Keuw language

Keuw is an unclassified language of New Guinea.
Keuw is spoken in a swampy lowland region along the Poronai River in Keuw village of Wapoga District, Nabire Regency, Papua province, Indonesia. According to oral folklore, the Keuw were originally from Woisaru, and then moved to Sanawado, which may be locations in Wapoga District.

Classification

Mark Donohue said that Kehu is "probably a Geelvink Bay language, but no one knows enough about those languages, systematically, to say this with confidence for beyond Barapasi, Tunggare and Bauzi."
Timothy Usher classifies it as a Lakes Plain language, closest to Awera and Rasawa–Saponi. According to Foley, based on some lexical and phonological similarities, Keuw may possibly share a deep relationship with the Lakes Plain languages. Palmer treats Keuw as a language isolate.

Phonology of Keuw from Kamholz, quoted in Foley :

Keuw has ten consonants.

Keuw has five vowels.

Keuw has contrastive tone. Some minimal pairs demonstrating phonemic tonal contrasts:

Keuw has SOV word order, as exemplified by the sentence below. The morphemic suffixes remain unglossed.

Basic vocabulary of Keuw from Kamholz, quoted in Foley :
The following basic vocabulary words are from the Trans-New Guinea database: