| Abawiri | |
|---|---|
| Doa | |
| Abawiri | |
| Native to | Indonesia |
| Region | Western New Guinea |
Native speakers | 350 (2010)[1] |
Lakes Plain
| |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | flh |
| Glottolog | foau1240 |
| ELP | Foau |
The Abawiri language is a Lakes Plain language of Papua, Indonesia. It is spoken in the village of Fuau, located along the Dijai River, a tributary to the Mamberamo River. Clouse tentatively included Abawiri and neighboring Taburta (Taworta) in an East Lakes Plain subgroup of the Lakes Plain family;[2] due to the minimal data that was available on the languages at that time.[3] With more data, the connection looks more secure.
Like other Lakes Plain languages, Abawiri is notable for being heavily tonal[4] and for lacking nasal consonants: there are no nasal or nasalized consonants or vowels, even allophonically.[5]
Phonology
Abawiri has sixteen obstruent consonants (eight plain and eight labialized), as well as one sonorant consonant /ɾ/. The consonant and vowel charts below show the phonemes, followed by their representations in the community orthography (in <brackets>) where that representation is different from the phoneme symbol.
| Labial | Alveolar | Alveolo-palatal | Velar | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| plain | rounded | plain | rounded | plain | rounded | plain | rounded | ||
| Plosive | voiceless | t | tʷ ⟨tw⟩ | k | kʷ ⟨kw⟩ | ||||
| voiced | b | bʷ ⟨bw⟩ | d | dʷ ⟨dw⟩ | dʒ ⟨j⟩ | dʒʷ ⟨jw⟩ | g | gʷ ⟨gw⟩ | |
| Fricative | f | fʷ ⟨fw⟩ | s | sʷ ⟨sw⟩ | |||||
| Flap | ɾ ⟨r⟩ | ||||||||
Abawiri has seven vowels, including three high front vowels: /i/, /y/, and /i̝/.
| Front | Back | |
|---|---|---|
| Extra-high | i̝ ⟨yi⟩ | |
| High | i y ⟨yu⟩ | u |
| Mid | ɛ ⟨e⟩ | |
| Low | a | ɒ ⟨o⟩ |
References
- ↑ Abawiri at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
- ↑ Clouse, Duane (1997). "Toward a reconstruction and reclassification of the Lakes Plain languages of Irian Jaya". Papers in Papuan Linguistics. 2: 133–236.
- ↑ Voorhoeve, Clemens L. (1975). Languages of Irian Jaya: checklist, preliminary classification, language maps, wordlists. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics Series B-31.
- ↑ Yoder, Brendon (2018). "The Abawiri tone system in typological perspective". Language (Phonological Analysis). 94 (4): e266–e292. doi:10.1353/lan.2018.0067. S2CID 150242777 – via Project MUSE.
- ↑ Yoder, Brendon (2020). A grammar of Abawiri, a Lakes Plain language of Papua, Indonesia (PhD dissertation thesis). University of California Santa Barbara.