The Alamblak language is spoken in the

Angoram District Angoram District is a district of East Sepik Province in Papua New Guinea. It is one of the six administrative districts that make up the province. The main town in Angoram. See also *Districts of Papua New Guinea This page is a list of distr ...

East Sepik Province East Sepik is a province in Papua New Guinea. Its capital is Wewak. East Sepik has an estimated population of 450,530 people (2011 census) and is 43,426 km square in size. Its density is 10.4 people per square kilometer. History Cherubim D ...

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. One dialect is spoken in nine villages on the Middle Karawari and Wagupmeri rivers, and another in four villages near Kuvanmas Lake. It is the easternmost of the Sepik Hill languages.

Geographic distribution

Dialects/Varieties

There are two major dialects of Alamblak: Karawari and Kuvenmas. These dialects demonstrate extensive differences in phonology, grammar, and lexicon. Speakers of the Karawari dialect live along the Karawari and Wagupmeri Rivers, and those of the Kuvenmas dialect live along the southern shore of Lake Kuvenmas and eastward. In 1984, it was noted by linguist Les Bruce that there are approximately 800 speakers of Karawari and 400 speakers of Kuvenmas. Speakers of the Karawari dialect constitute four of six Alamblak social groups: Këmbrofm, Marhëmbom, Yimanifm, and Bnarm. The Këmbrofm people live in the villages of Tanganbit (Meingenda), Amongabi, Morwok, and in some traditional hamlet sites among the hills between the Karawari River and the Black Water River to the west. The Marhëmbom people live in the villages of Maramba and Chimbut. The Yimanifm people live in the villages of Skayum (Sikaium) and Barabijim (Barapidjin) on the Wagupmeri River and Gitfat Creek. The Bnarm people live in the villages of Yanitabak (Yenitabak) and Denyik (Danyig). Speakers of the Kuvenmas dialect constitute two of the six Alamblak social groups: Bahwidëh and Wolpam. The Bahwidëh and Wolpam people live in the villages of Tarakai, Sevenbuk, Anganamei, and Mariamei.

Phonology

Consonants

Unlike the

Tama languages The Tama languages are a small family of three clusters of closely related languages of northern Papua New Guinea, spoken just to the south of Nuku town in eastern Sandaun Province. They are classified as subgroup of the Sepik languages. ''Tama ...

and Sare, Alamblak does not distinguish between /r/ and /l/.

Vowels

Syllable structure

There are three basic syllable patterns in Alamblak: # C(C) (C)V(C) (C) # V(C) (C) # CVV(C)

Typology

Alamblak is a

polysynthetic In linguistic typology, polysynthetic languages, formerly holophrastic languages, are highly synthetic languages, i.e., languages in which words are composed of many morphemes (word parts that have independent meaning but may or may not be able t ...

language. It is highly

agglutinative In linguistics, agglutination is a morphological process in which words are formed by stringing together morphemes (word parts), each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglu ...

with some

fusional Fusional languages or inflected languages are a type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by their tendency to use single inflectional morphemes to denote multiple grammatical, syntactic, or semantic features. For ex ...

elements. It exhibits several linguistic features that generally indicate polysynthesis in a Papuan-language context. Some of these include polypersonalism (marking of multiple arguments on verbs) and heavy head-marking. Its basic

word order In linguistics, word order (also known as linear order) is the order of the syntactic constituents of a language. Word order typology studies it from a cross-linguistic perspective, and examines how languages employ different orders. Correlatio ...

is subject–object–verb, and several other morphosyntactic features generally associated with SOV languages are also exhibited in Alamblak. Specifically,

subordinate clauses A dependent clause, also known as a subordinate clause, subclause or embedded clause, is a certain type of clause that juxtaposes an independent clause within a complex sentence. For instance, in the sentence "I know Bette is a dolphin", the cla ...

precede independent clauses (e.g.,

relative clause A relative clause is a clause that modifies a noun or noun phrase and uses some grammatical device to indicate that one of the arguments in the relative clause refers to the noun or noun phrase. For example, in the sentence ''I met a man who wasn ...

s precede the head),

case Case or CASE may refer to: Instances * Instantiation (disambiguation), a realization of a concept, theme, or design * Special case, an instance that differs in a certain way from others of the type Containers * Case (goods), a package of relate ...

relators follow the noun (as enclitics or suffixes), and the interrogative element is not fronted in a clause, but remains ''in situ''. Examples of these

typological A typology is a system of classification used to organize things according to similar or dissimilar characteristics. Groups of things within a typology are known as "types". Typologies are distinct from taxonomies in that they primarily address t ...

features can be seen below. Examples are from Bruce (1984).

References

* *

External links

OLAC resources in and about the Alamblak languageEmotions in the Alamblak lexicon
{{Languages of Papua New Guinea Alamblak languages Languages of East Sepik Province