Waimoa or Waimaa is a language spoken by about 27,000
Waimoa (2015 census)
people in northeast
East Timor
Timor-Leste, also known as East Timor, officially the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste, is a country in Southeast Asia. It comprises the eastern half of the island of Timor, the coastal exclave of Oecusse in the island's northwest, and ...
. Waimoa proper is reported to be
mutually intelligible
In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between different but related language varieties in which speakers of the different varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. Mutual intellig ...
with neighboring
Kairui and
Midiki, which together have about 5,000 speakers.
The classification of Waimoa is unclear. Structurally, it is
Malayo-Polynesian
The Malayo-Polynesian languages are a subgroup of the Austronesian languages, with approximately 385.5 million speakers. The Malayo-Polynesian languages are spoken by the Austronesian peoples outside of Taiwan, in the island nations of Southeast ...
. However, its vocabulary is largely Papuan, similar to that of
Makasae. Although generally classified as Austronesian languages or dialects that have been largely
relexified under the influence of a language related to Makasae, it is possible that Waimoa, Kairui, and Midiki are instead Papuan languages related to Makasae which have been influenced by Austronesian.
Phonology
Waimoa has
aspirated/voiceless and glottalized/ejective consonants, which are distributed like and consonant clusters (or perhaps and ) but are often pronounced as single segments.
[Kirsten Culhane (2021) Waimaa consonants: phonology and typological position in Greater Timor. 15th International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics.]
Similarly there are voiceless and glottalized .
There is also
vowel harmony
In phonology, vowel harmony is a phonological rule in which the vowels of a given domain – typically a phonological word – must share certain distinctive features (thus "in harmony"). Vowel harmony is typically long distance, meaning tha ...
.
See also
*
Kawaimina
Kawaimina (a syllabic abbreviation of the names) is a cluster of four languages and dialects of East Timor: Kairui, Midiki, Waimaha, and Naueti, spoken by one or two thousand speakers each. It is a name used by linguists discussing the lang ...
References
Timor–Babar languages
Languages of Timor-Leste
Mixed languages
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