Western Dani, or Lani, is a
Nuclear-Trans-New Guinea language. It is the
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 ...
with the most speakers in
Indonesian 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 ...
. It is spoken by the
Lani people in the
province of Highland Papua.
The
Baliem Valley tribes are called ''Oeringoep'' and ''Timorini'' in literature from the 1920s, but those names are no longer used.
Phonology
Consonants
The consonant
phoneme inventory of Western Dani has been described as follows:
At the beginning of words, oral stops have aspirated
allophones
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 ...
ʰ, tʰ, kʰ, kʷʰ intervocalically, voiceless /p t k / have voiced allophones
� d ~ ɾ ɣ ~ ʁ for instance following the prefix no-/na- meaning "my".
An intervocalic /ɣ/ is pronounced as , and a /ɹ/ before a high vowel becomes a fricative .
Vowels
Vowels /i, u, ɒ/ have allophones
,
Vowel length is contrastive in Western Dani, as illustrated by the minimal and near minimal pairs below:
References
Dani languages
Languages of Western New Guinea
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