Foi, also known as Foe or Mubi River, is one of the two East Kutubuan languages of the Trans-New Guinea family spoken along Lake Kutubu and Mubi River, located in the

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 2021 census, the total population of Southern Highlands province is 927,306. History Separation of H ...

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 ...

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

Swadesh list A Swadesh list () is a compilation of cultural universal, tentatively universal concepts for the purposes of lexicostatistics. That is, a Swadesh list is a list of forms and concepts which all languages, without exception, have terms for, such as ...

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

Source: 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 to mark the verbal aspect of seen, unseen, deduced, possibility, and mental deduction.

Morphology

Source: 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

Source: 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''). Personal pronouns may also take different for ...

. 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 address ...

for first-person

pronouns In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun ( glossed ) 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 con ...

. 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 speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract, forming the nucleus of a syllable. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness a ...

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, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronou ...

including the

glottal stop The glottal stop or glottal plosive is a type of consonantal sound used in many Speech communication, spoken languages, produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract or, more precisely, the glottis. The symbol in the International Phonetic ...

used in Foi are:

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

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 ...

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

International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standard written representation ...

Body-part counting system

Foi adopts the body-part counting system. This feature can also be found in approximately 60 Trans-New Guinea Languages such as Fasu 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 ''Ethnologue: Languages of the World'' is an annual reference publication in print and online that provides statistics and other information on the living languages of the world. It is the world's most comprehensive catalogue of languages. It w ...

'', 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