The Lihir language (''Lir'') is an
Austronesian language spoken in the
Lihir island group, in
New Ireland Province
New Ireland Province, formerly New Mecklenburg (german: Neu-Mecklenburg), and Nova Hibernia, is the northeasternmost province of Papua New Guinea.
Physical geography
The largest island of the province is New Ireland.
Also part of the province a ...
,
Papua New Guinea
Papua New Guinea (abbreviated PNG; , ; tpi, Papua Niugini; ho, Papua Niu Gini), officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea ( tpi, Independen Stet bilong Papua Niugini; ho, Independen Stet bilong Papua Niu Gini), is a country i ...
. It is notable for having 5 levels of
grammatical number
In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verb agreement (linguistics), agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one", "two" or "three or more"). English and other languages pres ...
: singular, dual, trial, paucal and plural.
It is questionable whether the trial is indeed trial or whether it is paucal, leaving there being a paucal and a greater paucal.
Either way, this is the highest number of levels of grammatical number in any language.
This distinction appears in both independent pronouns and possessor suffixes.
There is some variation in
pronunciation
Pronunciation is the way in which a word or a language is spoken. This may refer to generally agreed-upon sequences of sounds used in speaking a given word or language in a specific dialect ("correct pronunciation") or simply the way a particular ...
and
orthography
An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation.
Most transnational languages in the modern period have a writing system, and ...
between the main island
Niolam, and some of the smaller islands in the group.
Name
The name ''Lihir'' is an
exonym
An endonym (from Greek: , 'inner' + , 'name'; also known as autonym) is a common, ''native'' name for a geographical place, group of people, individual person, language or dialect, meaning that it is used inside that particular place, group, ...
from the related
Patpatar language. Natively, it is called ''Lir'', a cognate of the Patpatar name.
Phonology
Sources are indeterminate with regards to the phonemic status of different surface vowels, although minimal pairs provide evidence for the phonemic status of most vowel qualities.
References
External links
Lihir Phonology, from SIL
Languages of New Ireland Province
Meso-Melanesian languages
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