The Yimas language is spoken by the Yimas people, who populate the Sepik River Basin region of Papua New Guinea. It is spoken primarily in Yimas village (), Karawari Rural LLG, East Sepik Province. It is a member of the Lower-Sepik language family. All 250-300 speakers of Yimas live in two villages along the lower reaches of the Arafundi River, which stems from a tributary of the Sepik River known as the Karawari River.
Yimas is a polysynthetic language with (somewhat) free word order, and is an ergative-absolutive language morphologically but not syntactically, although it has several other case-like relations encoded on its verbs. It has ten main noun classes (genders), and a unique number system. Four of the noun classes are semantically determined (male humans, female humans, higher animals, plants and plant material) whereas the rest are assigned on phonological bases.
It is an endangered language, being widely replaced by Tok Pisin, and to a lesser extent, English. It is unclear if any children are native Yimas speakers. However, a Yimas pidgin was once used as a contact language with speakers of Alamblak and Arafundi. Although it is still used in face-to-face conversation, it is considered a threatened language on the Ethnologue endangerment scale, with a rating of 6b.
Phonology
Yimas has a total of 18 phonemes. Below are the vowel and consonant inventories, which are represented using International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) symbols.
Consonants
The consonant phoneme inventory of Yimas is typical for the languages of Papua New Guinea. Like many languages of the region, Yimas has no fricative phonemes, although fricatives do sometimes appear in pronunciation as variants of plosives. The following table contains the 12 consonant phonemes of the language:
LabialDentalAlveolarPalatalVelarStopNasalLiquidGlide
The phonemic status of the palatal consonants /c/, /ɲ/ and /ʎ/ is not entirely clear. In general their appearance is predictable; they arise primarily through palatalization of the alveolar consonants /t/, /n/, and /r/. However, there are a few words in which these consonants must be regarded as underlyingly palatal. Examples include akulɨm 'wrist', ɨɲcɨt 'urine', and other words, though these historically go back to alveolar consonants, as can be seen in their cognates in Karawari (awkurim 'wrist' and sɨndi 'urine').
Adjacent nasals and plosives are usually homorganic. Other combinations such as mt, mk, np, ŋt, etc., are rare or unattested; an example is pamki 'legs'. The same is true when plosives appear before nasals at the ends of words or syllables. In this case, the nasal is syllabic, for example watn (a hardwood tree species).
Plosives are generally voiced after nasals, with /p/ becoming voiced also before u. At word onsets and before stressed vowels, they are aspirated and voiceless. For example: ɲct 'urine', pamki 'legs', tkay 'nose', kput 'rain'. /p/ and /w/ weaken to a voiceless fricative: ipwa . When /k/ appears before two vowels, if the second vowel is unstressed, then the /k/ is realized as a voiced fricative: amanakn 'mine'. Intervocally /c/ has age-based allophony, with older speakers preferring the stop realization and younger ones the dental sibilant [s], as in acak 'to send'. After another consonant, /c/ is always realized as a palatal stop.
/ʎ/ is in free variation between and . r varies in pronunciation between and .
Vowels
The Yimas vowel inventory contains six phonemes in total, consisting of four monophthongs and two diphthongs: + Vowel Phonemes Front Central Back Close Open
The two diphthongs in Yimas are /aj/ and /aw/.
The most frequent vowels by far are /a/ and /ɨ/. ɨ also appears as an epenthetic vowel to break up otherwise illicit consonant clusters. In the vicinity of u and also occasionally in other contexts, an u is sometimes inserted instead: 'a kind of snake', 'underneath', 'two veins'. The appearance of /ɨ/ is often predictable from the surrounding consonant environment and as a result it can typically be treated as an epenthetic vowel even within lexical roots. Adopting this analysis results in whole words with no underlying vowels.
The vowel phonemes are involved in numerous phonological changes.
Syllable structure
The basic structure of the Yimas word (in terms of consonants C and vowels V) is the following: #(C1)(C2)V1([(C3)C4(C5)]n)V2(C6)(C7)#
Consonants are organized into three basic clusters in Yimas: the initial cluster [(C1)(C2)], the medial cluster [(C3)C4(C5)] and the final cluster [(C6)(C7)]. Parentheses indicate that the consonant is optional. There are specific phonological constraints placed on the cluster depending on where it is located in the word. In other words, only certain consonant phonemes can begin a word, end a word, or appear in the middle of a word. The iterative variable n allows the medial consonant cluster to be repeated many times.
A Yimas word can consist of only a single vowel. An example is the verb stem /i-/, which means 'say'. Some of the longest roots are five or six syllables, like /mamantakarman/, which means 'land crab'.
Yimas has predictable rules with regard to syllabification. In the middle of a word, if a consonant is between two vowels, the syllable boundary precedes the consonant: (V.CV).
If two consonants are between two vowels, the syllable boundary falls between the consonants: (VC1.C2V).
However, if C1 is a stop and C2 is /r/, the syllable boundary precedes C1: (V.C1C2V).
Whenever three consonants are between two vowels, the syllable boundary comes after the first consonant: (VC1.C2C3V).
Stress
In Yimas, the primary accent lies in general on the first syllable of a word. In words with more than three syllables, the third syllable carries secondary stress. Below are some examples (where ´ represents primary stress, and ` represents secondary stress):
If the first syllable contains an epenthetic vowel but the second does not, then the second syllable is stressed. When the first as well as the second syllable contain epenthetic vowels, then the stress lies on the first syllable.
Below are more examples, including words with stress on epenthetic vowels:
WordPronunciationTranslationNotesŋárwa penis kcakk to cut first syllable has an epenthetic vowel → second syllable stressedmɲŋ tongue first two syllables have epenthetic vowels → first syllable stressedyámparan to stand up málcawkwa lower back yácɨrɨm an accessory for chewing betelnuts yáwkawpùnumprum yellow opossum Secondary stress on the third syllable
The genitive suffix -na, which is used on personal pronouns, takes primary stress: ama-na-kn 'mine'.
Stress is never the distinguishing factor between two words; i.e., two words cannot differ in meaning if they only differ in which syllable carries stress (as opposed to English, which distinguishes between the noun 'désert' and the verb 'desért').
Nouns and noun morphology
Noun classes
There are ten basic noun classes in Yimas, and about six additional minor classes with only a few nouns in each one. Noun classes are either categorized by their semantic similarity or their phonological similarity. Of the ten major noun classes, four are identified based on semantic properties, and six are identified based on phonological properties.
The ten major noun classes are distinguished by the following properties:
+ Noun Classes I-X Class Semantic/Phonological Property Example I male humans and humans of ambiguous sex apwi 'father' II female humans kaywi 'sister' III higher animals, like pigs, dogs, and crocodiles numpran 'pig' IV plants and trees irpm 'coconut palm' V noun ends in /p, k, m, n, ŋ, nt, r, l/ (or /i, y/ if not in class VIII) muntuk 'neck' VI noun ends in /ŋk/ (or /ŋ/ if in word-final position) yarmuraŋ 'black eel' VII noun ends in /mp/ (or /m/ if in word-final position) karm 'lip, language' VIII noun ends in /i, y/ mayŋi 'beetle' IX noun ends in /aw/ yaw 'road' X noun ends in a rounded vowel plus /k, ŋk/ (closely related to class VI) awruk 'bandicoot'
Although some classes are similar in category, no two classes overlap; i.e., no noun is associated with more than one noun class. So there may be words that fall into the semantic categories specified by class I-IV that have the same phonetic properties as words in one of the later classes, but will only be placed in one class. By far, class V is the largest noun class, with nearly half of all Yimas words assigned to this class. Many of the nouns formerly in class VIII have become members of class V as the language has evolved. Additionally, the rounded vowel that terminates nouns in class X have a distinctive autosegmental rounding feature.
Nouns within a class share sets of agreement affixes with adjectives, pronouns, and verbs. The adjectival, pronominal, and verbal agreement affixes are appended to adjectives, pronouns, and verbs respectively, depending on the number and noun class of the noun they are associated with. The adjective must have an affix that agrees with the noun the adjective describes, and pronouns are made possessive by appending affixes that agree with the noun of the possessor as well. Agreement affixes for verbs are used to indicate that a noun is its subject if the verb is intransitive, or that a noun is its object if the verb is transitive. As an example, the following table contains the set of agreement affixes for class I nouns: + Class I Agreement Affixes Singular Dual Plural Adjectival -n -mampan -ump Possessive -kn -rm -ump Verbal na- impa- pu-
Below is an example of the class I singular adjectival agreement suffix /-n/ applied to the adjective meaning 'good'. Here, the suffix is used to show that the adjective is describing a class I, singular noun:
In general, appending the possessive marker /-na/ to a pronoun, along with the appropriate possessive agreement affix, creates a possessive pronoun in Yimas. The following is an example of how a class I singular possessive pronoun is formed; /ama/ is the bound first person singular pronoun, and /-kn/ is the class I possessive agreement suffix:
Affixation on verbs for noun agreement are discussed in detail in the verbal morphology section.
Pronouns Yimas independent pronouns are:
! !! sg !! du !! pc !! pl |- ! 1 | ama || kapa || paŋkət || ipa |- ! 2 | mi || kapwa || paŋkət || ipwa |- ! 3 | mən || mərəm || məŋgət || mum
Oblique suffix
The oblique suffix (/-n/ or /-nan/) is the only case marker present in Yimas, and "indicates locations, times, or instruments." Generally, the suffix /-n/ is used with singular nouns, and the suffix /-nan/ is used with plural and dual nouns, although there are some irregularities. Below are a few inflectional uses of the suffix, which serve to provide a semantic meaning similar to prepositions in English:
Noun compounding
Nouns may compound with a verb or another noun phrase. The head is always a noun, and this head noun determines the number and noun class of the final compounded noun. Compounds consisting of two root nouns are the most frequently used type of compounded noun.
The most common way of forming a compound with two root nouns is by appending the oblique suffix /-n/ to the non-head noun, which precedes the head noun:
Suppletion
Instead of using affixation to distinguish number for a noun, Yimas uses suppletion for many common nouns; in other words, the singular and plural forms have different roots for these common nouns.
Singular Plural 'woman' narmaŋ ŋaykum 'man' panmal payum 'child' kalakn kumpwi
The dual form in Yimas is derived from the singular form, and does not follow the same morphological process of suppletion.
Verbal morphology
Yimas is a polysynthetic language with a complex verbal morphology. The most significant form of Yimas morphology is affixation, with other morphological processes only serving a secondary role in the language.
Pronominal prefixes