Kirikiri (Kirira), or Faia (after its two dialects), is a
Lakes Plain language
The Lakes Plain languages are a family of Papuan languages, spoken in the Lakes Plain of Indonesian New Guinea. They are notable for being heavily tonal and for their lack of nasal consonants.
Classification
The Lakes Plain languages were tenta ...
of
Irian Jaya
New Guinea (; Hiri Motu: ''Niu Gini''; id, Papua, or , historically ) is the world's second-largest island with an area of . Located in Oceania in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, the island is separated from Australia by the wide Torres ...
,
Indonesia
Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania between the Indian and Pacific oceans. It consists of over 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi, and parts of Borneo and New Guine ...
. It is spoken in Dofu Wahuka and Paniai villages.
Phonology
Kirikiri does not have many consonant
phoneme
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west o ...
s, but there are many consonant
allophone
In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is a set of multiple possible spoken soundsor ''phones''or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, (as in ''s ...
s, as in:
*/ɸ/
¸, h, β, p*/t/
, d
The comma is a punctuation mark that appears in several variants in different languages. It has the same shape as an apostrophe or single closing quotation mark () in many typefaces, but it differs from them in being placed on the baseline ...
*/k/
, ɡ, x, ɣ*/b/
, β, m, mb*/d/
, n, nd, l, ɾ*/s/
, z, ʃ, ʒ
Kirikiri, like
Doutai, has the fricativized high vowels iʼ and uʼ. There are 7 vowels:
:
References
Tariku languages
Languages of western New Guinea
{{papuan-lang-stub