Golin language

"Golin" redirects here. For other uses, see Golin (disambiguation).

Golin (also Gollum, Gumine) is a Papuan language of Papua New Guinea.

Golin
Region	Gumine District, Simbu Province
Native speakers	(50,000 cited 1981)[1]
Language family	Trans–New Guinea Chimbu–Wahgi Chimbu Golin
Writing system	Latin
Language codes
ISO 639-3	gvf
Glottolog	goli1247
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Phonology

Vowels

	Front	Back
High	ɪ ɪː	ʊ ʊː
Mid	ɛ ɛː	ɔ ɔː
Low		ɑ ɑː

Diphthongs that occur are /ɑi ɑu ɔi ui/. The consonants /l n/ can also be syllabic.

Consonant

		Bilabial		Alveolar		Palatal	Velar
		plain	lab.	plain	Late.		plain	lab.
Nasal		m		n
Stop	voiceless /voiced	p b	(bʷ)	t d			k ɡ	(gʷ)
Fricative				s~ʃ	ɬ~ l
Approximant						j		w
Trill				r

/bʷ ɡʷ/ are treated as single consonants by Bunn & Bunn (1970),^[2] but as combinations of /b/ + /w/, /ɡ/ + /w/ by Evans et al. (2005).^[3]

Two consonants appear to allow free variation in their realisations: [s] varies with [ʃ], and [l] with [ɬ].

/n/ assimilates to [ŋ] before /k/ and /ɡ/.

Tone

Golin is a tonal language, distinguishing high ([˧˥]), mid ([˨˧]), and low ([˨˩]) tone. The high tone is marked by an acute accent and the low tone by a grave accent, while the mid tone is left unmarked. Examples:^[3]

• High: mú [mu˧˥] 'type of snake'; wí [wi˧˥] 'scream (man)'
• Mid: mu [mu˨˧] 'type of bamboo'; wi [wi˨˧] 'coming from the same ethnic group'
• Low: mù [mu˨˩] 'sound of river'; wì [wi˨˩] 'cut (verb)'

Pronouns

Golin is notable for having a small pronominal paradigm. There are two basic pronouns:^[4]

• ná first person
• í second person

There is no number distinction and no true third person pronoun. Third person pronouns in Golin are in fact compounds derived from 'man' plus inín 'self':

• yalíni 'he' < yál 'man' + inín 'self'
• abalíni 'she' < abál 'woman' + inín 'self'

References

1. Golin at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022)
2. • Bunn, Gordon; Bunn, Ruth (1970). "Golin phonology". Pacific Linguistics A. 23: 1–7.
3. Evans, Nicholas; Besold, Jutta; Stoakes, Hywel; Lee, Alan (2005). Materials on Golin: Grammar, texts and dictionary. Parkville: The Dept. Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, The University of Melbourne.
4. Foley, William A. (2018). "The morphosyntactic typology of Papuan languages". In Palmer, Bill (ed.). The Languages and Linguistics of the New Guinea Area: A Comprehensive Guide. The World of Linguistics. Vol. 4. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. pp. 895–938. ISBN 978-3-11-028642-7.

• Bunn, Gordon (1974). "Golin grammar". Working Papers in New Guinea Linguistics. 5.