Yabem language

Yabem, or Jabêm, is an Austronesian language of Papua New Guinea.

Overview

Yabem belongs to the division of the Melanesian languages spoken natively by about 2,000 people at Finschhafen, which is on the southern tip of the Huon Peninsula in Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea, despite historical evidence that shows that the language originated in the northern coast. However, Yabem was adopted as local lingua franca along with Kâte for evangelical and educational purposes by the German Lutheran missionaries who first arrived at Simbang, a Yabem-speaking village, in 1885. Yabem was the first language for which the missionaries created a writing system because it was the first language that they encountered when they arrived. They even created a school system to provide education for the Yabem community.
By 1939, it was spoken by as many as 15,000 people and understood by as many as 100,000. In the decade after World War II, the mission's network of schools managed to educate 30,000 students by using Yabem as the medium of instruction. Although the usage of Yabem as a local lingua franca was replaced by Tok Pisin, which was used in informal everyday life, such as religious meetings and the workplace, and English, which was used in more formal institutions like education and government in the 1950s, Yabem remains one of the best-documented Austronesian languages, with extensive instructional and liturgical materials as well as grammars and dictionaries. The government wanted an easier assimilation to Western culture and values and access to their superior educational resources and so English was the most efficient language of instruction.
Still, the transition from the usage of Kâte and Yabem, which are languages with local origins, to Tok Pisin and English, which are languages with foreign origins, affected the dynamic of the people and their view of language and the church somewhat negatively.
Yabem also shares a close relationship with the Kela and Bukawa languages. In fact, many people who speak Bukawa also speak Yabem.
Ethnologue classifies the language's status as "threatened." It may be spelled Jabêm, Jabem, Jabim, Yabim and is also known as Laulabu.

Phonology

Vowels

Yabem distinguishes seven vowel qualities.

	Front	Central	Back
High	i		u
Upper mid	e		o
Lower mid	ɛ		ɔ
Low		a

Consonants

The glottal stop, written with a -c, is distinctive only at the end of syllables. The only other consonants that can occur there are labials and nasals: p, b, m, ŋ. The liquid is realized as either a flap or a lateral. Syllable-structure constraints are most easily explained if labialized and prenasalized consonants are considered to be unit phonemes rather than clusters. However, Otto Dempwolff, who greatly influenced the German missionary orthographies in New Guinea, apparently did not sanction labialized labials, preferring instead to signal rounding on labials by the presence of a round mid vowel between the labial consonant and the syllable nucleus, as in vs. ômôêŋ 'you'll come' vs. ômêŋ 'he'll come' or ômôa 'you'll dwell' vs. ômac 'you'll be sick'.

Tone

Yabem has a simple system of register tone that distinguishes high-tone syllables from low-tone ones. In the standard orthography, high-tone syllables are unmarked, and the nuclei of low-tone syllables are marked with a grave accent, as in oc 'sun' vs. òc 'my foot' or uc 'breadfruit' vs. ùc 'hunting net'. Tone distinctions in Yabem appear to be of relatively recent origin and still correlate strongly with obstruent voicing contrasts. Only high tones occur in syllables with voiceless obstruents, and only low tone occurs in syllables with voiced obstruents. The fricative is voiced in low-tone syllables but voiceless in high-tone syllables. Other phonemes are neutral with respect to tone and so occur in both high-tone or low-tone environments.

Lexical categories

Yabem has nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns and adverbs. Some categories, such as verbs and nouns, are distinguishable by the types of morphology that they are able to take.
Yabem nouns can take inalienable possessive suffixes, distinguishing person, number and inclusivity/exclusivity. Alienable possessives are indicated by a juxtaposed possessive word. Nouns can also take "affective" suffixes that indicate a speaker's attitude toward that thing: sympathy, affection or ridicule. Examples are from Bradshaw & Czobor unless otherwise stated:

ŋac – 'man'

Verbs are distinguishable by their prefixes. They can take pronominal prefixes to indicate person, number, and irrealis/realis mode, as can be seen above in the Morphology section.
Some words can function as either nouns or verbs and thus take either nominal or verbal morphology:

lac – 'a sail'

Most of these are derived from the sense of the noun originally, though some appear to be derived from actions expressed by verbs:

ômac – 'laughter'
Grammatical relations and alignment

Yabem has a nominative-accusative system of alignment, as is evidenced by the pronominal prefixes that appear on verbs that always mark the subject of either a transitive or intransitive verb. There is no case-marking on the nominals themselves, and word order is typically subject–verb–object. Examples are from Bradshaw & Czobor unless otherwise noted:
Subject prefixes can also occur with full subject pronouns, as is shown in the example below. Both bolded morphemes refer to the first-personal singular.
Word order is another marker of the nominative/accusative system. Below, the first person singular free pronoun precedes the first whether it is the subject of an intransitive verb or the agent of a transitive verb.

Voice and valency

Yabem, like many other languages of the area, both Oceanic and Papuan, has no passive voice. There is also no morphological method to create a causative. Detransitivization can be accomplished via periphrastic reflexive/reciprocal phrases, as can be seen below. Example is from Bradshaw.

Morphological typology

Yabem shows elements of morphological fusion and agglutination but is not very high in either respect. The primary factor determinative of fusion/agglutination degree is lexical category. Verbs, for example, take subject prefixes, which fusionally mark person, number, inclusivity, realis/irrealis, and high- and have low-tone variants. Nouns also display low levels of agglutination, sometimes taking possessive suffixes. Verbal derivation is not something that occurs morphologically although nominalization does so. Some derivational morphology for nominalization can be seen below in building a noun via the agentive suffix. In the second example, the patient of a verb is combined with the agent to construct an agentive nominalized form. Examples are from Bradshaw & Czobor

Relative clauses

Relative clauses are created by use of the demonstrative pronouns/adjectives, which come in several forms themselves.

First series	tonec	onec	tec	nec
Second series	tonaŋ	onaŋ/ônaŋ	taŋ	naŋ
Third series	tone	ônê	tê	nê

The three series above represent three degrees of proximity in the demonstratives. First series correlates to something nearest or most relevant to the 1st person, and the second series corresponded to the 2nd person, while the third series corresponds to what is nearest or most relevant to the 3rd person. The forms beginning with t- are those that offer a specific or precise degree of evidentiality. Examples of this degree of precision can be seen below.
The bolded forms in the above table are the short forms of these demonstratives. They are phonologically reduced but carry no difference in meaning from the long forms. It is these short demonstratives that are used to create relative clauses. The three degrees of proximity as well as the two degrees of evidential precision still come into play when these forms are used as relative pronouns.
It is of note that the t- pronoun may precede the n- form, or two n-/n- forms may co-occur, but the n- form may never precede the t- form. This means that taŋ...naŋ and naŋ...naŋ are acceptable but not *naŋ...taŋ.

Serial verb constructions

Yabem has a rich serial verb construction system. It incorporates both different subject SVCs and same subject SVCs. The SVC system is symmetrical. The two verbs of the SVC must agree in mode and must have the same object if they are transitive. Semantic usages include directionals, resultatives, causatives, comitatives and adverbial modifiers:

Morphology

Pronouns and person markers

Free pronouns

First-person plural inclusive and exclusive are not distinguished in the free pronouns, but are distinguished in the subject prefixes and the genitives.

Person	Singular	Plural	Dual
1st person inclusive		aêàc	aêàgêc
1st person exclusive	aê	aêàc	aêàgêc
2nd person	aôm	amàc	amàgêc
3rd person	eŋ	êsêàc	êsêàgêc

Genitive pronouns

The short, underdifferentiated genitive forms are often disambiguated by adding the free pronoun in front.

Person	Singular	Plural
1st person inclusive		nêŋ
1st person exclusive	ŋoc	ma
2nd person	nêm	nêm
3rd person	nê	nêŋ