Sio (also spelled Siâ) is an Austronesian language spoken by about 3,500 people on the north coast of the

Huon Peninsula Huon Peninsula is a large rugged peninsula on the island of New Guinea in Morobe Province, eastern Papua New Guinea. It is named after French explorer Jean-Michel Huon de Kermadec. The peninsula is dominated by the steep Saruwaged and Finister ...

Morobe Province Morobe Province is a province on the northern coast of Papua New Guinea. The provincial capital and largest city is Lae. The province covers 33,705 km2, with a population of 674,810 (2011 census), and since the division of Southern Highlands P ...

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 ...

. According to Harding and Clark (1994), Sio speakers lived in a single village on a small offshore island until the

Pacific War The Pacific War, sometimes called the Asia–Pacific War, was the theater of World War II that was fought in Asia, the Pacific Ocean, the Indian Ocean, and Oceania. It was geographically the largest theater of the war, including the vast ...

, after which they established four villages on the nearby coast: Lambutina, Basakalo, Laelo, and Balambu. Nambariwa, another coastal village a few miles to the east, is also Sio-speaking. Michael Stolz (d. 1931) of the German Lutheran Neuendettelsauer Mission arrived in 1910, and Sio villagers converted en masse in 1919. "Since then the Sio have produced many Lutheran evangelists, lay mission workers, teachers, and churchmen" (Harding and Clark 1994: 31). However, the Sio villages were assigned to the mostly Papuan

Kâte language Kâte is a Papuan language spoken by about 6,000 people in the Finschhafen District of Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea. It is part of the Finisterre–Huon branch of the Trans–New Guinea language family (McElhanon 1975, Ross 2005). It was a ...

circuit, rather than to the mostly Austronesian Jabêm language circuit. The first Sio orthography was based on that of Kâte, and was used in the publication in 1953 of ''Miti Kanaŋo'', a book containing Bible stories, Luther's Small Catechism, and 160 hymns, all in the Sio language. Stolz was the principal translator, although many of the hymns were composed by native speakers of Sio, and the whole volume was edited by L. Wagner, Stolz's successor.

Phonology

Vowels (orthographic)

The low back vowel is pronounced � All vowels vary in length, but length is rarely contrastive. Monosyllabic nouns and adjectives tend to be lengthened more than monosyllabic verbs, adverbs, or prepositions. Word stress generally falls on the penultimate syllable.

Consonants (current orthography)

When Stephen and Dawn Clark of

SIL International SIL International (formerly known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics) is an evangelical Christian non-profit organization whose main purpose is to study, develop and document languages, especially those that are lesser-known, in order to ex ...

began to work with Sio speakers in 1985, the latter expressed a desire to revise their orthography to make it more similar to what people had become familiar with in

Tok Pisin Tok Pisin (,Laurie Bauer, 2007, ''The Linguistics Student’s Handbook'', Edinburgh ; Tok Pisin ), often referred to by English speakers as "New Guinea Pidgin" or simply Pidgin, is a creole language spoken throughout Papua New Guinea. It is an ...

and

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

. The eventual results are tabulated in the following chart. The community at first resisted writing the labialized consonants as digraphs, since they clearly regarded them as unit

phonemes 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 ...

. They insisted on writing the labialization as superscripts rather than as separate segments. However, by 1992, after many materials were produced in the new orthography, Sio teachers and church circuit officers approved writing the indicator of labialization on the same line, thus accepting ''mw'' instead of ''mʷ'' (Clark 1993).

Consonants (original orthography)

The first orthography of Sio was devised by the missionary Michael Stolz, based on that of the

, which the German Lutheran mission used as a church and school

lingua franca A lingua franca (; ; for plurals see ), also known as a bridge language, common language, trade language, auxiliary language, vehicular language, or link language, is a language systematically used to make communication possible between groups ...

among speakers of

Papuan languages The Papuan languages are the non- Austronesian and non-Australian languages spoken on the western Pacific island of New Guinea in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, as well as neighbouring islands, by around 4 million people. It is a strictly geogra ...

. (Sio appears to have been assigned to the wrong language circuit.) The linguist

Otto Dempwolff Otto Dempwolff (25 May 1871 in Pillau, Province of Prussia – 27 November 1938, in Hamburg) was a German physician, linguist and anthropologist who specialized in the study of the Austronesian language family. Initially trained as a physician, ...

served as mentor and adviser to all the German missionaries in New Guinea on language questions. After Stolz died, Dempwolff analyzed his language materials and compiled a short sketch (1936). His analysis differs in several key respects from that of Clark (1993), who has had firsthand experience with the language. The most striking difference pertains to the labiovelars, which Dempwolff analyzed as coarticulated , , , , but which Clark finds to be labialized labials (rounded on release) , , , (The boldfaced q in the table below here stands for a curly ''q'' with hooked serifs that cannot properly be rendered online.) But Clark also found that ''g-'' and ''-c-'' were positional variants of the same phoneme; that trilled is just a conditioned variant of flapped ; and that the approximants are conditioned variants of their corresponding vowels.

Morphology

Pronouns

Free pronouns

References

* Clark, Dawn S. (1993). "The phonology of the Sio language

In John M. Clifton (ed.), Phonologies of Austronesian languages 2, 25-70. Data Papers on Papua New Guinea Languages, 40. Ukarumpa: Summer Institute of Linguistics. * Dempwolff, Otto (1936). Bemerkungen über die Siâ-Sprache. Zu den Aufzeichnungen von Missionar Michael Stolz. (Copied out by L. Wagner, 15/7/1936.) Ms. 13 pp. * Harding, Thomas G., and Stephen A. Clark (1994). The Sio story of Male. ''Pacific Studies'' 17, no. 4, 29-51. * Stolz, M., trans.; Wagner, H., ed. (1953). Miti Kanaŋo: Siŋga Wa Waseki Wa. Madang: Lutheran Mission Press.

External links

* Paradisec has two collections of Arthur Capell, Arthur Cappell's materials
AC1AC2
and one collection of Malcolm Ross's materials
MR1
that include Sio language materials.
The New Testament and Psalms in the Sio Language of Papua New Guinea
{{Austronesian languages Ngero–Vitiaz languages Languages of Morobe Province