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]
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⟩ |