Wandamen language
| Wandamen | |
|---|---|
| Wamesa | |
| Native to | Indonesia |
| Region | Cenderawasih Bay |
|
Native speakers
|
5,000 (1993) |
|
Austronesian
|
|
| Dialects |
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | wand1267 |
Wandamen is the commonly used name for an Austronesian language of Indonesian New Guinea, spoken across the neck of the Doberai Peninsula or Bird's Head. However, several speakers of the Windesi dialect have stated that 'Wandamen' and 'Wondama' refer to a dialect spoken around the Wandamen Bay, studied by early missionaries and linguists from SIL. They affirm that the language as a whole is called 'Wamesa', the dialects of which are Wandamen, Windesi, and Bintuni.ga
There are five contrastive vowels in Wandamen, as is typical of Austronesian languages. These vowels are shown in the tables below.
Word
Gloss
Five diphthongs appear in Wandamen: /au/, /ai/, /ei/, /oi/, and /ui/. Two-vowel and three-vowel clusters are also common in Wandamen. Almost all VV-clusters contain at least one high vowel, and at least every other vowel in a larger cluster must be a high vowel.
Cluster
Word(s)
Gloss
There are 14 consonants in Wandamen, three of which are marginal (shown in parentheses in the table below).
Labial, coronal and velar places of articulation are contrastive in Wandamen. Coronal plosives sound relatively dental and may therefore be referred to as alveolar or alveo-dental until palatography can be executed to corroborate this. Lateral /l/ and affricate /d͡ʒ/ appear only in loanwords, while all other sounds occur in native Wandamen words. The voiced velar fricative /g/ is a marginal phoneme because it only appears following /ŋ/.
The coronal tap and trill are in free variation, though the trill tends to occur more in word-initial or word-final position and in careful speech.
Place and manner contrasts as described above are supported by the minimal and near-minimal pairs found in the following table. Where possible, Wandamen words have been selected to show native (non-loan) phonemes in the environment /C[labial]a_a/.
Velar plosive [g] only appears following [ŋ], and [ŋ] can only appear without a following [g] if it is stem-initial.
There are no underlying glides in Wandamen, [j] and [w] are allophones of the vowel phonemes /i/ and /u/. This phonetic alternation is obligatory, permitted, or prohibited, depending upon environment.
High vowels must become glides word-initially preceding a vowel or intervocalically. They may optionally become glides when adjacent to a single vowel. Finally, high vowels never become glides between two consonants, depriving the syllable of a nucleus. Nor do glides appear word-initially preceding a consonant or word-finally following a consonant, in which case the syllable structure would be at odds with the Sonority Sequencing Principle.
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