Bunama

Last updated: 2019-10-29

Background

Language family: Austronesia / Malayo-Polynesian / Central-Eastern / Eastern Malayo-Polynesian / Oceanic / Western Oceanic / Papuan Tip / Nuclear / North Papuan Mainland-D’Entrecasteaux / Dobu-Duau

• Bunama is spoken in the Milne Bay province of Papua New Guinea.

Phonology

Consonants

	Place of Articulation
Manner of Articulation	Labial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Stops (plain)	p b	t d		k ɡ	ʔ
Stops (labialized)	pʷ bʷ			ɡʷ	ʔʷ
Fricatives		s			h hʷ
Nasals	m mʷ	n
Approximants	w	l	j
Note: For phonemes that share a cell, those on the left are voiceless and those on the right are voiced. The exceptions are the glottal fricatives (both voiceless) and (bi)labial nasals (both voiced), where the phonemes on the left are plain and the phonemes on the right are labialized.

Vowels

• Although vowels may appear consecutively, they are not always interpreted as complex phonemes, so they will not be accounted for as diphthongs in the rules (Leckie and Hughes 1976, 7–8).

	Front	Central	Back
High	i		u
Mid	e		o
Low		a

Alphabet

Grapheme	Phoneme	Comment
a	/a/
b	/b/
d	/d/
e	/e/
g	/ɡ/
h	/h/
i	/i/
k	/k/
l	/l/
m	/m/
n	/n/
o	/o/
p	/p/
s	/s/
t	/t/
u	/u/
w	/w/
y	/j/
’	/ʔ/	the corresponding uppercase grapheme is ⟨C⟩ (Leckie and Hughes 1976, 69)
Digraph
bw	/bʷ/
gw	/ɡʷ/
hw	/hʷ/
mw	/mʷ/
pw	/pʷ/
’w	/ʔʷ/

Syllable Structure

• Syllables in Bunama consist of the following structures (Leckie and Hughes 1976, 61):
  • CV
  • CVC
  • V
  • VC

Lenition Rules

• /h/ is often deleted intervocalically (Leckie and Hughes 1976, 7).

Misc. Rules

• In some instances, the labialized consonants can occur in free variation with their non-labialized counterparts (Leckie and Hughes 1976, 15).
• The labialized consonants seem to only appear preceding /a/ and /e/ (Leckie and Hughes 1976, 15).

References

Leckie, Isabel, and Ngaire Hughes. 1976. “Bunama Phonemics.” Summer Institute of Linguistics.