Wutung language

Wutung (Udung) is a Skou language of Papua New Guinea. It is spoken in the villages of Wutung (2.60857°S 141.010203°E / -2.60857; 141.010203 (Wutung)) and Sangke in Bewani-Wutung Onei Rural LLG of Sandaun Province.[3][4] The two varieties are sometimes considered separate languages.

Wutung
Sangke
Native toPapua New Guinea
RegionSandaun Province
Native speakers
900 (2003)[1]
Dialects
  • Wutung
  • Sangke (Nyao)
Language codes
ISO 639-3wut
Glottologwutu1244[2]
Coordinates: 2.60857°S 141.010203°E / -2.60857; 141.010203 (Wutung)

Location

The village is in Sandaun Province, on the northern coast and adjacent to the border with Indonesia. There are about 500 living in Wutung village, most of whom speak Wutung.

The nearby villages of Musu (12 km east on the coast) and Nyao Kono (about 12 km due south) have closely related languages which are named after their villages (Musu and Nyao). These three speech varieties are very closely related and are 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.

Consonants

Wutung is one of the very few languages that lack dorsal consonants.

Labial Alveolar Palatal Glottal
Plosive
or
Affricate		 voiceless p t t͡ʃ ʔ
voiced b d d͡ʒ
Nasal m n ɲ
Fricative f s h
Approximant w l

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.

Front Central Back
Close i
/i/		 u
/u/
Mid ey
/e/		 ur
/ɵ/		 o
/o/
Open e
/ɛ/		 a
/a/

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.

Iniewenetu
thoumeyouetu
heqeytheytetu
shecey
gollark: It's not as bad as my server at maximum fan speed, though...
gollark: *VRRRRRR*
gollark: When I occasionally do voice chat on here and stuff I have to use push to talk.
gollark: My laptop's microphone is very bad, so they'd probably ask me to turn it off if I were to actually use it.
gollark: Technically my laptop has a camera. But also technically that's not a webcam.

References
  1. Wutung at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
  2. Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Wutung". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
  3. Eberhard, David M.; Simons, Gary F.; Fennig, Charles D., eds. (2019). "Papua New Guinea languages". Ethnologue: Languages of the World (22nd ed.). Dallas: SIL International.
  4. United Nations in Papua New Guinea (2018). "Papua New Guinea Village Coordinates Lookup". Humanitarian Data Exchange. 1.31.9.
  • Marmion, Doug (2010). Topics in the Phonology and Morphology of Wutung. Canberra: Australian National University.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.