Ma'ya is an
Austronesian language of the
Raja Ampat islands in
West Papua, Indonesia. It is spoken by about 6,000 people in coastal villages on the islands
Misool
Misool, formerly spelled Mysol (Dutch: Misoöl) or Misol, is one of the four major islands in the Raja Ampat Islands in Southwest Papua, Indonesia. Its area is 2,034 km2. The highest point is 561 m and the main towns are Waigama, located ...
,
Salawati, and
Waigeo.
It is spoken on the boundary between Austronesian and
Papuan languages.
Dialects
Ma'ya has five dialects: three on the island of
Waigeo (
Laganyan,
Wauyai
Ma'ya is an Austronesian language of the Raja Ampat islands in West Papua, Indonesia. It is spoken by about 6,000 people in coastal villages on the islands Misool, Salawati, and Waigeo. It is spoken on the boundary between Austronesian and ...
, and
Kawe), one on
Salawati, and one (extinct or nearly extinct) on
Batanta. The
prestige dialect
Prestige refers to a good reputation or high esteem; in earlier usage, ''prestige'' meant "showiness". (19th c.)
Prestige may also refer to:
Arts, entertainment and media Films
* ''Prestige'' (film), a 1932 American film directed by Tay Garnett ...
is the one on Salawati. The Waigeo dialects have /s/ and /ʃ/, where the varieties spoken on Salawati and Misool have /t/ and /c/ respectively. Batanta, now extinct, was evidently unintelligible with its neighbours.
On
Waigeo Island, the three dialects are
*The ''Kawe'' dialect in Selpele and Salyo villages in the northwest part of the island.
*The ''Laganyan'' dialect is spoken in Araway, Beo, and Luptintol villages on the Mayalibit Bay coast.
*The ''Wauyai'' dialect is spoken in Wauyai village on the Kabui Bay coast.
Phonology
Consonants
* Twelve consonants may also be heard as palatalized /pʲ, bʲ, tʲ, dʲ, kʲ, ɡʲ/; /fʲ, sʲ/; /mʲ, nʲ, lʲ, wʲ/.
* When in word-final position, six plosives can occur as unreleased
Ìš, bÌš, tÌš, dÌš, kÌš, É¡Ìš as well as nasals
Ìš, nÌš, Å‹Ìš
* /l/ can be heard as retroflex
in word-final positions, and when preceded by a back vowel.
* /s/ can be pronounced as
ƒwhen between two /i/ vowel sounds.
* /ɾ/ can also be heard as a trill
when in word-final positions.
* /n/ can be heard as a velar
‹ when preceding velar stops.
‹may also be a loan phoneme.
* The glottal stop
”is heard mostly phonetically, in word-initial position before initial vowels.
* Other sounds /ɦ, x, z/ may also occur as a result of Arabic and Indonesian loanwords.
Vowels
* Other sounds /ɪ, ʊ/ are considered archiphonemes, and can also phonetically occur as a result of /i, u/ within vowel clusters.
Tone
In Ma'ya both
tone and
stress are lexically
distinctive.
This means both the stress and the pitch of a word may affect its meaning. The stress and tone are quite independent from one another, in contrast to their occurrence in
Swedish
Swedish or ' may refer to:
Anything from or related to Sweden, a country in Northern Europe. Or, specifically:
* Swedish language, a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Sweden and Finland
** Swedish alphabet, the official alphabet used by ...
and
Serbo-Croatian. The language has three
tonemes (high, rising and falling). Out of over a thousand Austronesian languages, there are only a dozen with lexical tone; in this case it appears to be a remnant of shift from
Papuan languages.
Lexical tone is found only in final syllables.
[Arnold, Laura. 2018. â]
A preliminary archaeology of tone in Raja Ampat
€™. In Antoinette Schapper, ed. ''Contact and substrate in the languages of Wallacea'', Part 2. NUSA 64: 7–37.
See also
*
Matbat language
Matbat is a heavily Papuan-influenced Austronesian language spoken in West Papua, Indonesia, on the island of Misool, Raja Ampat islands. Its dialects are ''Magey'' and ''Tomolol''. Similar to the neighboring Ma'ya language, Matbat is one of a ...
, a neighboring language with more extreme Papuan influence and five tones.
References
Further reading
*
{{Austronesian languages
South Halmahera–West New Guinea languages
Languages of western New Guinea
Tonal languages in non-tonal families