Yahadian language


Yahadian is a Papuan language of the Bird's Head Peninsula of Southwest Papua. It is spoken in Yahadian village, Kais District, South [Sorong Regency]. Overall, Yahadian is poorly documented, with only enough data for a sketch of the language's structure. It is considered "endangered" by Ethnologue.

Geographic distribution

Yahadian is a member of the Trans–New Guinea languages, spoken on the northwestern corner of the island of New Guinea. Three villages speak Yahadian: Mugim, Yahadian, and Kais, with an estimated 1,200 speakers in 2002. They are all located on the south side of the Bird's Head peninsula in Indonesia.
Yahadian is most closely related to Konda; the two languages appear to form a dialect continuum. Yahadian speakers in the village of Mugim reported that they could "easily" understand Konda speakers. They are also the only two South [Bird's Head languages] that do not mark gender on nouns.
It does not appear to have a close relationship with its eastern neighbor, the Inanwatan language, with limited lexical overlap and far different phonology and morphology.

Phonology

Consonants

Yahadian has 21 consonants, according to de Vries's analysis.

Vowels

Yahadian has eight vowels:
FrontCentralBack
unroundedunroundedrounded
Close
Close-mid
Open-mid
Open

Phonotactics

The language generally uses CV or V syllables, with a few exceptions. CC consonant clusters require one of the consonants to be or . Nasals and liquids are the only observed word-final consonants.

Morphology

Yahadian has fairly simple morphology compared to its neighbors. It does not index the verb's arguments via affixes, unlike other South Bird's Head languages.

Pronouns

Gender is not known to be marked in Yahadian. De Vries reports the following pronouns for Yahadian:
singularplural
1st personnéná
2nd personéádigi/adʒigi
3rd personmímíginaigi