Ma'ya is an Austronesian language of the

Raja Ampat islands Raja Ampat, or the ''Four Kings'', is an archipelago located off the northwest tip of Bird's Head Peninsula on the island of New Guinea, in Indonesia's Southwest Papua , Southwest Papua province. It comprises over 1,500 small islands, cays, and sh ...

in West Papua, Indonesia. It is spoken by about 6,000 people in coastal villages on the islands

Misool Misool, formerly spelled Mysol (Dutch: Misoöl) or Misol, is one of the four major islands in the Raja Ampat Islands in Southwest Papua, Indonesia. Its area is 2,034 km2. The highest point is 561 m and the main towns are Waigama, located ...

Salawati Salawati is one of the four major islands in the Raja Ampat Islands in Southwest Papua (formerly West Papua), Indonesia. Its area is 1,623 km2. Salawati is separated from New Guinea to the southeast by the Sele Strait (a.k.a. Galowa Str ...

, and

Waigeo Waigeo is an island in Southwest Papua province of eastern Indonesia. The island is also known as Amberi, or Waigiu. It is the largest of the four main islands in the Raja Ampat Islands archipelago, between Halmahera and about to the north-w ...

. It is spoken on the boundary between Austronesian and

Papuan languages The Papuan languages are the non- Austronesian and non- Australian languages spoken on the western Pacific island of New Guinea in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, as well as neighbouring islands, by around 4 million people. It is a strictly geogr ...

Dialects

Ma'ya has five dialects: three on the island of

( Laganyan, Wauyai, and

Kawe KAWE, virtual and VHF digital channel 9, is a Public Broadcasting Service ( PBS) member television station licensed to Bemidji, Minnesota, United States. The station is owned by Northern Minnesota Public Television, Inc. KAWE's studios are locat ...

), one on

, and one (extinct or nearly extinct) on

Batanta Batanta is one of the four major islands in the Raja Ampat Islands in Southwest Papua province, Indonesia. Its area is 453 km² and its highest point is 1184 m. The Pitt Strait separates it from Salawati, while the Dampier Strait separat ...

. The

prestige dialect Prestige refers to a good reputation or high esteem; in earlier usage, ''prestige'' meant "showiness". (19th c.) Prestige may also refer to: Arts, entertainment and media Films * ''Prestige'' (film), a 1932 American film directed by Tay Garnett ...

is the one on Salawati. The Waigeo dialects have /s/ and /ʃ/, where the varieties spoken on Salawati and Misool have /t/ and /c/ respectively. Batanta, now extinct, was evidently unintelligible with its neighbours. On

Island, the three dialects are *The ''Kawe'' dialect in Selpele and Salyo villages in the northwest part of the island. *The ''Laganyan'' dialect is spoken in Araway, Beo, and Luptintol villages on the Mayalibit Bay coast. *The ''Wauyai'' dialect is spoken in Wauyai village on the Kabui Bay coast.

Phonology

Consonants

* 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 ̚, b̚, t̚, d̚, k̚, ɡ̚ as well as nasals ̚, n̚, ŋ̚ * /l/ can be heard as retroflex �in word-final positions, and when preceded by a back vowel. * /s/ can be pronounced as �when between two /i/ vowel sounds. * /ɾ/ can also be heard as a trill when in word-final positions. * /n/ can be heard as a velar � when preceding velar stops. �may also be a loan phoneme. * The glottal stop �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

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

Tone

In Ma'ya both tone and

stress Stress may refer to: Science and medicine * Stress (biology), an organism's response to a stressor such as an environmental condition * Stress (linguistics), relative emphasis or prominence given to a syllable in a word, or to a word in a phrase ...

are lexically distinctive. 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 in

Swedish Swedish or ' may refer to: Anything from or related to Sweden, a country in Northern Europe. Or, specifically: * Swedish language, a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Sweden and Finland ** Swedish alphabet, the official alphabet used by ...

and

Serbo-Croatian Serbo-Croatian () – also called Serbo-Croat (), Serbo-Croat-Bosnian (SCB), Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS), and Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS) – is a South Slavic language and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia an ...

. The language has three

toneme Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information and to convey emph ...

s (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 from

. Lexical tone is found only in final syllables.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.

Dialects

Phonology

Consonants

Vowels

Tone

See also

References

Further reading