Gumawana (sometimes also referred to by the
exonym
An endonym (also known as autonym ) is a common, name for a group of people, individual person, geographical place, language, or dialect, meaning that it is used inside a particular group or linguistic community to identify or designate them ...
Gumasi) is an
Austronesian language spoken by people living on the
Amphlett Islands of the
Milne Bay Province
Milne Bay is a province of Papua New Guinea. Its capital is Alotau. The province covers 14,345 km2 of land and 252,990 km2 of sea, within the province there are more than 600 islands, about 160 of which are inhabited. The province has ...
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 ...
.
Classification
Gumawana is an Austronesian language of the North Papuan Mainland-D'Entrecasteaux branch.
Geographic distribution
Gumawana is spoken by some 470 people in the small Amphlett Islands of Papua New Guinea's Milne Bay Province. The language is spoken on the four inhabited islands of the archipelago: Nubogeta, Gumawana, Omea, and Bituma.
Gumawama has been influenced by the nearby
Dobu language
Dobu or Dobuan is an Austronesian language spoken in Milne Bay Province of Papua New Guinea. It is a lingua franca for 100,000 people in D'Entrecasteaux Islands
D'Entrecasteaux Islands () are situated near the eastern tip of New Guinea in the ...
, and speakers of Gumawana often have knowledge of other neighboring
Papuan Tip languages
The Papuan Tip languages are a branch of the Western Oceanic languages consisting of 60 languages.
Contact
All Papuan Tip languages, except Nimoa, Sudest, and the Kilivila languages (all spoken on islands off the coast of mainland Papua New G ...
.
Dialects
Gumawana had three dialects: Nubogeta, Omea, and Bituma. The last speaker of the Omea dialect died in April 1988. The Bituma dialect is very different from the Nubogeta dialect of Nubogeta and Gumawana islands in both syntax and lexicon.
Phonology
Gumawana has 11 consonant phonemes and 5 vowel phonemes.
Olson represents the labio-dental consonant as bilabial in later works, and also includes the palatal approximant .
Syllables have a (C)V structure.
Grammar
Clauses in Gumawana have a basic order of
SOV. Oblique noun phrases occur between the direct object and the verb.
References
Nuclear Papuan Tip languages
Languages of Milne Bay Province
{{PapuanTip-lang-stub