Background

Language Family: West Papuan / Yapen

Also referred to as Yava and Mantembu, Yawa is spoken in the Papua province of Indonesia.
Yawa has incorporated many Indonesian loanwords, which have mostly been adapted to Yawa’s phonological system (Jones 1986, 25).
The linguistic classification of Yawa is somewhat suspect; some speculate it (or Yapen) is an independent language family.

Phonology

The only documentation regarding the phonology of Yawa is provided by Jones (1986), which is said to reflect only the Sarawandori dialect (Jones 1968, 33); however, he states that all dialects of Yawa are incredibly similar.

Consonants

	Place of Articulation
Manner of Articulation	Labial	Alveolar	Postalveolar	Alveopalatal	Velar	Glottal
Stops	p b	t d				k
Affricates			ʃ	dʑ
Fricatives		s
Nasals	m	n			ɲ
Flaps		ɾ
Approximants	w				j
Note: For phonemes that share a cell, those on the left are voiceless and those on the right are voiced.

Vowels

Most of the diphthongs that occur are realized as vowel-glide sequences. /ui/ is the only exception, where it’s realized either as a glide plus a vowel or a vowel plus a glide (Jones 1986, 17).
- These diphthongs may be realized merely as vowel sequences (Jones 1986, 17); therefore, no rules will be included to account for them.

	Front	Central	Back
High	i		u
Mid	e		o
Low		a

Alphabet

The most comprehensive account of the Yawa orthography is provided by Jones (1986), which is what the alphabet below is heavily patterned after. However, the same author also provides another account about the transcription (Jones, Paai, and Paai 1989). In addition to the graphemes from the 1986 source, the 1989 source includes two additional graphemes ⟨ng⟩ and ⟨v⟩ (p. xvii). The former is said to represent /ŋ/, but there isn’t a clear description about the transcription of ⟨v⟩, which is “pronounced like in English except with both lips close together.”
- Given that this source provides the pronunciation (i.e. not specific about the underlying phonemes), it could be inferred that /ŋ/ is allophonic, just like the realization of [ɡ] (see Misc. Rules; Jones 1986, 6). Furthermore, looking at the words contained in Crúbadán, all instances of ⟨ng⟩ are followed by a velar stop. Therefore, it is likely that ⟨ng⟩ represents the phoneme /n/ that has assimilated to the place of the following velar stop.
- Based on the description of ⟨v⟩, it appears that the pronunciation is somewhere between that of /v/ and /w/, leading me to believe that there could be some free variation with the two (ex. Yawa is understood as both Yawa and Yava). Given that Jones (1986) doesn’t provide a corresponding phoneme for ⟨v⟩, I have chosen to use /w/.

Grapheme	Phoneme	Comment
a	/a/
b	/b/
d	/d/
e	/e/
g	/dʑ/
i	/i/
j	/dʑ/
k	/k/
m	/m/
n	/n/
o	/o/
p	/p/
r	/ɾ/
s	/s/
t	/t/
u	/u/
v	/w/
w	/w/
y	/j/
Digraph
ng	/n/	precedes velar stops; realized as [ŋ]
ny	/ɲ/
sy	/ʃ/

Syllable Structure

The syllable structures permitted in Yawa include (Jones 1986, 2):
- CV
- CCV
- CVV
- CCVV
- V
- VV
Consonant clusters must consist of a homorganic nasal followed by a stop or a fricative (Jones 1986, 15).

Misc. Rules

Non-palatal consonants (excluding /t/) are labialized when preceded by /u/ and followed by another vowel (Jones 1986, 5).
/w/ occurs in free variation with [β] (Jones 1986, 6).
/dʑ/ is realized as [ɡ] following /u/ (ibid.).
Unstressed /u/, word-initially, is deleted preceding a lone consonant (Jones 1986, 8).

References

Jones, Larry B. 1968. “The Dialects of Yawa.” In Papers in New Guinea Linguistics No. 25, edited by S. A. Wurm, 31–68. Pacific Linguistics A 74. The Australian National University, Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.

Jones, Linda K. 1986. “Yawa Phonology.” In Papers in New Guinea Linguistics No. 25, edited by S. A. Wurm, 1–30. Pacific Linguistics A 74. The Australian National University, Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. http://sealang.net/archives/pl/pdf/PL-A74.1.pdf.

Jones, Linda K., Zeth Paai, and Yohanes Paai. 1989. “Pronunciation of Yawa.” Summer Institute of Linguistics, 4.

Yawa

Emily Strand