Yapese is a language spoken by the people on the

island An island (or isle) is an isolated piece of habitat that is surrounded by a dramatically different habitat, such as water. Very small islands such as emergent land features on atolls can be called islets, skerries, cays or keys. An island ...

Yap Yap ( yap, Waqaab) traditionally refers to an island group located in the Caroline Islands of the western Pacific Ocean, a part of Yap State. The name "Yap" in recent years has come to also refer to the state within the Federated States of Micr ...

(

Federated States of Micronesia The Federated States of Micronesia (; abbreviated FSM) is an island country in Oceania. It consists of four states from west to east, Yap, Chuuk, Pohnpei and Kosraethat are spread across the western Pacific. Together, the states comprise a ...

). It belongs to the Austronesian languages, more specifically to the

Oceanic Oceanic may refer to: *Of or relating to the ocean *Of or relating to Oceania **Oceanic climate **Oceanic languages **Oceanic person or people, also called "Pacific Islander(s)" Places * Oceanic, British Columbia, a settlement on Smith Island, ...

branch of that family. It has been difficult to classify it further, but Yapese may prove to be one of the

Admiralty Islands languages The Admiralty Islands languages are a group of some thirty Oceanic languages spoken on the Admiralty Islands The Admiralty Islands are an archipelago group of 18 islands in the Bismarck Archipelago, to the north of New Guinea in the South ...

Orthography

Written Yapese uses

Latin script The Latin script, also known as Roman script, is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae, in southern Italy ...

. In Yapese spelling as practiced until the 1970s, the glottal stop was not written with an explicit character. A word-final glottal stop was represented by doubling the final vowel letter.

Glottalization Glottalization is the complete or partial closure of the glottis during the articulation of another sound. Glottalization of vowels and other sonorants is most often realized as creaky voice (partial closure). Glottalization of obstruent consona ...

of consonants was represented with an apostrophe. In the 1970s an orthography was created which uses double vowel letters to represent long vowels; and because of the ambiguity that would occur if the glottal stop was not written, the glottal stop was written with the letter ''q''. This new orthography using the letter ''q'' is not in universal use, but many works and maps about Yap write place names using the new q-orthography.

Phonology

Apart from a couple grammatical forms which are V, syllables are CV or CVC.

Consonants

Yapese is one of the relatively few languages in the world with

ejective In phonetics, ejective consonants are usually voiceless consonants that are pronounced with a glottalic egressive airstream. In the phonology of a particular language, ejectives may contrast with aspirated, voiced and tenuis consonants. Some ...

fricative A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in t ...

s. The Yapese ejective consonants are . There are also glottalised nasals and approximants . In the table below, each

phoneme In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west o ...

is listed to the left of the

grapheme In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest functional unit of a writing system. The word ''grapheme'' is derived and the suffix ''-eme'' by analogy with ''phoneme'' and other names of emic units. The study of graphemes is called ''graphemics' ...

that represents it in Yapese orthography. and only occur in English and Japanese loans ( does occur in native words, however).

Vowels

In the table below, each phoneme is listed to the left of the grapheme that represents it in Yapese orthography.

Grammar

Morphology

Reduplication

Yapese makes use of

reduplication In linguistics, reduplication is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word (or part of it) or even the whole word is repeated exactly or with a slight change. The classic observation on the semantics of reduplication is Edwa ...

for several morphological functions, including deriving

stative According to some linguistics theories, a stative verb is a verb that describes a state of being, in contrast to a dynamic verb, which describes an action. The difference can be categorized by saying that stative verbs describe situations that are ...

adjectives from

inchoative Inchoative aspect (abbreviated or ) is a grammatical aspect, referring to the beginning of a state. It can be found in conservative Indo-European languages such as Latin and Lithuanian, and also in Finnic languages or European derived languages w ...

adjectives, as in (1a–b), as well as to make

diminutives A diminutive is a root word that has been modified to convey a slighter degree of its root meaning, either to convey the smallness of the object or quality named, or to convey a sense of intimacy or endearment. A (abbreviated ) is a word-formati ...

of verbs, as in (2a-b):

Pronouns

Yapese distinguishes between three

numbers A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The original examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. Numbers can be represented in language with number words. More universally, individual numbers can ...

(singular, dual, and plural) and three

persons A person ( : people) is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of property, ...

(first, second, and third), as well as

clusivity In linguistics, clusivity is a grammatical distinction between ''inclusive'' and ''exclusive'' first-person pronouns and verbal morphology, also called ''inclusive " we"'' and ''exclusive "we"''. Inclusive "we" specifically includes the addressee ...

in its personal pronouns.
Yapese Talking Dictionary
was produced b
Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages

References

Bibliography

*Jensen, John Thayer. 1977. Yapese–English Dictionary. (PALI Language Texts: Micronesia.) Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.

External links

Yapese Wordlist at the Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database

* Chepin yuu Waqab ('Events on Yap'). Yapese-language vernacular reader * Yaat nu Waqab ('Tales of Yap'). A Yapese-language vernacular reader * Thaaboeg (this title is a man's name). A Yapese-language vernacular reader * Written materials about Yapese plants and animals archived with Kaipuleohone * Index cards of plant and animal names, labeled 'Carolines nimals' and index cards of plant and animal names, labeled 'Carolines lants' * Paradisec has two collections of

Arthur Capell Arthur Capell (28 March 1902 – 10 August 1986) was an Australian linguist, who made major contributions to the study of Australian languages, Austronesian languages and Papuan languages. Early life Capell was born in Newtown, New South Wales ...

's materials
AC1AC2
, which include Yapese language materials * Paradisec ha
an open access collection of Yapese texts and a dictionary
from John Jensen {{Oceania topic, Languages of Yap Oceanic languages Languages of the Federated States of Micronesia