May River Iwam, often simply referred to as Iwam, is a language of

East Sepik Province East Sepik is a province in Papua New Guinea. Its capital is Wewak. East Sepik has an estimated population of 433,481 people (2010 census) and is 43,426 km square in size. History Cherubim Dambui was appointed as East Sepik's first premier ...

Papua New Guinea Papua New Guinea (abbreviated PNG; , ; tpi, Papua Niugini; ho, Papua Niu Gini), officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea ( tpi, Independen Stet bilong Papua Niugini; ho, Independen Stet bilong Papua Niu Gini), is a country i ...

. It is spoken in Iyomempwi (), Mowi (), and Premai villages of

Tunap/Hunstein Rural LLG Tunap/Hunstein Rural LLG (often spelled locally as Tunap/Hustein) is a local-level government (LLG) of East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea. The LLG is home to speakers of many different Left May languages and Sepik languages. Wards *01. Hotmin ...

, and other villages on the

May River The May River is a river in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. The river is formed when the Lennard River splits into two channels north of Mount Marmion and near the Kimberley Downs Station homestead, the other channel being the Me ...

Phonology

Vowels

In non-final positions, , , and are , , and , respectively. appears only in nonfinal syllables. When adjacent to nasal consonants, vowels are

nasalized In phonetics, nasalization (or nasalisation) is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal sound is . In the Internationa ...

; nasalization may also occur when adjacent to word boundaries.

Consonants

and are voiced fricatives ( and ) respectively) when intervocalic and unreleased when final ( is also unreleased when final). is a nasal flap () word-initially and between vowels. is initially and may otherwise be palatalized . Sequences of any consonant and are neutralized before where an offglide is always heard.

Phonotactics

Bilabial and velar consonants and may be followed by when initial. Other initial clusters include , , , , and and final clusters are or followed by any consonant except for or .

Pronouns

May River Iwam pronouns: :

Noun classes

Like the

Wogamus languages The Wogamus languages are a pair of closely related languages, : Wogamusin and Chenapian. They are classified among the Sepik languages of northern Papua New Guinea; Malcolm Ross and William A. Foley (2018) place them in the Upper Sepik bra ...

, May River Iwam has five

noun class In linguistics, a noun class is a particular category of nouns. A noun may belong to a given class because of the characteristic features of its referent, such as gender, animacy, shape, but such designations are often clearly conventional. Some ...

es: : As shown by the example above for ''ana'' ‘hand’, a noun can take on different classes depending on the physical characteristics being emphasized.

Vocabulary

The following basic vocabulary words of Iwam are from Foley (2005) and Laycock (1968), as cited in the Trans-New Guinea database: :

Notes

External links

* Materials on Sepic Iwam are included in the open access

Arthur Capell Arthur Capell (28 March 1902 – 10 August 1986) was an Australian linguist, who made major contributions to the study of Australian languages, Austronesian languages and Papuan languages. Early life Capell was born in Newtown, New South Wales ...

collections
AC1
held by

Paradisec The Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC) is a cross-institutional project that supports work on endangered languages and cultures of the Pacific and the region around Australia. They digitise reel-to ...

References

* {{Languages of Papua New Guinea Iwam languages Languages of East Sepik Province