Vanimo language


Vanimo is a Skou language of Papua New Guinea which extends from Leitre to Wutung on the Papua New Guinea - Indonesian border.

Phonology

The Duso dialect of Vanimo is unusual in not having any phonemic velar consonants, though it does have phonetic.
The vowels are,
FrontCentralBack
Close
Close-mid
Open-mid
Open

All occur nasalized, varying phonetically between a nasal vowel and a vowel followed by consonantal. Nasal /u/ may be realized as a syllabic.
In Dumo, there are no velar consonants apart from this . The other consonants are,
BilabialAlveolarPalatalVelarGlottal
Nasal
Stop
Fricative
Approximant
Lateral Approximant

Consonant clusters are /pl, bl, ml, ɲv, hv, hm, hn, hɲ, hj/. /ɲv/ is pronounced. There are no coda consonants apart from.
do occur in Dusö dialect. They correspond to or zero in Dumo.
Dumo syllables may have either a 'high' or a 'long' tone. There is strict syllable timing, a 'long'-toned syllable takes the entire time allotted for a syllable, whereas with a high-tone or atonic syllable, there is a slight gap between it and the following syllable. Ross writes high tone with a grave accent, and long tone with an acute accent. A syllable with a nasal vowel / coda is not necessarily long, it may have any of the three tones.

Vocabulary

The majority of Vanimo words contain either one, two, three, or four syllables.

Personal pronouns

The pronoun system in Vanimo accommodates its grammatical gender system. The "masculine" and "feminine" 2nd and 3rd person pronouns, along with their primary uses for referring to people, can also be used for non-animate nouns or common nouns in correspondance with their grammatical gender. An example of this would be the pronoun ébu, which can be used both to mean you, or to mean you. In the table below ? is used to represent unknown or undocumented words.
SingularDualTrialPlural
1st exc.néniminihòni
1st inc.?nimivonihònivo
2nd mi?éhòé/évo
2nd mi?ébué/évo
3rd hédéhédéhòdé
3rd bédébédébudé