Yoke is a poorly documented language spoken by about 200 people in the north of Papua,

Indonesia Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania, between the Indian Ocean, Indian and Pacific Ocean, Pacific oceans. Comprising over List of islands of Indonesia, 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, ...

. The name is also spelled ''Yoki, Yauke'', and it is also known as Bitovondo. It was spoken in a single village in the interior until the government relocated a third of the population to a new village, Mantarbori, on the coast. In the late 19th century, a word list of "Pauwi" was collected by Robidé van der Aa at Lake Rombebai, where the Yoke say they migrated from; this is transparently Yoke, apart from some words which do not appear in the modern language but are found in related Warembori.A word list of "Pauwi" collected by Stroeve and Moszkowski was not Yoke, though it's not clear what it wa

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Classification

About one third of the vocabulary of Yoke is cognate with Warembori language, Warembori, a language which has either been strongly influenced by

Austronesian languages 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 ...

, or is an Austronesian language strongly influenced by

Papuan languages 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 ...

. The two languages are grammatically very similar, with shared morphological irregularities, demonstrating a genealogical relationship. However, Yoke does not share the Austronesian features of Warembori, and it is unclear how this relates to Ross's 2005 classification, based on pronouns, of Warembori as an Austronesian language.

Grammar

On the surface, at least, Yoke has the following sounds: Unusually for a Papuan language, but like Warembori, Yoke has prepositions and a subject–verb–object (SVO) constituent order. Verbs have subject prefixes and may have one or more object suffixes. The verbal affixes are: The independent pronouns are the first subject marker listed in the table prefixed to ''-βu''. The plural forms may derive from Austronesian; see Warembori language, Warembori for details. Like many

of northern New Guinea, Yoke has

suppletive In linguistics and etymology, suppletion is traditionally understood as the use of one word as the inflection, inflected form of another word when the two words are not cognate. For those learning a language, suppletive forms will be seen as "irre ...

singular/plural forms for nouns. Yoke is

polysynthetic In linguistic typology, polysynthetic languages, formerly holophrastic languages, are highly synthetic languages, i.e., languages in which words are composed of many morphemes (word parts that have independent meaning but may or may not be able t ...

, with

noun incorporation In linguistics, incorporation is a phenomenon by which a grammatical category, such as a verb, forms a compound (linguistics), compound with its direct object (object incorporation) or adverbial modifier, while retaining its original syntax, synt ...

in its verbs. For example, (The purpose of the 'thematic' consonant is unclear, but it appears to divide verbs into different classes.)

References

*Clouse, Duane, Mark Donohue and Felix Ma. 2002. "Survey report of the north coast of Irian Jaya

External links

Donohue (1998) on Warembori
with a section on Yoke {{Languages of Indonesia Lower Mamberamo languages Languages of Western New Guinea