Meyah (Meax) is a

West Papuan language The West Papuan languages are a proposed language family of about two dozen non-Austronesian languages of the Bird's Head Peninsula (Vogelkop or Doberai Peninsula) of far western New Guinea, the island of Halmahera and its vicinity, spoken by ab ...

spoken in Miyah District,

Tambrauw Regency Tambrauw Regency is a regency of Southwest Papua Province, Indonesia. Geography Tambrauw Regency is a new regency located in Bird's head region of Papua Island. Geographically, Tambrauw. Regency is located at 132035' East Longitude (East Longitude ...

of West Papua,

Indonesia Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania between the Indian and Pacific oceans. It consists of over 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi, and parts of Borneo and New Guine ...

. The Meyah language is

agglutinative In linguistics, agglutination is a morphological process in which words are formed by stringing together morphemes, each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative lang ...

and head-marking and has no

grammatical cases A grammatical case is a category of nouns and noun modifiers ( determiners, adjectives, participles, and numerals), which corresponds to one or more potential grammatical functions for a nominal group in a wording. In various languages, nom ...

. It has subject-object-verb word order, which comes from nearby Austronesian languages.

Distribution

Within

, ethnic Meyah people reside in Senopi District, Miyah District, Fef District, and Syujak District.

Phonology

Meax has 5 vowels and 13 consonants.

Pitch-accent

Like many other

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 ...

of the

Bird's Head Peninsula The Bird's Head Peninsula ( Indonesian: ''Kepala Burung'', nl, Vogelkop) or Doberai Peninsula (''Semenanjung Doberai''), is a large peninsula that makes up the northwest portion of the island of New Guinea, comprising the Indonesian provinces ...

, Meyah is a pitch-accent language with two phonemic pitch levels: rising high and falling high, which contrast.

Grammar

Pronouns

Pronouns demonstrate three numbers: singular, dual, and plural. The first person dual and plural pronouns also demonstrate clusivity. These prefixes are used for verbs, body parts and kinship terms.

Nouns

Nouns in Meyah are divided into two types: alienable and inalienable, the latter of which includes terms for body parts and kinship relations, and are obligatorily marked for possessor. With alienable nouns, there is morphological complexity. The plural marker '-ir' can only be used with humans, pigs, and dogs. There is no other method of indicating plurality for other alienable nouns. For inanimate nouns, a plurality may be indicated by certain modifiers such as ''mod ofokou'' 'house many' or ''mod efaga orgomu'' 'house CLF three.'

Kinship

Kinship terms, as inalienable nouns, share the same possessor prefixes as body parts and verb stems, however, they differ in the singular possessive prefixes. Instead of the '''(C)i-''' prefix found on first and second singular prefixes, kinship terms have '''ed-''.' (1st singular) and '''eb-''' (2nd singular). On verbs and other inalienable nouns, the third person singular possessive prefix is normally unmarked, but kinship terms use the same prefix as the first person plural exclusive, '''me-''.' Terms for important kinship relations have divergent morphology, like the lack of a first-person singular possessive prefix for father akeina''' and mother '''ameina'',' which are also used to refer to father and mothers' brothers respectively.

Classes

There are six classes of nouns, which are differentiated on the basis of their classifier when they are modified by a numeral. The first class is a class used exclusively for humans. Classes two and three relate to food, with the former being for food growing underground and the latter being for food growing on trees and vines. When this food is removed from trees or vines, it is classified according to whether it is 'round,' placed in the fourth class, and 'flat,' found in the fifth class. Class six consists of terms for animals and 'house.'