Gimi language

Gimi (Labogai) is a Papuan language spoken in Eastern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea.

Gimi
Native to	Papua New Guinea
Region	Eastern Highlands Province
Native speakers	(22,500 cited 1981)[1]
Language family	Trans–New Guinea Kainantu–Goroka Goroka Gimi
Dialects	Gouno
Language codes
ISO 639-3	gim
Glottolog	gimi1243[2]

Phonology

Gimi has 5 vowels and 12 consonants.[3] It has voiceless and voiced glottal consonants where related languages have /k/ and /ɡ/. The voiceless glottal is simply a glottal stop [ʔ]. The voiced consonant behaves phonologically like a glottal stop, but does not have full closure. Phonetically it is a creaky-voiced glottal approximant [ʔ̞].[4]

Vowels

	Front	Back
High	i	u
Mid	e	o
Low		ɑ

Consonants

		Bilabial	Alveolar	Glottal
Plosive	voiceless	p	t	ʔ
	voiced	b	d	ʔ̞
Nasal		m	n
Tap/Flap			ɾ
Fricative	voiceless		s	h
	voiced		z

Allophony

/p/ occurs word initially only in loanwords.

/b/ can surface as either [b] or [β] in free variation.

/z/ becomes [s] before /ɑ/.

/t/ and /ɾ/ tend to fluctuate with one another word initially.

Syllables

The syllable structure is (C)V(G), where G is either /ʔ/ or /ʔ̞/.

Tone

The final vowel of a word takes either a level or falling tone. The falling tone is written with an acute accent.

ak "seed"		ák "armband"
nimi "bird"		nimí "louse"

Orthography

Gimi uses the Latin script.[3]

Letter	Aa	Bb	Cc	Dd	Ee	Gg	Hh	Ii	Mm	Nn	Oo	Pp	Rr	Ss	Tt	Uu	Zz
IPA	ɑ	b	ʔ	d	e	ʔ̞	h	i	m	n	o	p	ɾ	s	t	u	z

References

1. Gimi at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
2. Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Gimi (Eastern Highlands)". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
3. Gimi Organised Phonology Data. [Manuscript]
4. Ladefoged, Peter; Maddieson, Ian (1996). The Sounds of the World's Languages. Oxford: Blackwell. pp. 77–78. ISBN 978-0-631-19815-4.