Yei (Yey, Jei, Je, Yei-Nan) is a

Papuan language The Papuan languages are the non-Austronesian languages spoken on the western Pacific island of New Guinea, as well as neighbouring islands in Indonesia, Solomon Islands, and East Timor. It is a strictly geographical grouping, and does not imply a ...

spoken along the upper reaches of the

Maro River The Maro River also known as Sungai Merauke and Merauke-rivier, Merauki River flows in Merauke Regency, Papua, Indonesia. It is located just to the west of the Bensbach River of Western Province, Papua New Guinea. Hydrology The Maro flows f ...

, in the

Merauke Merauke is a large town (''kelurahan'') and an administrative district (''distrik'') in Merauke Regency of South Papua Province, Indonesia. It is also the administrative centre of Merauke Regency, and is considered to be the easternmost city in I ...

South Papua South Papua, officially the South Papua Province (), is an Indonesian Provinces of Indonesia, province located in the southern portion of Western New Guinea, Papua, following the borders of the Papuan customary region of Anim Ha. Formally establ ...

, Indonesia. The Upper and Lower Yey dialects are only

mutually intelligible In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between different but related language varieties in which speakers of the different varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. Mutual intellig ...

with difficulty.

Distribution

According to Evans (2018), Yei is spoken in the villages of Po, Torai, Bupul, Tanas, and Kwel in , in eastern

Merauke Regency Merauke Regency is a Regencies of Indonesia, regency in the far south of the Indonesian province of South Papua. It covers an area of 45,013.35 km2, and had a population of 195,716 at the 2010 CensusBiro Pusat Statistik, Jakarta, 2011. and 2 ...

, Indonesia.

References

Yam languages Languages of Western New Guinea {{papuan-lang-stub