Language of West Papua
Maybrat is a Papuan language spoken in the central parts of the Bird's Head Peninsula in the Indonesian province of Southwest Papua.
Maybrat is also known as Ayamaru, after the name of its principal dialect, while the divergent Karon Dori dialect has sometimes been counted as a separate language. Maybrat has not been demonstrated to be related to any other language, and so is often considered a language isolate. Nevertheless, in its grammatical structure, it has a number of features that are shared with the neighbouring languages.
Maybrat is characterised by a relatively small consonant inventory and an avoidance of most types of consonant clusters. There are two genders: masculine and unmarked. Morphology is simple. Verbs and inalienably possessed nouns alike take person prefixes. There is an elaborate system of demonstratives (words like "this" or "that"), with encoding for distance from the speaker, specificity, and syntactic function. In the clause, there is a fairly rigid subject–verb–object word order, and within noun phrases modifiers follow the head noun. Verb sequences, including serial verbs are very common, and verbs are used for a number of functions which in languages like English are served by adjectives or prepositions.
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Background.
With around 25,000 speakers (as of 1987), Maybrat is among the most populous languages of Indonesian Papua. Its speakers are the Maybrat people, whose main occupations have been hunting, fishing, and swidden agriculture. They have traditionally lived in scattered homesteads, with the organisation into villages (kampongs) initiated by the efforts of the Dutch administration between the 1930s and the 1950s. This has had an effect on the language. For example, the establishment of the settlement of Ayawasi in 1953 brought together scattered local groups where each family had spoken a slightly different "family dialect", resulting in a "melting pot" where these small dialectal differences are levelled in the speech of the younger generations.
Maybrat is spoken in a large area in the central parts of the Bird's Head Peninsula and a large portion of its speakers are concentrated around the Ayamaru Lakes, although many are also found in urban areas of Indonesian Papua. Maybrat is surrounded by a number of languages. To the north are two other isolates: Abun and Mpur; to the east are Meyah and Moskona, both members of the East Bird's Head language family; the South Bird's Head languages Arandai, Kaburi, Kais, and Konda are spoken to the south; the neighbouring languages to the west are Tehit and Moraid, both of the West Bird's Head family.
The Malay language served as the language of wider communication in this area during the Dutch administration, while more recently the related Indonesian language has taken up this role. Most Maybrat speakers in Ayawasi, for example, are fully bilingual in Indonesian, with the use of Indonesian loanwords and code-switching between the two languages fairly common.
The word "Maybrat" is a compound of "mai" 'sound, language', and according to one explanation, its meaning is "the language Brat", where "Brat" is the name of a hill near the village of Semetu in the Ayamaru region.
Classification and dialects.
Maybrat is often considered to be a language isolate, as a genetic relationship to any other language has not been established. There have been attempts to subsume it under putative families like the "Toror languages" (also including Abun and the West Bird's Head languages), or the broader West Papuan phylum. Even if not demonstrably related to any other language and sharing only a small percentage of its vocabulary with its neighbours, Maybrat nevertheless has a great deal in its grammatical structure that resembles other languages of the Bird's Head.
There have been various classifications and listings of the dialects of Maybrat. The local tradition of the speakers recognises the following six dialects (the districts and villages where each is spoken are given in brackets):
The most distinct dialect, at least in comparison to Mayhapeh, is Karon, which in some previous surveys has been listed as a separate language. The differences between Maymaru and Mayhapeh on the other hand are very small, but the two are nevertheless regarded by their speakers as distinct dialects. This is largely because the Maymaru speak significantly faster, so much so that the Mayhapeh often have difficulties understanding them. The dialect whose phonology and grammar are described in the following sections is Mayhapeh, as analysed by Dol in her 2007 grammar. The two papers by Brown (1990, 1991) are on noun phrases and phonology and they are based on the Maymaru dialect as spoken in the village of Kambuaya.
Irires is also known as Karon Dori, Meon, or Maiyach. Some exonyms include:
Phonology.
Maybrat has five vowel phonemes and a small consonant inventory consisting of between nine and eleven consonant phonemes, depending on the analysis. Closed syllables are not uncommon, but most types of consonant clusters are broken up with the insertion of a schwa vowel. The placement of stress is not predictable.
Vowels.
The following table presents the five Maybrat vowels along with their allophones as documented in the Mayhapeh dialect:
A non-phonemic schwa vowel is used, mostly to break up consonant clusters (see below). A schwa is also optionally inserted before the initial consonant in a small number of short words: ~ 'night'. Vowels are phonetically lengthened in stressed one-syllable words. A vowel at the start of a word is optionally preceded, and a vowel at the end of a word is optionally followed, by a non-phonemic glottal stop , typically when the word is uttered in isolation: ~ 'rain', ~ 'they drink'.
Not all of these allophones have been documented in the Maymaru dialect. However, it does have the following allophone rules not described for the Mayhapeh dialect: word-final /o/ is pronounced as [] after /i/, while unstressed word-final /a/ is realised as [].
Consonants.
In the Mayhapeh dialect, the bilabial stop does not occur at the end of the word. It has two allophones – voiceless and voiced – which are in free variation in all positions: /tapam/ 'land' → ; the voiceless allophone is more common, even between vowels. The velar stop is voiceless, but it has an optional voiced allophone between vowels and an optional unreleased allophone at the end of the word. The alveolar stop is always voiceless, and in word-final position is in free variation with the aspirated and the unreleased : /poiit/ 'food' → . The labial fricative /f/ has two allophones in free variation: the and the . The velar fricative //, which in the practical orthography is written as "h", can be either voiceless or voiced : /xren/ 'they sit' → . The rhotic consonant is always an alveolar trill at the start of the word, while in other positions it is in free variation with the alveolar tap .
Voiced allophones are generally more common in the other dialects. For example, in the Maymaru dialect, spoken in the area of Ayamaru, the bilabial stop is always voiced , while the alveolar stop becomes voiced after . The velar stop becomes voiced either before or after .
The semivowels and are treated as distinct consonantal phonemes in Dol's study of the Mayhapeh dialect of Ayawasi, but Brown's analysis of the Maymaru dialect they are instead analysed as allophones of the vowels /i/ and /u/ respectively. In the remainder of this article, the semivowel // is represented with ⟨y⟩, following the practical orthography.
Consonant clusters.
At the phonemic level, consonant clusters do occur, either at the start or in the middle of the word, but they are invariably broken up by the insertion of the epenthetic vowel schwa . Thus, /tre/ 'bracelet' is pronounced , /twok/ → 'they enter', /mti/ → 'evening'. This also happens when the consonant cluster is in the middle of the word between vowels (/mfokfok/ → 'they roll'), except if the first consonant of the cluster is a nasal: /nimpon/ → 'watermelon'. The epenthetic schwa can assimilate in quality to the following vowel: /mtie/ → . Those Maybrat speakers who are also fluent in Indonesian, can and do pronounce clusters of a consonant + r (which are also found in Indonesian), for example /pron/ 'bamboo' → (in contrast to , as pronounced by people who speak only Maybrat).
Stress.
The placement of stress is not predictable, although it most often falls on the first syllable (schwa vowels getting skipped: /tfo/ → ). Stress is phonemic at least in the Maymaru dialect. In his description of this dialect, Brown adduces several minimal pairs of words that differ solely in the placement of stress: 'they' (with the stress falling on the first syllable) vs. 'fence' (stress falling on the second syllable), 'she itches' vs. 'she takes'. In her study of the Mayhapeh dialect of Ayawasi, Dol notes that such pairs, though perceived by the native speakers as distinct, are acoustically indistinguishable, thus "they" and "fence" are both . Her conclusion, which has received some criticism, is that stress is only weakly phonemic.
At the end of a sentence, many older speakers blow a puff of air through their nose, which appears to be a common phenomenon in the languages of the Bird's Head Peninsula.
Grammar.
Personal pronouns and prefixes.
Maybrat has a set of independent personal pronouns and the corresponding person prefixes that are used with verbs and some nouns:
The Maymaru dialect distinguishes between inclusive 'we' (meaning 'I + you') and exclusive 'we' ('I + he/she'). The inclusive form is "anu" (with corresponding person prefix "b-") and the exclusive one is "amu" (with prefix "n-"). It also has somewhat different pronouns for the first and second person singular: "tyo" 'I', and "nyo" 'you (singular)'.
The person prefixes are obligatory for verbs and for inalienably possessed nouns (see below for these possession constructions). When added to a verb, the prefix indexes the subject ("y-amo" 'He goes'), and when added to an inalienably possessed noun, it indexes the possessor ("y-ana" 'his head'). If the verb or noun begins with the vowel "a-" then this vowel is dropped before prefixes for the first and second person plural. The following table lists the prefixes of the Mayhapeh dialect along with an example paradigm:
There are words, nouns or verbs, that do not take person prefixes. This is largely determined phonologically: the prefix is not allowed if its addition would result in a word of three or more syllables. There are also five verbs that are exceptions: they do not allow person prefixes even though they are otherwise phonologically eligible.
Demonstratives.
Maybrat has an elaborate system of demonstratives (these are words like "this", "that", or "there"). They are morphologically complex and consist of a prefix, a demonstrative base, and a suffix. The four demonstrative bases are differentiated based on distance from the speaker: "-f-" is for objects that are within physical reach of the speaker, "-t-" indicates objects a little further away but still near, "-n-" refers to objects that are far away, while "-au" does not specify a distance and so is used when the distance from the speaker is irrelevant. The demonstrative base is followed by a suffix specifying gender: "-o" is unmarked for gender, and "-i", "-ait" or "-e" are for the masculine. Which of the three masculine suffixes to choose depends on the base: "-ait" is only used after "-t", "-e" is used with "-n-", while "-i" usually combines with "-f-". Gender is relevant only with certain prefixes ("re-" and "me-"/"-fi-" + "-t-"); otherwise, the unmarked suffix "-o" is used. Examples of the masculine and the unmarked forms:
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The demonstratives in the examples above have the prefix "re-", which is used when the specific location of the object is known. If the exact location of the object is not known, then another prefix "we-" is employed:
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Another prefix is "te-", which refers to area, and so demonstratives with this prefix correspond to English words like "here" or "there", unlike ones with "re-" and "we-", which can usually be translated as "this" or "that":
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All three prefixes discussed above – "re-", "we-" and "te-" – mark their demonstratives for attributive use, that is, such demonstratives typically occur within a noun phrase and modify the head noun. Another set of prefixes is used for adverbial demonstratives, ones that can be used as adverbs