Maʼya language

Maʼya
Maʼya
Native to	Indonesia
Region	Raja Ampat Islands
Native speakers	5,000 (2000–2001)
Language family	Austronesian Malayo-Polynesian Central–Eastern Malayo-Polynesian Eastern Malayo-Polynesian South Halmahera–West New Guinea Raja Ampat–South Halmahera Maya–Matbat Maʼya; ; ; ; ; ; ;
Language codes
ISO 639-3	Variously:; slz– Ma'ya; kgb– Kawe; lcc– Legenyem; wuy– Wauyai
Glottolog	raja1258
ELP	Legenyem
	Maʼya
	Coordinates:0°52′S130°39′E/ 0.86°S 130.65°E

Maʼyais anAustronesian languageof theRaja Ampat islandsinSouthwest Papua,Indonesia. It is part of theSouth Halmahera–West New Guinea (SHWNG) subgroupand is spoken by about 6,000 people in coastal villages on the islandsMisool,Salawati,andWaigeo,^[2]on the boundary between Austronesian andPapuan languages.^[3]

Dialects

Maʼya has five dialects: three on the island ofWaigeo(Laganyan,Wauyai,andKawe), one onSalawati,and one onMisool.^[4]Theprestige dialectis the one on Salawati.^{[citation needed]}The varieties spoken on Salawati and Misool are characterized by the occurrence of/s/and/ʃ/in some words, where the Waigeo dialects (and other relatedSHWNGlanguages) have/t/and/c/respectively.^[2]

OnWaigeoIsland, the three dialects are^[5]^: 6

TheKawedialect in Selpele and Salyo villages in the northwest part of the island.
TheLaganyandialect is spoken in Araway, Beo, and Luptintol villages on the Mayalibit Bay coast.
TheWauyai/Wawiyaidialect is spoken in Wawiyai village on the Kabui Bay coast.

Phonology

Consonants

		Labial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Plosive	voiceless	p	t		k	(ʔ)
Plosive	voiced	b	d		ɡ
Nasal		m	n		(ŋ)
Fricative		f	s
Tap			ɾ
Lateral			l
Approximant		w		j

Twelve consonants may also be heard as palatalized/pʲ,bʲ,tʲ,dʲ,kʲ,ɡʲ/;/fʲ,sʲ/;/mʲ,nʲ,lʲ,wʲ/.
When in word-final position, six plosives can occur as unreleased[p̚,b̚,t̚,d̚,k̚,ɡ̚],as well as nasals[m̚,n̚,ŋ̚].
/l/can be heard as retroflex[ɭ]in word-final positions, and when preceded by a back vowel.
/s/can be pronounced as[ʃ]when between two/i/vowel sounds.
/ɾ/can also be heard as a trill[r],when in word-final positions.
/n/can be heard as a velar[ŋ],when preceding velar stops.[ŋ]may also be a loan phoneme.
The glottal stop[ʔ]is heard mostly phonetically, in word-initial position before initial vowels.
Other sounds/ɦ,x,z/may also occur as a result of Arabic and Indonesian loanwords.

Vowels

	Front	Back
Close	i	u
Mid	e	ɔ
Open	a

Phoneme	Allophones
/e/	[e],[e̝],[ɛ]
/a/	[a],[ä]
/ɔ/	[ɔ],[ɔ̞],[o]

Other sounds/ɪ,ʊ/are considered archiphonemes, and can also phonetically occur as a result of/i,u/within vowel clusters.^[6]

Tone

In Maʼya bothtoneandstressare lexicallydistinctive.^[2]^[7]This means both the stress and the pitch of a word may affect its meaning. The stress and tone are quite independent from one another, in contrast to their occurrence inSwedishandSerbo-Croatian.The language has threetonemes(high, rising and falling). Out of over a thousand Austronesian languages, there are only a dozen with lexical tone; in this case it appears to be a remnant of shift fromPapuan languages.

Lexical tone is found only in final syllables.^[8]

References

^Ma'yaatEthnologue(18th ed., 2015)(subscription required)
KaweatEthnologue(18th ed., 2015)(subscription required)
LegenyematEthnologue(18th ed., 2015)(subscription required)
WauyaiatEthnologue(18th ed., 2015)(subscription required)
^^a ^b ^cRemijsen, Bert (2001)."Dialectal Variation in the Lexical Tone System of Ma'ya".Language and Speech.44(4): 473–499.doi:10.1177/00238309010440040301.PMID 12162695.
^Remijsen, Bert (November 2003),"New Perspectives in Word-Prosodic Typology"(PDF),IIAS Newsletter #32,p. 29, archived fromthe original(PDF)on 2011-06-11
^Arnold, Laura (2018)."A preliminary archaeology of tone in Raja Ampat".In Antoinette Schapper (ed.).Contact and substrate in the languages of Wallacea, Part 2.NUSA Vol. 64. pp. 7–37.
^Arnold, Laura Melissa (2018).Grammar of Ambel, an Austronesian language of Raja Ampat, west New Guinea(PhD). University of Edinburgh.hdl:1842/31120.
^van der Leeden, Alex C. (1993).Maʼya: a language study.Seri Terbitan LIPI-RUL Jakarta: Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan Indonesia and Rijkuniversiteit te Leiden.
^Rivera-Castillo, Yolanda; Pickering, Lucy (2004)."Phonetic Correlates of Stress and Tone in a Mixed System".Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages.19(2): 261–284.CiteSeerX10.1.1.538.9834.doi:10.1075/jpcl.19.2.02riv.
^Arnold, Laura. 2018. ‘A preliminary archaeology of tone in Raja Ampat’. In Antoinette Schapper, ed.Contact and substrate in the languages of Wallacea,Part 2. NUSA 64: 7–37.doi:10.5281/zenodo.1450778