The Yalë language, also known as Yadë, Nagatman, or Nagatiman, is spoken in northwestern

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 ...

. It may be related to the

Kwomtari languages Kwomtari is the eponymous language of the Kwomtari languages, Kwomtari family of Papua New Guinea. Spencer (2008) is a short grammar of Kwomtari. The language has an SOV constituent order and nominative–accusative alignment. Both subjects and ...

, but Palmer (2018) classifies it as a

language isolate A language isolate is a language that has no demonstrable genetic relationship with any other languages. Basque in Europe, Ainu and Burushaski in Asia, Sandawe in Africa, Haida and Zuni in North America, Kanoê in South America, and Tiwi ...

. There were 600 speakers in 1991 and 30 monolinguals at an unrecorded date. Yalë is spoken in Nagatiman () and several other villages of

Green River Rural LLG Green River Rural LLG is a local-level government (LLG) of Sandaun Province, Papua New Guinea. It is located along the border with Keerom Regency, Papua Province and Pegunungan Bintang Regency, Highland Papua Province, in Indonesia Ind ...

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 ...

. Foley (2018) reports a total of six villages. Yalë is in extensive trade and contact with Busa, a likely language isolate spoken just to the south. Yalë has complex verbal inflection and SOV word order.

Phonology

Aannested, Aidan (2020) gives the following phonology for Yadë (Yalë): * "dd" is pronounced as a trilled * See the source for more information regarding allophones- the ones listed are just the common occurrences. * Each vowel has a wide range of possible realizations, most notably /u/, which has: ** /y/, /ʉ/, /ʊ/, and /u̟/

Pronouns

Pronouns are: :

Grammar

Verbal conjugation affixes are: *-''d'': generic marker *-''t'': transitive marker *-''b'': intransitive marker Most nouns are not pluralized, and only nouns with human or animate reference or with high local salience may be pluralized using the suffix -''rɛ'' ~ -''re'': *''nɛba-re'' /child-PL/ ‘children’ *''ama-re'' /dog-PL/ ‘dogs’ *''dife-rɛ'' /village-PL/ ‘villages’ Other plural nouns are irregular: *''aya-nino'' /father-PL/ ‘fathers’ *''mise'' ‘woman’, ''one'' ‘women’

Vocabulary

The following basic vocabulary words are from Conrad and Dye (1975), as cited in the Trans-New Guinea database: :

References

External links