Foi, also known as Foe or Mubi River, is one of the two

East Kutubuan languages The East Kutubuan languages are a small family of Trans–New Guinea languages Trans–New Guinea (TNG) is an extensive family of Papuan languages spoken on the island of New Guinea and neighboring islands ‒ corresponding to the country Papu ...

of the Trans-New Guinea family spoken along

Lake Kutubu Lake Kutubu is the second-largest lake in Papua New Guinea,Lake Kutubu
at Ramsar site after Southern Highlands Province Southern Highlands is a province in Papua New Guinea. Its provincial capital is the town of Mendi. According to Papua New Guinea's national 2011 census, the total population of Southern Highlands (after the separation of Hela Province) is 515,51 ...

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 ...

. Dialects of Foi are Ifigi, Kafa, Kutubu, Mubi. A

Swadesh list The Swadesh list ("Swadesh" is pronounced ) is a classic compilation of tentatively universal concepts for the purposes of lexicostatistics. Translations of the Swadesh list into a set of languages allow researchers to quantify the interrelatedness ...

for the Foi language was documented by The Rosetta Project in 2010. The estimated number of Foi speakers as of 2015 is between 6,000 and 8,000.

Grammar

Syntax

Foi is a subject–object–verb language, similar to most languages in

. Foe adopts the usage of focused objects as sentence-initial. In noun phrases, Foi follows the pattern of Noun + Quantifier and Adjective + Noun. Adverbial phrases are marked postpositionally by

clitics In Morphology (linguistics), morphology and syntax, a clitic (, Back-formation, backformed from Ancient Greek, Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) ...

in Foi. Foi also has a series of

evidentials In linguistics, evidentiality is, broadly, the indication of the nature of evidence for a given statement; that is, whether evidence exists for the statement and if so, what kind. An evidential (also verificational or validational) is the particul ...

to mark the

verbal aspect In linguistics, aspect is a grammatical category that expresses how an action, event, or state, as denoted by a verb, extends over time. Perfective aspect is used in referring to an event conceived as bounded and unitary, without reference to ...

of seen, unseen, deduced, possibility, and mental deduction.

Morphology

The subject or focus transitive in a sentence is marked with ''-mo'' as shown in example (1) below.Where the focus is on the person who is eating the sweet potato.

Lexical

Foi has separate words for today and yesterday, as well as two, three, four and five days prior and hence.

Pronouns

Singular, dual, and plural are distinguished in

personal pronouns Personal pronouns are pronouns that are associated primarily with a particular grammatical person – first person (as ''I''), second person (as ''you''), or third person (as ''he'', ''she'', ''it'', ''they''). Personal pronouns may also take dif ...

. In addition, Foe also marks

clusivity In linguistics, clusivity is a grammatical distinction between ''inclusive'' and ''exclusive'' first-person pronouns and verbal morphology, also called ''inclusive " we"'' and ''exclusive "we"''. Inclusive "we" specifically includes the addresse ...

for first-person

pronouns In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun (abbreviated ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase. Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the parts of speech, but some modern theorists would not co ...

. It was not made clear if a reported minimal distinction in the first-person plural form between the inclusive ''jia'' and exclusive ''jija'' is real.

Phonology

Vowels

Foi features 5

vowels A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (l ...

Consonants

The 16

consonants In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are and pronounced with the lips; and pronounced with the front of the tongue; and pronounced w ...

including the glottal stop used in Foi are:

Allophonic In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is a set of multiple possible spoken soundsor ''phones''or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, (as in ''s ...

variation of and is common. The vowel /y/ was mentioned as a consonant by Franklin, suggesting that the research was phonetically noted in

Americanist phonetic notation Americanist phonetic notation, also known as the North American Phonetic Alphabet (NAPA), the Americanist Phonetic Alphabet or the American Phonetic Alphabet (APA), is a system of phonetic notation originally developed by European and American an ...

. The table above has been amended according to the standards of International Phonetic Alphabet.

Body-part counting system

Foi adopts the

body-part counting system Some languages of the world have numeral systems that do not make use of an arithmetic base. One such system is the body-part counting system which make use of further body parts to extend the system beyond the ten fingers. Counting typically b ...

. This feature can also be found in approximately 60 Trans-New Guinea Languages such as

Fasu Fasu, also known as Namo Me, is one of the Kutubuan languages of New Guinea. Varieties Wurm and Hattori (1981) considered its three principal dialects, Fasu, Some and Namumi, to be three languages, which they called the West Kutubuan family. Ho ...

and Oksapmin. Counting typically begins by touching (and usually bending) the fingers of one hand, moves up the arm to the shoulders and neck, and in some systems, to other parts of the upper body or the head. A central point serves as the half-way point. Once this is reached, the counter continues, touching and bending the corresponding points on the other side until the fingers are reached.

Language status

According to '' Ethnologue'', the language status of is '5*', referring to the situation whereby the language is anticipated to be in vigorous use by all, based on the informed guess made by editorial team due to the lack of information. This status is based on Lewis and Smino's (2010) Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (EGIDS).

References

External links

* Timothy Usher, New Guinea World
Foe
{{Languages of Papua New Guinea Languages of Southern Highlands Province East Kutubuan languages