austronesian languages which is tonal, and it has a larger inventory of vowels than many other languages in this family. It also has a three way place contrast between coronal stops, a relative rarity in the languages of the world — only 3.54% of languages in Maddieson’s (1984) survey of 317 languages contrast more than two coronal stops. This rather unusual contrast will be the primary focus of this paper. Ndumbea provides a further opportunity to examine if the acoustic properties of coronals conform to a general pattern based on simple place of articulation distinctions, or whether they vary in a language-specific way and 1 Grateful thanks are extended to all the speakers who shared their linguistic knowledge with us. Stephen Schooling provided invaluable assistance in New Caledonia, and this project could not have been completed without his support. This work was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation to Peter Ladefoged and Ian Maddieson for research on the phonetic structures of endangered languages.