Tobati, or Yotafa, is an

Austronesian language The Austronesian languages ( ) are a language family widely spoken throughout Maritime Southeast Asia, parts of Mainland Southeast Asia, Madagascar, the islands of the Pacific Ocean and Taiwan (by Taiwanese indigenous peoples). They are spoken b ...

spoken in

Jayapura Jayapura (formerly Hollandia (1910-1962), Kota Baru (1962-1963), Soekarnopura (1963-1968)) is the capital city, capital and List of Indonesian cities by population, largest city of the Indonesian Provinces of Indonesia, province of Papua (provi ...

Bay in Papua province,

Indonesia Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania, between the Indian Ocean, Indian and Pacific Ocean, Pacific oceans. Comprising over List of islands of Indonesia, 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, ...

. It was once thought to be a

Papuan language The Papuan languages are the non-Austronesian languages spoken on the western Pacific island of New Guinea, as well as neighbouring islands in Indonesia, Solomon Islands, and East Timor. It is a strictly geographical grouping, and does not imply a ...

. Notably, Tobati displays a very rare object–subject–verb word order.Crowley, Terry; Lynch, John; Ross, Malcolm (2002). The Oceanic Languages. London and New York: Routledge. pp. 186-88

Phonology

also shows allophony as . However, it does not behave as a stop (see

below Below may refer to: *Earth *Ground (disambiguation) *Soil *Floor * Bottom (disambiguation) *Less than *Temperatures below freezing *Hell or underworld People with the surname * Ernst von Below (1863–1955), German World War I general * Fred Belo ...

). Tobati has a five-vowel system of / /, realized as / / in

closed syllables A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''margins'', which are ...

Phonotactics

Tobati permits three consonants in the onset, and at most a single consonant or a nasal-stop cluster in the coda. Nasal-stop clusters only permit a nasal and a stop of the same

place of articulation In articulatory phonetics, the place of articulation (also point of articulation) of a consonant is an approximate location along the vocal tract where its production occurs. It is a point where a constriction is made between an active and a pa ...

. For the sequence, becomes dental []. Neither the bilabial, consisting of and the allophone , nor palatal nasal-stop clusters distinguish voice (i.e. they are and respectively). The sequence voices to .

References

{{Languages of Indonesia Languages of Western New Guinea Object–subject–verb languages Sarmi–Jayapura languages Severely endangered languages