The Yuat languages are an independent family of five
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 ...
spoken along the
Yuat River in
East Sepik Province
East Sepik is a province in Papua New Guinea. Its capital is Wewak. East Sepik has an estimated population of 450,530 people (2011 census) and is 43,426 km square in size. Its density is 10.4 people per square kilometer.
History
Cherubim D ...
,
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 an independent family in the classification of Malcolm Ross, but are included in Stephen Wurm's
Sepik–Ramu proposal. However, Foley and Ross could find no lexical or morphological evidence that they are related to the Sepik or Ramu languages.
It is named after the
Yuat River of northern
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 ...
. Yuat languages are spoken mostly in
Yuat Rural LLG of
East Sepik Province
East Sepik is a province in Papua New Guinea. Its capital is Wewak. East Sepik has an estimated population of 450,530 people (2011 census) and is 43,426 km square in size. Its density is 10.4 people per square kilometer.
History
Cherubim D ...
.
Languages
The Yuat languages proper are:
*
Changriwa
*
Mekmek
*
Kyenele (Miyak)
*
Biwat (Mundugumor)
*
Bun
Classification
Foley (2018) provides the following classification.
;Yuat family
*
Changriwa
*
Mekmek
*
Miyak;
Bun,
Mundukumo (
Biwat)
Changriwa and
Mekmek are attested only by short words, and are tentatively grouped as separate branches by Foley (2018: 226) due to scanty evidence.
Pronouns
The pronouns Ross (2005) reconstructs for proto-Yuat are:
:
Mundukumo and
Miyak pronouns are:
:
Vocabulary comparison
The following basic vocabulary words are from Davies & Comrie (1985), as cited in the Trans-New Guinea database.
The words cited constitute translation equivalents, whether they are cognate (e.g. ''ŋkaᵐbaᵐgat∘'', ''ŋgambaŋ'' for “leg”) or not (e.g. ''fufuimaye'', ''ϕə'ziru'' for “hair”).
:
Grammar
Yuat languages distinguish inclusive and exclusive first person pronouns, a feature not found in most other Papuan languages. This tyopological feature has also diffused from Yuat into the
Grass languages
The Grass languages are a group of languages in the Ramu language family. It is accepted by Foley (2018), but not by Glottolog. They are spoken in East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea, with a small number of speakers also located just across th ...
, which are spoken contiguously to the Yuat languages.
Yuat grammar and phonology are similar to those of the neighboring
Ramu languages.
Yuat verbal morphology is relatively simple.
Yuat languages are
accusative
In grammar, the accusative case (abbreviated ) of a noun is the grammatical case used to receive the direct object of a transitive verb.
In the English language, the only words that occur in the accusative case are pronouns: "me", "him", "her", " ...
, unlike many other Papuan languages, e.g., Trans New Guinea, East Cenderawasih Bay, Lakes Plain, South Bougainville, which are all
ergative.
Word order in Yuat languages, like in the
Yawa languages, is rigidly SOV, whereas in many other Papuan families, OSV word order is often permitted (as long as the verb is final).
See also
*
Maramba language, a possibly spurious language often listed as Yuat.
*
Upper Yuat languages
References
External links
Yuat languages database at TransNewGuinea.org
{{language families
Language families
Papuan languages
Languages of East Sepik Province