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

Vowels

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).