Wutung (Udung), Musu, and Nyao, are dialects of a unnamed
Skou language 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 ...
. They are spoken in
Bewani/Wutung Onei Rural LLG of
Sandaun Province
Sandaun Province (formerly West Sepik Province) is the northwesternmost mainland Provinces of Papua New Guinea, province of Papua New Guinea (also known as home of the sunset). It covers an area of 35,920 km2 (13868 m2) and has a population ...
.
Sangke and the language of several other villages of the interior are reported to be similar, and may be dialects.
Tok Pisin
Tok Pisin ( ,Laurie Bauer, 2007, ''The Linguistics Student's Handbook'', Edinburgh ; ), often referred to by English speakers as New Guinea Pidgin or simply Pidgin, is an English-based creole languages, English creole language spoken throughou ...
and
English are widely spoken in the area, and many Wutung people speak
Indonesian too.
Location
Wutung village () is in
Sandaun Province
Sandaun Province (formerly West Sepik Province) is the northwesternmost mainland Provinces of Papua New Guinea, province of Papua New Guinea (also known as home of the sunset). It covers an area of 35,920 km2 (13868 m2) and has a population ...
, on the northern coast and adjacent to the border with Indonesia. There are about 600 living in Wutung village, most of whom speak Wutung. Traditional Wutung land extends across the border to the
Tami River, but while people garden plots in that expanse they all live in the village.
The nearby villages of Musu (12 km east on the coast, at ) and Nyao Kono (about 12 km due south, at ) have closely related dialects which are named after their villages (Musu and Nyao). These three speech varieties are very closely related and are easily mutually intelligible.
Phonology
Wutung has fifteen consonants and seven vowels, six of which have nasal variants. This gives a total of 28 phonemes. Wutung also makes suprasegmental distinctions in
tone
Tone may refer to:
Visual arts and color-related
* Tone (color theory), a mix of tint and shade, in painting and color theory
* Tone (color), the lightness or brightness (as well as darkness) of a color
* Toning (coin), color change in coins
* ...
.
Consonants
Wutung is one of the very few languages that lack
velar consonants.
Vowels
Wutung has thirteen vowels, which includes seven oral and six nasal vowels. The table below shows the oral vowels. Each of these vowels, apart from the close-mid vowel ur /ɵ/, has an equivalent nasal vowel. The nasal vowels are indicated using the same symbol as the equivalent oral, but with a following ''ng'', e.g. ca, 'pig' vs. cang 'blossom', the latter having the nasal vowel.
Pronouns
Wutung has a simple system of personal pronouns with three persons (1st, 2nd and 3rd), two numbers (singular and plural) and gender in the third person singular pronouns. The same set of pronouns are used for object and subject.
:
External links
*
Paradisec has an open access collection of
Don Laycock’s materials tha
includes Zimakani language materials
References
{{Languages of Papua New Guinea
Languages of Sandaun Province
Western Skou languages