Vanimo (Wanimo, Manimo) is a Skou language of

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 ...

which extends from Leitre to Wutung on the Papua New Guinea - Indonesian border.

Phonology

The Duso dialect of Vanimo is unusual in not having any phonemic

velar consonant Velar consonants are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue (the dorsum) against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth (also known as the "velum"). Since the velar region of the roof of the mouth is relativel ...

s, though it does have phonetic .Malcolm Ross, 1980, "Some elements of Vanimo, a New Guinea tone language" The vowels (Dumo dialect) are, All occur nasalized, varying phonetically between a nasal vowel and a vowel followed by consonantal . Nasal /u/ may be realized as a syllabic . In Dumo, there are no velar consonants apart from this (and also as noted below). The other consonants are, Consonant clusters are /pl, bl, ml, ɲv, hv, hm, hn, hɲ, hj/ (hv and hm may be allophones). /ɲv/ is pronounced . There are no coda consonants apart from . do occur in Dusö dialect. They correspond to or zero in Dumo. Dumo syllables may have either a 'high' or a 'long' tone. There is strict syllable timing, a 'long'-toned syllable takes the entire time allotted for a syllable, whereas with a high-tone or atonic syllable, there is a slight gap between it and the following syllable. Ross writes high tone with a ''grave'' accent, and long tone with an acute accent. A syllable with a nasal vowel / coda is not necessarily long, it may have any of the three tones.

Vocabulary

The majority of Vanimo words contain either one, two, three, or four syllables.

Personal pronouns

The pronoun system in Vanimo accommodates its grammatical gender system. The "masculine" and "feminine" 2nd and 3rd person pronouns, along with their primary uses for referring to people, can also be used for non-animate nouns or common nouns in correspondance with their grammatical gender. An example of this would be the pronoun ''ébu'', which can be used both to mean ''you'' (in which all three members of the group being referred to as ''you'' are female), or to mean ''you'' ( in which the group being referred to as ''you'', is made up of three common nouns that are all grammatically female). In the table below ''?'' is used to represent unknown or undocumented words.

Phonology

Vocabulary

Personal pronouns

References

Further reading