The Yawa languages, also known as Yapen languages, are a small family of two closely related

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 ...

, Yawa (or Yava) and Saweru, which are often considered to be divergent dialects of a single language (and thus a language isolate). They are spoken on central Yapen Island and nearby islets, in

Cenderawasih Bay Cenderawasih Bay ( id, Teluk Cenderawasih, "Bird of Paradise Bay"), also known as Sarera Bay ( id, Teluk Sarera) and formerly Geelvink Bay ( nl, Geelvinkbaai), is a large bay in northern Province of Papua, Central Papua and West Papua, New Guin ...

, Indonesian Papua, which they share with the Austronesian Yapen languages. Yawa proper had 6000 speakers in 1987. Saweru has been variously reported to be partially intelligible with other dialects of Yawa and to be considered a dialect of Yawa by its speakers, and to be too divergent for intelligibility and to be perceived as a separate language. It is

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, spoken by 150 people out of an ethnic group of 300.

Classification

C. L. Voorhoeve tentatively linked Yawa with the East Geelvink Bay languages in his Geelvink Bay proposal. However, the relationship would be a distant one at best, and Mark Donohue felt in 2001 that Yawa had not been shown to be related to any other language. Reesink (2005) notes resemblances with East Bird's Head languages. Recently Malcolm Ross made a tentative proposal that Yawa might be part of an

Extended West Papuan 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 ...

language phylum. The pronominal resemblances are most apparent when comparing proto-Yawa to the East Bird's Head language Meax: : ''d~r, b~w, we~o, p~f'' are all common sound correspondences. ''Ethnologue'' (2009, 2013) takes this a step further, and placed Yawa within West Papuan itself. Foley (2018) classifies Yawa separately as an independent language family.

Typological overview

Yawa languages are

split intransitive Split(s) or The Split may refer to: Places * Split, Croatia, the largest coastal city in Croatia * Split Island, Canada, an island in the Hudson Bay * Split Island, Falkland Islands * Split Island, Fiji, better known as Hạfliua Arts, entertai ...

languages, which are typologically highly uncommon in New Guinea. Unlike the

Sepik languages The Sepik or Sepik River languages are a family of some 50 Papuan languages spoken in the Sepik river basin of northern Papua New Guinea, proposed by Donald Laycock in 1965 in a somewhat more limited form than presented here. They tend to have ...

, Taiap, and other languages of northern New Guinea, masculine rather than feminine is the unmarked gender, whereas Taiap and the Sepik languages treat feminine as the default unmarked gender. In Yawa languages, feminine is delegated mostly for animate nouns with obvious female sexual characteristics.

Basic vocabulary

Basic vocabulary of the Yapen languages Yawa and Saweru listed in Foley (2018): : The following basic vocabulary words are from Voorhoeve (1975), as cited in the Trans-New Guinea database: :

Classification

Typological overview

Basic vocabulary

References

Further reading