Uneapa (often called "Bali", natively ''Uniapa'') is an

Oceanic language The approximately 450 Oceanic languages are a branch of the Austronesian languages. The area occupied by speakers of these languages includes Polynesia, as well as much of Melanesia and Micronesia. Though covering a vast area, Oceanic languages ...

spoken by about 10,000 people on the small island of Bali ( Uneapa), north of

West New Britain West New Britain is a province of Papua New Guinea on the islands of New Britain. The provincial capital is Kimbe. The area of the province is 20,387 km² with a population of 264,264 as of the 2011 census. The province's only land border is w ...

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 ...

. It is perhaps a dialect of neighboring Vitu. Uneapa is one of the most conservative Oceanic languages, having retained most of

Proto-Oceanic Proto-Oceanic (abbr. ''POc'') is a proto-language that historical linguists since Otto Dempwolff have reconstructed as the hypothetical common ancestor of the Oceanic subgroup of the Austronesian language family. Proto-Oceanic is a descendant ...

's final consonants with an

echo vowel An echo vowel, also known as a synharmonic vowel, is a paragogic vowel that repeats the final vowel in a word in speech. For example, in Chumash, when a word ends with a glottal stop and comes at the end of an intonation unit, the final vowel is r ...

, such as ''*Rumaq'' "house" > ''rumaka'' and ''*saqat'' "bad" > ''zaɣata''. A sketch grammar of this language was published in 2002 by Malcolm Ross.

Name

The name ''Uneapa'' is a variation of the native name ''Uniapa'' for the

island An island (or isle) is an isolated piece of habitat that is surrounded by a dramatically different habitat, such as water. Very small islands such as emergent land features on atolls can be called islets, skerries, cays or keys. An island ...

. In Vitu, the same island is called ''Unea''. Both names can come from a proto-form ''*Uniap'' or ''*Uneap'', reflecting the addition of an echo vowel in Uneapa and the regular loss of final consonants in Vitu. The alternative name ''Bali'', used by foreigners, comes from the term ''bali'' meaning "to be not". It is not related etymologically to the more popular

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 ...

n island called

Bali Bali () is a province of Indonesia and the westernmost of the Lesser Sunda Islands. East of Java and west of Lombok, the province includes the island of Bali and a few smaller neighbouring islands, notably Nusa Penida, Nusa Lembongan, and Nu ...

, which is home to a distantly related language called Balinese.

Classification

Uneapa, together with neighboring Vitu, forms a subgroup within the Meso-Melanesian cluster of the

Oceanic languages The approximately 450 Oceanic languages are a branch of the Austronesian languages. The area occupied by speakers of these languages includes Polynesia, as well as much of Melanesia and Micronesia. Though covering a vast area, Oceanic languages ...

. The two are sometimes considered to be a single language, called Bali-Vitu. However, there are some differences, particularly in their phonemic inventories, retention of final consonants (which is lost in Vitu), pronoun systems, and word choices. In general, Uneapa tends to be more conservative than Vitu in most respects.

Phonology

Phonemically, Uneapa has 5 vowels and 14 consonants. Uneapa has a simple phonotactic structure, either V, CV, VV, CVV. Stress is located at the

penultimate Penult is a linguistics term for the second to last syllable of a word. It is an abbreviation of ''penultimate'', which describes the next-to-last item in a series. The penult follows the antepenult and precedes the ultima. For example, the main ...

syllable. Optionally, clitic-final vowels may be lost, such as underlying ''balitaza'' "is not" becoming ''baltaza''.

Example sentence

The following sentence illustrates the conservatism of Uneapa relative to

. Uneapa: Proto-Oceanic:

References

External links

* Paradisec has a collection of Malcolm Ross's materials
MR1
that include Uneapa language materials. Meso-Melanesian languages Languages of West New Britain Province {{MesoMelanesian-lang-stub