The Yuat languages are an independent family of five

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 ...

spoken along the Yuat River in

East Sepik Province East Sepik is a province in Papua New Guinea. Its capital is Wewak. East Sepik has an estimated population of 433,481 people (2010 census) and is 43,426 km square in size. History Cherubim Dambui was appointed as East Sepik's first premier b ...

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 ...

. They are an independent family in the classification of Malcolm Ross, but are included in Stephen Wurm's Sepik–Ramu proposal. However, Foley and Ross could find no lexical or morphological evidence that they are related to the Sepik or Ramu languages. It is named after the Yuat River of northern

. Yuat languages are spoken mostly in Yuat Rural LLG of

Languages

The Yuat languages proper are: * Changriwa * Mekmek * Kyenele (Miyak) * Biwat (Mundugumor) * Bun

Classification

Foley (2018) provides the following classification. ;Yuat family * Changriwa * Mekmek * Miyak; Bun, Mundukumo ( Biwat) Changriwa and Mekmek are attested only by short words, and are tentatively grouped as separate branches by Foley (2018: 226) due to scanty evidence.

Pronouns

The pronouns Ross (2005) reconstructs for proto-Yuat are: : Mundukumo and Miyak pronouns are: :

Vocabulary comparison

The following basic vocabulary words are from Davies & Comrie (1985), as cited in the Trans-New Guinea database: :

Grammar

Yuat languages distinguish inclusive and exclusive first person pronouns, a feature not found in most other Papuan languages. This tyopological feature has also diffused from Yuat into the

Grass languages The Grass languages are a group of languages in the Ramu language family. It is accepted by Foley (2018), but not by Glottolog. They are spoken in East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea, with a small number of speakers also located just across ...

, which are spoken contiguously to the Yuat languages. Yuat grammar and phonology are similar to those of the neighboring

Ramu languages The Ramu languages are a family of some thirty languages of Northern Papua New Guinea. They were identified as a family by John Z'graggen in 1971 and linked with the Sepik languages by Donald Laycock two years later. Malcolm Ross (2005) classifi ...

. Yuat verbal morphology is relatively simple. Yuat languages are

accusative The accusative case ( abbreviated ) of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. In the English language, the only words that occur in the accusative case are pronouns: 'me,' 'him,' 'her,' 'us,' and ‘ ...

, unlike many other Papuan languages, e.g., Trans New Guinea, East Cenderawasih Bay, Lakes Plain, South Bougainville, which are all ergative. Word order in Yuat languages, like in the

Yawa languages The Yawa languages, also known as Yapen languages, are a small family of two closely related Papuan languages, Yawa (or Yava) and Saweru, which are often considered to be divergent dialects of a single language (and thus a language isolate). T ...

, is rigidly SOV, whereas in many other Papuan families, OSV word order is often permitted (as long as the verb is final).

References

External links

Yuat languages database at TransNewGuinea.org
{{language families Language families Papuan languages Languages of East Sepik Province