Waimoa or Waimaa is a spoken by about 18,467 (2010 census) people in northeast

East Timor East Timor (), also known as Timor-Leste (), officially the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste, is an island country in Southeast Asia. It comprises the eastern half of the island of Timor, the exclave of Oecusse on the island's north-weste ...

. Waimoa proper is reported to be

mutually intelligible In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. It is sometimes used as an ...

with neighboring Kairui and Midiki, with 5,000 speakers total. The classification of Waimoa is unclear. Structurally, it is

Malayo-Polynesian The Malayo-Polynesian languages are a subgroup of the Austronesian languages, with approximately 385.5 million speakers. The Malayo-Polynesian languages are spoken by the Austronesian peoples outside of Taiwan, in the island nations of Southeast ...

. However, its vocabulary is largely Papuan, similar to that of

Makasae Makasae (also known as Makassai, Macassai, Ma'asae, Makasai) is a Papuan language spoken by about 100,000 people in the eastern part of East Timor, in the districts of Baucau and Viqueque, just to the west of Fataluku. It is the most widely spok ...

. Although generally classified as Austronesian languages or dialects that have been largely relexified under the influence of a language related to Makasae, it is possible that Waimoa, Kairui, and Midiki are instead Papuan languages related to Makasae which have been influenced by Austronesian.

Phonology

Similarly to other Austronesian languages of the region, Waimoa has aspirated/voiceless and glottalized/ejective consonants, which are distributed like and consonant clusters (or perhaps and ) but are often pronounced as single segments.Kirsten Culhane (2021) Waimaa consonants: phonology and typological position in Greater Timor. 15th International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics. Similarly there are voiceless and glottalized . There is also

vowel harmony In phonology, vowel harmony is an Assimilation (linguistics), assimilatory process in which the vowels of a given domain – typically a phonological word – have to be members of the same natural class (thus "in harmony"). Vowel harmony is t ...

References

Timor–Babar languages Languages of East Timor Mixed languages {{austronesian-lang-stub

Phonology

See also

References