Eipo (Eipomek), or Lik, is a Mek language of the eastern highlands of Eipumek District,

Pegunungan Bintang Regency Pegunungan Bintang Regency or Bintang Mountains Regency ("Bintang" means "star") is a regency in the Indonesian province of Highland Papua. It was created on 11 December 2002 from the north-eastern districts of Jayawijaya Regency. It covers an a ...

Highland Papua Highland Papua () is a provinces of Indonesia, province of Indonesia, which roughly follows the borders of the Papuan customary region of Lano-Pago (often shortened to La Pago). It covers an area of and had a population of 1,467,050 according to ...

. It spoken by the Eipo people who live along the Eipo River. A large percentage of its vocabulary is shared with Una and Tanime, and they form one dialect area.

Classification

Eipo belongs to the Eastern branch of

Mek languages The Mek languages are a well established language family, family of Papuan languages spoken by the Mek people and Yali people. They form a branch of the Trans–New Guinea languages (TNG) in the classifications of Stephen Wurm (1975) and of Malc ...

, which is a family of closely related languages belonging to the larger grouping of Trans-New Guinea languages.

Geographic distribution

The Eipo language is spoken by about 3,000 people along the Eipo River in the valley of Eipomek, which is situated in the eastern highlands of

Phonology

Consonants

Eipo exhibits the following 16 phonemic consonants: * /p/ indicates a labialized ʷɵ * /c/ indicates a palatalized ʲ

Vowels

Eipo has five phonemic vowels: Diphthongs are not regarded as separate phonemes.

Grammar

Morphology

Eipo is generally isolating language, but exhibits an elaborate system of agglutination in verb formation.

Syntax

The usual word order of Eipo is subject-object-verb (SOV).

Deictics

Eipo has only four basic spatial

deictic In linguistics, deixis () is the use of words or phrases to refer to a particular time (e.g. ''then''), place (e.g. ''here''), or person (e.g. ''you'') relative to the context of the utterance. Deixis exists in all known natural languagesLyons, J ...

s, which are usually accompanied by pointing gestures, since the deictics are used during face-to-face communication to refer to positions relative to the person. *''a-'' ‘here’ *''ei-'' ‘up there’ *''ou-, u-'' ‘down there’ *''or-, er-'' ‘across there’ (‘across-valley’)

Interrogatives

Eipo has many compound interrogatives: *''yate'' ‘what?, which?, what kind of?’ **''yate anye'' ‘who?’ **''yate ate'' ‘why? (what for)’ **''yate arye'' ‘why? (what reason)’ **''yate-barye'' ‘why?’ **''yate-sum'' ‘when? (what day/time)’ *''dan-'' ‘where?, where to, whence’ **''dan-segum'' ‘whereabouts? (approximate location)’ **''dan-tam'' ("where side") ‘where, whence, whereto’ **''dan-ak'' ("where at") ‘where, whence, whereto’

Writing system

Eipo is not historically a written language, but in recent decades a

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the Ancient Rome, ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered except several letters splitting—i.e. from , and from � ...

has been devised for it. The letter values are mostly those of the IPA letters given above, with the exceptions of , , , and .

References

* *Heeschen, Volker and Wulf Schiefenhövel. 1983. ''Wörterbuch der Eiposprache: Eipo-Deutsch-Englisch''. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer. {{Mek languages Mek languages Languages of Western New Guinea