Abau is a
Papuan language spoken in southern
Sandaun Province
Sandaun Province (formerly West Sepik Province) is the northwesternmost mainland Provinces of Papua New Guinea, 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
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 ...
, primarily along the border with Indonesia.
In 2002, there were estimated to be between 4,500 and 5,000 speakers, and this number does not appear to have declined since the first accurate count in the 1970s.
Abau is reported to have
whistled speech.
Phonology
Abau has the simplest phonemic inventory in the Sepik language family.
Pronouns
Pronouns are:
:
The dual and plural numbers only distinguish between first person and non-first person. Also, the third-person gender distinction exists only for the singular, but not the dual or plural forms.
Noun classes
Abau
noun class
In linguistics, a noun class is a particular category of nouns. A noun may belong to a given class because of the characteristic features of its referent, such as gender, animacy, shape, but such designations are often clearly conventional. Some ...
es are:
:
Nouns can take on different class affixes depending on the physical characteristics being emphasized. Examples:
;''su'' ‘coconut’
*''su pi-ron'' /coconut class.5-one/ ‘a coconut palm’
*''su ka-mon'' /coconut class.2-one/ ‘a coconut’
;''pey'' ‘sugarcane’
*''pey pi-ron'' /sugarcane class.5-one/ ‘one stalk of uncut sugarcane’
*''pey houk-mon'' /sugarcane class.12-one/ ‘one piece of sugarcane’
*''pey eind-mon'' /sugarcane class.9-one/ ‘bundle of stored stalks of sugarcane’
*''pey hnaw-mon'' /sugarcane class.11-one/ ‘one bundle of sugarcane ready for transport’
Like most other
Sepik languages
The Sepik or Sepik River languages are a language family, family of some 50 Papuan languages spoken in the Sepik River, Sepik river basin of northern Papua New Guinea, proposed by Donald Laycock in 1965 in a somewhat more limited form than prese ...
, Abau overtly marks
grammatical gender
In linguistics, a grammatical gender system is a specific form of a noun class system, where nouns are assigned to gender categories that are often not related to the real-world qualities of the entities denoted by those nouns. In languages wit ...
(see ''
Sepik languages#Gender''). The same object can be classified as either masculine or feminine, depending on the physical characteristics intended for emphasis. Example:
;''youk'' ‘paddle’
*''youk se'' ‘paddle .’ (focuses on the ''length'' of the paddle)
*''youk ke'' ‘paddle .’ (focuses on the ''flat nature'' of the two-dimensional paddle blade)
Verbal morphology
Abau had three
periodic tense suffixes: diurnal -kok, postmeridial -ropay and nocturnal -nayr
Vocabulary
The following basic vocabulary words are from Foley (2005) and Laycock (1968), as cited in the Trans-New Guinea database:
:
References
*
External links
Papuaweb- a collection of source materials on Abau (PDF format)
Abau Grammar- paper by
Arjen Lock on grammar of the language (PDF format)
Phonology Essentials - Abau Language- paper by
Arjen Lock on phonology of the language (PDF format)
Abau basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical DatabaseOLAC resources in and about the Abau languageListen to a sample of Abau from Global Recordings Network*
World Atlas of Language Structures information o
Abau
{{Languages of Papua New Guinea
Upper Sepik languages
Languages of Sandaun Province