Maybrat language

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. Verbs and inalienably possessed nouns alike take person prefixes. There is an elaborate system of demonstratives, 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.

Distribution

With around 25,000 speakers, Maybrat is among the most populous languages of Indonesian Papua. Its speakers are the Maybrat people, who mainly practice hunting, fishing, and swidden agriculture. They have traditionally lived in scattered homesteads, with the organisation into villages initiated by the efforts of the Dutch administration between the 1930s and the 1950s. These villages, like the establishment of the settlement of Ayawasi in 1953, brought together scattered local groups where each family had spoken a slightly different dialect, resulting in a "melting pot" where the small dialectal differences are less pronounced in the speech of the younger generations.
Maybrat is spoken in a large area in the central parts of the Bird's Head Peninsula, with a large portion of its speakers 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, and 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 relationship to any other language has not yet been established. There have been attempts to subsume it under putative families like the "Toror languages", or the broader West Papuan family. 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 :

Mayhapeh
Mayasmaun
Karon Dori or Miyah.
Maymare
Maymaru : in Ayamaru District and Ayamaru Timur District
Mayte : in Aytinyo District

The most divergent dialect, Karon Dori, is sometimes considered a distinct 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 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:

Karon name: Meon ‘people who speak language speedly’
Mpur name: Bakatan ‘people who produce and wear bracelets’
Meyah name: Meyah mewi ‘language root’
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:

Phoneme	Allophones	Notes
a		obligatory before , in free variation with otherwise
a		obligatory before //, in free variation with otherwise
e		in open syllables
e		in closed syllables
i		everywhere
i		optionally before /k/
i		optionally at the end of the word after a vowel
o		in open syllables; also optionally before /m/ in one-syllable words
o		in closed syllables, or when preceded by /i/ or /u/
o		optionally when preceded by /u/ and followed by either /k/ or /x/
o		optionally when preceded by /u/ and followed by /t/
u		everywhere
u		optionally before /o/: /kuo/ ➜ ~
u		optionally at the end of the word after a vowel

A non-phonemic schwa vowel is used, mostly to break up consonant clusters. 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, 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, 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, for example /pron/ 'bamboo' → .

Stress

The placement of stress is not predictable, although it most often falls on the first syllable. 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' vs. 'fence', '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.