Amal is a language spoken along the border of
Sandaun Province
Sandaun Province (formerly West Sepik Province) is the northwesternmost mainland Provinces of Papua New Guinea, province of Papua New Guinea (also known as home of the sunset). It covers an area of 35,920 km2 (13868 m2) and has a population ...
and
East Sepik Province
East Sepik is a province in Papua New Guinea. Its capital is Wewak. East Sepik has an estimated population of 450,530 people (2011 census) and is 43,426 km square in size. Its density is 10.4 people per square kilometer.
History
Cherubim D ...
,
Papua New Guinea
Papua New Guinea, officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea, is an island country in Oceania that comprises the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and offshore islands in Melanesia, a region of the southwestern Pacific Ocean n ...
, along the
Wagana River near the confluence with Wanibe Creek.
[ Foley (2018) classifies Amal as a primary branch of the ]Sepik languages
The Sepik or Sepik River languages are a language family, family of some 50 Papuan languages spoken in the Sepik River, Sepik river basin of northern Papua New Guinea, proposed by Donald Laycock in 1965 in a somewhat more limited form than prese ...
, though it is quite close to Kalou.
Pronouns
Pronouns are:
:
Cognates
Amal cognates with Sepik languages
The Sepik or Sepik River languages are a language family, family of some 50 Papuan languages spoken in the Sepik River, Sepik river basin of northern Papua New Guinea, proposed by Donald Laycock in 1965 in a somewhat more limited form than prese ...
are:
*''tal'' ‘woman’
*''yan'' ‘child’
*''lal'' ‘tongue’ < proto-Sepik *ta(w)r
*''mi'' ‘breast’ < proto-Sepik *muk
*''waplo'' ‘liver’
*''nip'' ‘blood’
*''yen'' ‘egg’
*''ak'' ‘house’
Foley (2018) notes that there appears to be somewhat more lexical similarities between Amal and the Tama languages, but does not consider them to form a group with each other.
Vocabulary
The following basic vocabulary words of Amal are from Laycock (1968), as cited in the Trans-New Guinea database:
:
References
{{Languages of Papua New Guinea
Yellow–Wanibe languages
Languages of Sandaun Province
Languages of East Sepik Province