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Kavalan (also known as Kvalan, Kebalan or Kbalan) was formerly spoken in the Northeast coast area of Taiwan by the Kavalan people (噶瑪蘭). It is an East Formosan language of the Austronesian family.
Kavalan is no longer spoken in its original area. As of 1930, it was used only as a home language. As of 1987, it was still spoken in Atayal territories. In 2000, this language was still reported to be spoken by 24 speakers but considered moribund.
In 2017, a study using the EDGE metric from species conservation found that Kavalan, although critically endangered, was among the most lexically distinct of Austronesian languages.[3]
Kavalan consists of the following speech communities ordered from north to south:[4]
Kariawan (Jialiwan 加禮宛) – near Hualien, a formerly Sakizaya-speaking area
Patʀungan (Xinshe 新社) – located in Fungpin (豐濱鄉), Hualien
Kulis (Lide 立德)
Kralut (Zhangyuan 樟原)
These speech communities in eastern Taiwan were named after older settlements from the north, such as Kariawan, Sahut, and Tamayan, where the Kavalan people originally migrated from. Modern-day Kavalan speakers are surrounded by the Amis.
Tsuchida (1985) notes that word lists collected from Lamkham 南崁 (Nankan) and Poting 埔頂 (Buding) are closest to Kavalan,[5] while Li (2001) counts them as 'Basaic' languages.[6]
Kavalan nouns and verbs are distinguished by the lack of /a/ in the first syllable (nouns) or presence of /a/ (verbs).[8] Kavalan syllables take on the structure (C)(C)V(C)(C).[11] Kavalan is also one of two Formosan languages to have geminating consonants.
Kavalan affixes include:
m- (agent focus)
-um-/-m- (agent focus)
-in/-n- as variants of ni- (patient)
-a (irrealis patient-focus marker)
-an (locative-focus marker, nominalizer)
-i (imperative, patient focus)
pa- (causative)
qa- (future)
Unlike many other Formosan languages, there is no *-en suffix.
Li, Paul Jen-kuei 李壬癸; Tsuchida, Shigeru 土田滋 (2006). Kavalan Dictionary(PDF). Language and Linguistics Monograph Series A-19. Taipei, Taiwan: Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica. ISBN978-986-00-6993-8. Archived from the original(PDF) on 2020-07-16.
Blust, Robert (2009). The Austronesian Languages. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University. ISBN978-0-85883-602-0. ISBN978-0-85883-602-0
Yuánzhùmínzú yǔyán xiànshàng cídiǎn 原住民族語言線上詞典(in Chinese) – Kavalan search page at the "Aboriginal language online dictionary" website of the Foundation for the Research and Development of Indigenous Languages