Anjam

Last Updated: 2020-06-26

Background

Language Family: Trans-New Guinea / Madang-Adelbert Range / Madang / Rai Coast / Mindjim

• Anjam is spoken in the Madang province of Papua New Guinea.

Phonology

Consonants

• /j/ and /w/ are considered consonants in non-syllabic positions (i.e. in the onset or coda) (D. J. Rucker 1990, 2).

	Place of Articulation
Manner of Articulation	Bilabial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Uvular
Stops	p b	t d		k ɡ	q
Affricates		dʑ
Fricatives		s
Nasals	m	n	ɲ	ŋ
Trills		r
Approximants		l	j	w
Note: For phonemes that share a cell, those on the left are voiceless and those on the right are voiced.

Vowels

	Front	Central	Back
High	i		u
Mid	e		o
Low		a

Alphabet

• A large percentage of the corpus (roughly 20%) seems to consist of ⟨ý⟩; however, it is unclear what this grapheme represents. At first glance, we thought it indicated stress or phonetic vowel length; however, stress is not orthographically marked and the acute accent only appears atop this one grapheme (R. Rucker 2000, 4). Looking deeper, we found that it’s seemingly present only in scripture (“Yesus Aqa Anjam Bole” 2013), so we have opted not to include it.
• Note: /ŋ/ is not represented in the Crúbadán corpus.

Grapheme	Phoneme
a	/a/
b	/b/
d	/d/
e	/e/
g	/ɡ/
i	/i/
j	/dʑ/
k	/k/
l	/l/
m	/m/
n	/n/
ñ	/ɲ/
ŋ	/ŋ/
o	/o/
p	/p/
q	/q/
r	/r/
s	/s/
t	/t/
u	/u/
w	/w/
y	/j/

Syllable Structure

• Syllables in Anjam follow the order of (C)(C)V(V)(C)(C) (R. Rucker 2000, 4).

Misc. Rules

• /p/ and /b/ neutralize to /p/ word finally (R. Rucker 2000, 4).
• /dʑ/ devoices word-finally (R. Rucker 2000, 4).
• /i/ deletes when followed by /r/ across a morpheme boundary (R. Rucker 2000, 28).

References

Rucker, Diane J. 1990. Anjam Phonology Essentials.

Rucker, Robert. 2000. “Organized Phonology Data.”

“Yesus Aqa Anjam Bole.” 2013. Wycliffe Bible Translators, Inc.