The Lihir language () is an
Austronesian language
The Austronesian languages ( ) are a language family widely spoken throughout Maritime Southeast Asia, parts of Mainland Southeast Asia, Madagascar, the islands of the Pacific Ocean and Taiwan (by Taiwanese indigenous peoples). They are spoken b ...
spoken in the
Lihir island group, in
New Ireland Province
New Ireland Province, formerly New Mecklenburg (), and Nova Hibernia, is the northeasternmost Provinces of Papua New Guinea, province of Papua New Guinea.
Physical geography
The largest island of the province is New Ireland (island), New Irelan ...
,
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 notable for having five levels of
grammatical number
In linguistics, grammatical number is a Feature (linguistics), feature of nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verb agreement (linguistics), agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one", "two" or "three or more"). English and many other ...
: singular, dual, trial, paucal and plural.
It is questionable whether the trial is indeed trial or whether it is paucal, leaving there being a paucal and a greater paucal.
Either way, this is the highest number of levels of grammatical number in any language.
This distinction appears in both independent pronouns and possessor suffixes.
There is some variation in
pronunciation
Pronunciation is the way in which a word or a language is spoken. To
This may refer to generally agreed-upon sequences of sounds used in speaking a given word or all language in a specific dialect—"correct" or "standard" pronunciation—or si ...
and
orthography
An orthography is a set of convention (norm), conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, punctuation, Word#Word boundaries, word boundaries, capitalization, hyphenation, and Emphasis (typography), emphasis.
Most national ...
between the main island
Niolam, and some of the smaller islands in the group.
Name
The name ''Lihir'' is an
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 ...
from the related
Patpatar language. Natively, it is called , a cognate of the Patpatar name.
Phonology
Sources are indeterminate with regards to the phonemic status of different surface vowels, although minimal pairs provide evidence for the phonemic status of most vowel qualities.
References
External links
Lihir Phonology, from SIL
Languages of New Ireland Province
Meso-Melanesian languages
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