Wamesa language

Wamesa is an Austronesian language of Indonesian New Guinea, spoken across the neck of the Doberai Peninsula or Bird's Head. There are currently 5,000–8,000 speakers. While it was historically used as a lingua franca, it is currently considered an under-documented, endangered language. This means that fewer and fewer children have an active command of Wamesa. Instead, Papuan Malay has become increasingly dominant in the area.

Name

The language is often called Wandamen in the literature; however, several speakers of the Windesi dialect have stated that Wandamen and Wondama refer to a dialect spoken around the Wondama Bay, studied by early missionaries and linguists from SIL. They affirm that the language as a whole is called Wamesa, the dialects of which are Windesi, Bintuni, and Wandamen. While Wamesa is spoken in West Papua, Wamesa is not a Papuan language but rather a South Halmahera–West New Guinea language.

Distribution

Locations:

Teluk Bintuni Regency
Teluk Wondama Regency
*Windesi District: Windesi, Wamesa Tengah, Sombokoro, Wamesa Timur, and Sandey villages
*Sougb Jaya District: Kaprus village
Phonology

Vowels

There are five contrastive vowels in Wamesa, as is typical of Austronesian languages. These vowels are shown in the tables below.

	Front	Central	Back
High	i		u
Mid	e		o
Low		a

Five diphthongs appear in Wamesa:,,,, and. Two-vowel and three-vowel clusters are also common in Wamesa. Almost all VV-clusters contain at least one high vowel, and no two non-high vowels may be adjacent in larger clusters.

3-Vowel Cluster	Wamesa Word	English Gloss
iau	niau	cat
ioi	nioi	knife
iai	ai kiai dire	toenail
iou	ariou	flower
iui	βiui	3sg-write

Consonants

There are 14 consonants in Wamesa, three of which are marginal.

	Bilabial	Coronal	Velar
Nasal
Plosive
Fricative
Affricate
Tap/Trill		/
Lateral

Labial, coronal and velar places of articulation are contrastive in Wamesa. Coronal plosives sound relatively dental and may therefore be referred to as alveolar or alveo-dental until palatography can be executed to corroborate this. Lateral and affricate appear only in loanwords, while all other sounds occur in native Wamesa words. The voiced velar fricative is a marginal phoneme because it only appears following.
The coronal tap and trill are in free variation, though the trill tends to occur more in word-initial or word-final position and in careful speech.
Place and manner contrasts as described above are supported by the minimal and near-minimal pairs found in the following table. Where possible, Wamesa words have been selected to show native phonemes in the environment /Ca_a/.

Phoneme	Wamesa	English Gloss
p		valley
b		big
t		good, true
d		lamp
k		eel
g		yell
m		clear
n		already
ŋ		rat
β		under
s		broken, cracked
r		paddy oat leaf

Phonotactics

Velar plosive only appears following, and can only appear without a following if it is stem-initial.

Glide Phonotactics

There are no underlying glides in Wamesa; and are allophones of the vowel phonemes and. This phonetic alternation is obligatory, permitted, or prohibited, depending upon the environment.

Vowel surfaces as Glide	Env. 1	Env. 2	Env. 3
Obligatorily	#_V	V_V
Optionally	C_V	V_C	V_#
Never	C_C	#_C	C_#

High vowels must become glides word-initially preceding a vowel or intervocalically. They may optionally become glides when adjacent to a single vowel. Finally, high vowels never become glides between two consonants, depriving the syllable of a nucleus. Nor do glides appear word-initially preceding a consonant or word-finally following a consonant, in which case the syllable structure would be at odds with the Sonority Sequencing Principle.

Consonant cluster reduction

Complex onsets and codas are not permitted in Wamesa, and consonant clusters across syllable boundaries are usually reduced, such that /C₁C₂/ surfaces as . However, there are three exceptions to this; clusters of homorganic nasals and voiced plosives are permitted to surface, as are consonant-glide clusters that form through the morphophonological processes described above. Additionally, an underlying cluster of a consonant followed by or does not reduce but surfaces as a nasal followed by a homorganic voiced plosive, both of which derive their place features from underlying /C₂/.
Data from related languages of the Yapen and Biakic groups suggests that historically, and were *b *d and *g in Proto-Eastern Malayo-Polynesian. In this case, these phones would have formed a natural class of voiced plosives to which phonological rules could uniformly apply.

Stress

Wamesa is a bounded language with a three-syllable, right-aligned stress window, meaning that stress alternates and primary stress falls on the final, penultimate, or antepenultimate syllable of the Pword. However, the distribution is not even; in a random sampling test of 105 audio clips, 66 tokens had primary stress on the penultimate syllable. With the addition of enclitics, primary stress sometimes shifts towards the end of the word to stay within the stress window, but since Wamesa prefers its metrical feet to be trochees, stress usually jumps from the head of one foot to the next, rather than jumping single syllables.
Note that stress in Wamesa is not predictable, meaning there is no rule for where primary stress will occur. Therefore, stress is specified in the underlying form of words. However, as mentioned earlier, stress shift may occur in certain words in order to create a better phonological structure.
Secondary stresses are apparent in words of more than two syllables and, in cases of shifting stress, can be added at the beginnings of words to reduce lapses. In the example below, the addition of the enclitic determiner =pai causes primary stress to shift to the right by two syllables, and a secondary stress is added to the left in order to fill the lapse.
However, secondary stress always precedes primary stress and clitics are never able to carry stress in Wamesa. These two factors mean that the addition of multiple enclitics sometimes causes large lapses at the ends of words. For example, the construction below has a five-syllable lapse at the end.
This would appear to be a violation of the three-syllable stress window, but the fact that clitics never carry stress indicates that they may combine with their hosts at the level of the Pphrase rather than at Pword, where the stress window is relevant. Additionally, lapse is evaluated at the level of the Pword, meaning that stress in the following word never shifts to compensate. That is to say, stress in a word following the above construction would never shift leftwards for the purpose of reducing the lapse between words. This is in contrast to clash, which is evaluated at the level of the phonological phrase. Thus, to avoid clash, stress can shift within a word to compensate for the presence of a stressed syllable across a word boundary. For example, the word ka.tú 'small' typically has a stressed final syllable. However, when followed by yá.na 'there' as in the phrase below, stress within ka.tú shifts to avoid two adjacent stressed syllables.
In summary, lapse avoidance can only occur at the level of Pword, while clash avoidance is relevant at the level of Pphrase.

Orthography

In much of the literature on Wamesa an orthography is used which is based on the orthographic system of Indonesian. This orthography diverges from IPA notation in the following cases:

is notated
is notated
is notated
is notated – clusters of therefore appear as
Syntax

Wamesa includes the following parts of speech: noun, pronoun, verb, adverb, adjective, determiner, preposition, complementizer, conjunction, numeral, interrogative, imperative, locative, demonstrative, particle, interjection, and adposition.

Word order

Wamesa is a subject–verb–object language. Wamesa has NADQ order, which is rare in the world's languages.
When a sentence involves an applicative, the word order is as follows: instrument verb, with the items in parentheses as optional.

Adjectives

Adjectives always follow nouns. Unlike verbs, they cannot take the applicative prefix.

Verbs

With regard to verbs, phrases must adhere to the following rules:

Subject agreement must be marked on each verb and only on verbs.
If direction is involved in the sentence, it must be marked on the verb.
If there is an essive, it must attach to the verb that is describing a trait of the subject.
The applicative must attach to the verb, not the instrument.