Ayawasi is a village of about 1,200 people in the Indonesia province of
Southwest Papua
Southwest Papua ( id, Papua Barat Daya) is a province of Indonesia, and is a fraction of Western New Guinea. Despite being named southwest, it is a misnomer and this province is actually located in the northwest edge of Papua. The area that belo ...
. It is located in the
Ayfat area, north of the
Ayamaru Lakes, and it is the site of
Ayawasi Airport.
The village was established by
the Dutch around 1953. Prior to this, the people of this area lived scattered in small groups in their respective ancestral grounds, where each group had its own "family dialect" differing in small ways from the dialect of the other groups. As of the 1990s, around 95% of the population are indigenous
Maybrat, the rest have come from other parts of Indonesia to work in the schools, government offices and the Catholic mission. The Maybrat people of Ayawasi are fully bilingual in
Maybrat and
Indonesian
Indonesian is anything of, from, or related to Indonesia, an archipelagic country in Southeast Asia. It may refer to:
* Indonesians, citizens of Indonesia
** Native Indonesians, diverse groups of local inhabitants of the archipelago
** Indonesian ...
. The Maybrat language spoken in Ayawasi has been the subject of a 2007 descriptive grammar, and a major ethnographic study on the people was conducted in the 1970s.
References
Bibliography
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*{{cite thesis, last = Schoorl, first = Johannes Maria , year = 1979 , title = Mensen van de Ayfat : ceremoniële ruil en sociale orde in Irian Jaya-Indonesia, type = PhD, location = Nijmegen, url = https://www.papuaerfgoed.org/en/BK/40/20, language = nl
Populated places in West Papua