Mauwake

Last Updated: 2020-06-30

Background

Language Family: Trans-New Guinea / Madang-Adelbert Range / Adelbert Range / Pihom-Isumrud-Mugil / Pihom / Kumilan

• Mauwake is spoken in the Madang Province of Papua New Guinea.

Phonology

Consonants

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

Vowels

• Vowel length is contrastive in word-initial syllables (Berghäll 2015, 33–34). Long vowels are represented by duplicate graphemes.
  • Long vowels are retained in words when affixation or reduplication occurs (Berghäll 2015, 42–43). For example, in the word “mika-puukiman,” the long /uː/ that is present word-initially in the root “puukiman” is maintained even when the prefix “mika” is added. This is worth noting because the Crúbadán corpus includes hyphens indicating morpheme boundaries.
• Adjacent vowels are interpreted as complex nuclei when the second vowel is of the same articulatory height or higher than that of the first vowel (Berghäll 2015, 40).
  • /u/ is interpreted as having an articulatory height lower than that of /i/, resulting in the diphthong /ui/.

	Front	Central	Back
High	i		u
Mid	e		o
Low		a

Diphthongs
/ai/, /ae/, /ao/, /au/, /ui/

Alphabet

Grapheme	Phoneme
a	/a/
b	/b/
d	/d/
e	/e/
f	/ɸ/
g	/ɡ/
i	/i/
k	/k/
l	/l/
m	/m/
n	/n/
o	/o/
p	/p/
r	/r/
s	/s/
t	/t/
u	/u/
w	/w/
y	/j/

Syllable Structure

• Syllables in Mauwake follow the order of (C)V(V)(C), with CV being the most frequent structure (Berghäll 2015, 39).

Lenition Rules

• /r/ varies freely with [ɾ] (Berghäll 2015, 27).

Misc. Rules

• In some dialects, /j/ is realized as [ʒ] (Berghäll 2015, 28).
• /w/ may be realized as either [v] or [β] (ibid.).
• Vowels preceding stressed syllables may be elided (Berghäll 2015, 41).

References

Berghäll, Liisa. 2015. A Grammar of Mauwake. Language Science Press.