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pronounced Lakalai, as the alveolar nasal [n] has disappeared from the phonemic inventory of the language and has been replaced by [l].
[3] The dialects that make up the Nakanai language are Bileki, Ubae, Vele, Loso, and Maututu, respectively from the west-most to the east-most of the Nakanai-speaking areas.
[5] Vele speakers are centered on the coastal and adjacent regions of Bangula Bay, in particular, the villages of Tarobi, Pasusu, Sisimi, Gaekeke, Kai and Kaiamo.
[6] Loso (or Auka) is a dialect of Nakanai spoken in the Silanga region, inland of Lasibu Anchorage.
[7] The villages of the Maututu dialect are Matililiu, Gomu, Apulpul, Baikakea, Bubuu, Mataururu, Kiava and Evase, all grouped on the eastern coast of the Nakanai area, between Toiru River and Cape Koas.
These are all United Church Villages and have been influenced therefore by Tolai-speaking missionaries and Nassa shell traders, plus contact with Melamela to the east, Bileki and Vele to the west, and the inland languages Longeinga, Wasi and Kol.
[2] In terms of case relations, "Nakanai role structure operates morphologically as follows: there are six contrastive cases, Actor, which appears as the immediately pre-verbal NP; Patient, which appears in the unmarked instance as the immediately post-verbal NP; Source; which is the NP immediately preceded by the post-verbal ablative particle le; Beneficiary, which is encoded by inalienable possession suffixation of the verb; Instrument, signaled by ablative particle le, but appearing discontinuously from it, the Patient-NP obligatorily intervening; and Goal encoded by the preposition te.
"Additionally, directional verbs in chained sequence such as tavu (towards) and taro (away from) encode goal and source relationship respectively.
In Nakanai, the action includes the source, the undergoer and the experiencer of, "a caused or spontaneous process, or mental state or event."
With an actor, it appears as the last noun phrase in the clause, marked with post-verbal ablative particle le.
"[9] In ditransitive clauses, the source "represents the animate origin of an action in which a patient is moved away from source-entity by [an] actor" ACTEART BabaBabaVPabiget taroawaySRCleABL BubuBubuPATlaART buaareca nutACT {} VP {} SRC {} PAT {}E Baba abi taro le Bubu la buaART Baba get away ABL Bubu ART {areca nut}Baba took away from Bubu the areca nutsource marked by ablative particle le, appears post-verbally in first nominal slot.
"It indicates a relationship of spatial extent or temporal duration:" ACT[Egitethey(PL)VPgo-io]go-thereRange[pousit karauntil (te)PREP laART logo.
The obligatory coreferential topic deletion of the actor noun phrase potentially appearing with kara is illustrated in the second embedded clause.
Bileki also shares phonological similarities with another language in the New Britain area, Melamela, which is located east of the Maututu-speaking regions.
In Ubae, the Bileki habit of dropping the /h/ sound from their speech has caused the la noun marker to turn into l- for words starting with a vowel.
One driving force behind lexical innovation in the language is to be able to "discuss matters without outsiders understanding key words."
An example: Lexical innovation also comes in the form of borrowing terms from the surrounding languages, mainly Tolai, Pidgin and English, to cover foreign objects.
An example: Before the borrowing of lexical terms, they would make do with creative reactions to new objects that arrived to New Britain from foreign sources.
There are also unnecessary[editorializing] borrowings in the forms of functional term and calques: Ubae, compared to its neighbor Vele, has numerous lexical differences from Bileki, taking from other Eastern Nakanai dialects.
[2] ACT:actor BEN:beneficiary INS:instrument PAT:patient PREP:preposition SRC:source VP:verb phrase