Terei or Buin, also known as ''Telei, Rugara'', is the most populous
Papuan language
The Papuan languages are the non-Austronesian languages spoken on the western Pacific island of New Guinea, as well as neighbouring islands in Indonesia, Solomon Islands, and East Timor. It is a strictly geographical grouping, and does not imply a ...
spoken to the east of
New Guinea
New Guinea (; Hiri Motu: ''Niu Gini''; , fossilized , also known as Papua or historically ) is the List of islands by area, world's second-largest island, with an area of . Located in Melanesia in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, the island is ...
. There are about 27,000 speakers in the Buin District of Bougainville Province, Papua New Guinea.
Phonology
The phonology of the Buin language:
[Laycock, (2003). Pacific Linguistics.]
The /ɡ/ sound does not occur word-initially and is often fricativised as [ɣ]. The phoneme /ɾ/ following an /n/ is pronounced as [d], and also occurs as [l] for an allophonic variant. When a /t/ sound occurs before an /i/, it is always pronounced as [tsi], and when occurring before a /u/ or /a/, it may be realized as [tsu] or [tsa] depending on the dialect.
References
External links
* Paradisec ha
a number of collections with materials for Terei languagetwo collections of Arthur Capell, Arthur Cappell's materials
AC1AC2
.
Languages of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville
South Bougainville languages
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