Kunimaipa

Last Updated: 2020-06-30

Background

Language Family: Trans-New Guinea / Main Section / Eastern / Central and Southeastern / Goilalan / Kunimaipa

• Kunimaipa is spoken in the Central, Morobe, and Oro provinces of Papua New Guinea.

Phonology

Consonants

	Place of Articulation
Manner of Articulation	Labial	Alveolar	Velar
Stops	p b	t d	k ɡ
Fricatives	β	s z	ɣ
Nasals	m	n	ŋ
Trills		r
Approximants		l
Note: For phonemes that share a cell, those on the left are voiceless and those on the right are voiced.

Vowels

• Although diphthongs are prevalent in the Kunimaipa language, such vowels also appear in sequences (Pence 1966), thus, diphthongs will not be accounted for nor transcribed (p. 55).

	Front	Central	Back
High	i		u
Mid	e		o
Low		a

Alphabet

• The orthography does include the symbols ⟨ë⟩, ⟨ï⟩, ⟨ö⟩, and ⟨ü⟩, representing silent vowels in word-final positions (Geary 1992, 2). However, this does not appear to be phonemic, and rather a phonological devoicing process, so I will transcribe such graphemes as voiced.
• Repetition of vowel graphemes is also represented in the orthography (Pence 1966, 64). Given that vowel length is non-contrastive, it is unclear what such sequences indicate, whether it be phonetic length or independently pronounced vowels. Pence (1966) does describe such occurrences as vowel sequences, leading me to believe that each vowel is pronounced independently, so I will transcribe them as such.

Grapheme	Phoneme
a	/a/
b	/b/
d	/d/
e	/e/
g	/ɡ/
h	/ɣ/
i	/i/
k	/k/
l	/l/
m	/m/
n	/n/
ñ	/ŋ/
o	/o/
p	/p/
r	/r/
s	/s/
t	/t/
u	/u/
v	/β/
z	/z/

Syllable Structure

• Syllables in Kunimaipa follow the order of (C)V(C) (Pence 1966, 56), with stress normally occurring on the penultimate syllable (Geary 1992, 3).

Lenition Rules

• /b/, /d/, and /ɡ/ can spirantize word-medially and word-finally in fast speech (Geary 1992, 3; Pence 1966, 60).
• /p/ and /k/ can be pronounced with frication or fully spirantize word-medially (Geary 1992, 4).
• /β/ and /z/ may be realized as glides [w] and [j] (Pence 1966, 60).

Misc. Rules

• /b/, /d/, and /ɡ/ may be voiceless word-initially (Geary 1992, 3; Pence 1966, 60).
• /ɣ/ is said to be backed (Pence 1966, 61; Geary 1992, 4).

References

Geary, Elaine. 1992. “Kunimaipa Organised Phonology Data.”

Pence, Alan. 1966. “Kunimaipa Phonology: Hierarchical Levels.” In Papers in New Guinea Linguistics 5, 7:49–97. Pacific Linguistics, Series a. Canberra: Australian National University.