The Arapesh languages are several closely related

Torricelli languages The Torricelli languages are a family of about fifty languages of the northern Papua New Guinea coast, spoken by about 80,000 people. They are named after the Torricelli Mountains. The most populous and best known Torricelli language is Arapesh ...

of the 32,000 Arapesh people of

Papua New Guinea Papua New Guinea, officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea, is an island country in Oceania that comprises the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and offshore islands in Melanesia, a region of the southwestern Pacific Ocean n ...

. They are spoken in eastern

Sandaun Province Sandaun Province (formerly West Sepik Province) is the northwesternmost mainland Provinces of Papua New Guinea, province of Papua New Guinea (also known as home of the sunset). It covers an area of 35,920 km2 (13868 m2) and has a population ...

and northern

East Sepik Province East Sepik is a province in Papua New Guinea. Its capital is Wewak. East Sepik has an estimated population of 450,530 people (2011 census) and is 43,426 km square in size. Its density is 10.4 people per square kilometer. History Cherubim D ...

. The Arapesh languages are among the better-studied of Papuan languages and are most distinctive in their gender systems, which contain up to thirteen genders (

noun class In linguistics, a noun class is a particular category of nouns. A noun may belong to a given class because of the characteristic features of its referent, such as gender, animacy, shape, but such designations are often clearly conventional. Some ...

es) with noun-phrase concordance. Mufian, for example, has 17 noun classes for count nouns plus two extra noun classes, i.e. proper names and place names. (See that article for examples.)

Phonology

The most notable feature of the Arapesh

phoneme A phoneme () is any set of similar Phone (phonetics), speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible Phonetics, phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word fr ...

inventory is the use of

labialization Labialization is a secondary articulatory feature of sounds in some languages. Labialized sounds involve the lips while the remainder of the oral cavity produces another sound. The term is normally restricted to consonants. When vowels invol ...

as a contrastive device.

Consonants

Vowels

Arapesh syllables have the structure (C)V(V)(C), though monosyllables always contain coda consonants. Higher central vowels /ɨ ə/ sometimes break up consonant clusters in the middle of words.

Pronouns

Pronouns in Arapesh and other related Torricelli languages: :

Vocabulary comparison

The following basic vocabulary words are from the Trans-New Guinea database. The words cited constitute translation equivalents, whether they are cognate (e.g. ''bʌrʌkʰa'', ''berag'' for “head”) or not (e.g. ''ɛligʌ'', ''atah'' for “ear”). :

Grammar

Recent shifts have moved Arapesh languages from the typical Papuan SOV to a SVO order, along with a corresponding shift in

adposition Adpositions are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in, under, towards, behind, ago'', etc.) or mark various semantic roles (''of, for''). The most common adpositions are prepositions (which precede their complemen ...

al order. Most modifiers usually precede the noun, though as a result of changes in word order genitives and nouns do not have a fixed order. The language's unique

gender system Gender systems are the social structures that establish the number of genders and their associated gender roles in every society. A ''gender role'' is "everything that a person says and does to indicate to others or to the self the degree that o ...

is largely based on the ending of the noun. There are cognate pairings of each gender for singular and plural numbers. The whole gender system, unlike most of the comparable complexity in

Niger–Congo languages Niger–Congo is a hypothetical language family spoken over the majority of sub-Saharan Africa. It unites the Mande languages, the Atlantic–Congo languages (which share a characteristic noun class system), and possibly several smaller groups ...

, is sex-based: Gender IV is for all female beings and Gender VII for male ones. Arapesh culture forbids the use of personal names, so that kinship nouns are used extensively to address even intimate relatives. Arapesh languages also have a system of verbal nouns: there by default belong to gender VIII. Gender agreement, along with that for person and number, occurs with all

adjective An adjective (abbreviations, abbreviated ) is a word that describes or defines a noun or noun phrase. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Traditionally, adjectives are considered one of the main part of speech, parts of ...

s, numerals and interrogative pronouns and the subject and object of

verb A verb is a word that generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual description of English, the basic f ...

s. Verbs in Arapesh languages are inflected by means of

prefix A prefix is an affix which is placed before the stem of a word. Particularly in the study of languages, a prefix is also called a preformative, because it alters the form of the word to which it is affixed. Prefixes, like other affixes, can b ...

es. The basic template for this inflection is the order SUBJECT-MOOD-ROOT.

References

External links

WALS: Arapesh

Arapesh Grammar & Digital Language Archive
*