Awtuw (Autu), also known as Kamnum, is spoken in

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 ...

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 ...

. It is a

polysynthetic language In linguistic typology, polysynthetic languages, formerly holophrastic languages, are highly synthetic languages, i.e., languages in which words are composed of many morphemes (word parts that have independent meaning but may or may not be able t ...

closely related to Karawa and Pouye. It is spoken in Galkutua, Gutaiya (), Kamnom (), Tubum (), and Wiup () villages in Kamnom East ward, East Wapei Rural LLG,

. It is an

endangered language An endangered language or moribund language is a language that is at risk of disappearing as its speakers die out or shift to speaking other languages. Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers and becomes a " dead langua ...

, being widely replaced by

Tok Pisin Tok Pisin ( ,Laurie Bauer, 2007, ''The Linguistics Student's Handbook'', Edinburgh ; ), often referred to by English speakers as New Guinea Pidgin or simply Pidgin, is an English-based creole languages, English creole language spoken throughou ...

Phonology

Awtuw consonants are: Awtuw vowels are:

Pronouns

Pronouns are: :

Verbal morphology

Awtuw has a very rich verbal morphology, with 8 prefixal slots encoding tense, aspect, modality, polarity, subject number and reciprocal.). Six of these slots contain prefixes that have cognates in Pouye. The suffixal chain contains recently grammaticalized suffixes encoding associated motion, aspect, benefactive, and various unusual categories such as celerative ''-imya'' 'quickly' as in (1) (grammaticalized from the verb ''imya'' 'run'), simulative ''-panya'' 'pretend', and

periodic tense Periodic tense is a subtype of the grammatical category of tense, which encodes that the event expressed by the verb occurs within a particular period of the day (such as 'at night', 'in the morning' etc.) or of the year ('in winter', 'in summer' ...

(adauroral ''-alw'' 'until dawn').

References

* * * Whitehead, Carl R. 1992. Review of: a grammar of Awtuw, by Harry Feldman.
Rosetta Project:Awtuw Swadesh List
{{Sepik languages Languages of Sandaun Province Ram languages Endangered languages of Oceania Endangered Papuan languages Polysynthetic languages