Austronesian language spoken in Indonesia
Maʼya is an Austronesian language of the Raja Ampat islands in Southwest Papua, Indonesia. It is part of the South Halmahera–West New Guinea (SHWNG) subgroup and is spoken by about 6,000 people in coastal villages on the islands Misool, Salawati, and Waigeo, on the boundary between Austronesian and Papuan languages.
Dialects.
Maʼya has five dialects: three on the island of Waigeo (Laganyan, Wauyai, and Kawe), one on Salawati, and one on Misool. The prestige dialect is the one on Salawati. The varieties spoken on Salawati and Misool are characterized by the occurrence of and in some words, where the Waigeo dialects (and other related SHWNG languages) have and respectively.
On Waigeo Island, the three dialects are
Phonology.
Tone.
In Maʼya both tone and stress are lexically distinctive. This means both the stress and the pitch of a word may affect its meaning. The stress and tone are quite independent from one another, in contrast to their occurrence in Swedish and Serbo-Croatian. The language has three tonemes (high, rising and falling). Out of over a thousand Austronesian languages, there are only a dozen with lexical tone; in this case it appears to be a remnant of shift from Papuan languages.
Lexical tone is found only in final syllables.
References.
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