Oksapmin is a Trans–New Guinea language spoken in

Oksapmin Rural LLG Oksapmin Rural LLG is a local-level government (LLG) of Sandaun Province, Papua New Guinea Papua New Guinea, officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea, is an island country in Oceania that comprises the eastern half of the island ...

Telefomin District Telefomin District is a district of Sandaun Province of Papua New Guinea. Its capital is Telefomin. Its inhabitants include the Mountain Ok people, a cultural group with numerous sub-groups including the Telefol, the Urapmin, and the Wopkaimin ...

Sandaun Sandaun Province (formerly West Sepik Province) is the northwesternmost mainland province of Papua New Guinea (also known as home of the sunset). It covers an area of 35,920 km2 (13868 m2) and has a population of 248,411 (2011 census). The c ...

Papua New Guinea Papua New Guinea, officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea, is an island country in Oceania that comprises the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and offshore islands in Melanesia, a region of the southwestern Pacific Ocean n ...

. The two principal dialects are distinct enough to cause some problems with mutual intelligibility. Oksapmin has

dyadic kinship term Dyadic kinship terms ( abbreviated or ) are kinship terms in a few languages that express the relationship between individuals as they relate one to the other. In English, there are a few set phrases for such situations, such as "they are father a ...

sThe Oksapmin Kinship System
, retrieved May 21, 2009. and a body-part counting system that goes up to 27. Notable ethnographic research by Geoffrey B. Saxe at UC Berkeley has documented the encounter between pre-contact uses of number and its cultural evolution under conditions of monetization and exposure to schooling and the formal economy among the Oksapmin.

Classification

Oksapmin has been influenced by the

Mountain Ok languages The Ok languages are a family of about a dozen related Trans–New Guinea languages spoken in a contiguous area of eastern Irian Jaya and western Papua New Guinea. The most numerous language is Ngalum, with some 20,000 speakers; the best known i ...

(the name "Oksapmin" is from Telefol), and the similarities with those languages were attributed to borrowing in the classifications of both

Stephen Wurm Stephen Adolphe Wurm (, ; 19 August 1922 – 24 October 2001) was a Hungarian-born Australian linguist. Early life Wurm was born in Budapest, the second child to the German-speaking Adolphe Wurm and the Hungarian-speaking Anna Novroczky. ...

(1975) and Malcolm Ross (2005), where Oksapmin was placed as an independent branch of Trans–New Guinea. Loughnane (2009) and Loughnane and Fedden (2011) conclude that it is related to the Ok languages, though those languages share innovative features not found in Oksapmin. Usher finds Oksapmin is not related to the Ok languages specifically, though it is related at some level to the southwestern branches of Trans–New Guinea.

Phonology

Vowels

There are six

monophthong A monophthong ( ) is a pure vowel sound, or one whose articulation at beginning and end is relatively fixed, with the tongue moving neither up nor down and neither forward nor backward towards a new position of articulation. A monophthong can be ...

s, , and one

diphthong A diphthong ( ), also known as a gliding vowel or a vowel glide, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of ...

, .

Consonants

Tone

Oksapmin contrasts two tones: high and low.

References

External links

* Timothy Usher, New Guinea World
Oksap
{{Languages of Papua New Guinea Languages of Sandaun Province Languages of Southern Highlands Province Languages of Western Province (Papua New Guinea) Ok languages Trans–New Guinea languages