Tobati, or Yotafa, is an Austronesian language spoken in Jayapura Bay in Papua province,

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 was once thought to be a

Papuan language 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 ...

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

closed syllables A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological "bu ...

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 PoA. 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 Sarmi–Jayapura languages