Abawiri

The Abawiri language is a Lakes Plain language of Papua, Indonesia. It is spoken in the village of Fuau, located along the Dijai River, a tributary to the Mamberamo River. Clouse tentatively included Abawiri and neighboring Taburta (Taworta) in an East Lakes Plain subgroup of the Lakes Plain family;^[2] due to the minimal data that was available on the languages at that time.^[3] With more data, the connection looks more secure.

Abawiri
Doa
Abawiri
Native to	Indonesia
Region	Western New Guinea
Native speakers	350 (2010)[1]
Language family	Lakes Plain East Lakes Plain Abawiri
Language codes
ISO 639-3	flh
Glottolog	foau1240
ELP	Foau

Like other Lakes Plain languages, Abawiri is notable for being heavily tonal^[4] and for lacking nasal consonants: there are no nasal or nasalized consonants or vowels, even allophonically.^[5]

Phonology

Abawiri has sixteen obstruent consonants (eight plain and eight labialized), as well as one sonorant consonant /ɾ/. The consonant and vowel charts below show the phonemes, followed by their representations in the community orthography (in <brackets>) where that representation is different from the phoneme symbol.

Abawiri consonants

		Labial		Alveolar		Alveolo-palatal		Velar
		plain	rounded	plain	rounded	plain	rounded	plain	rounded
Plosive	voiceless			t	tʷ ⟨tw⟩			k	kʷ ⟨kw⟩
	voiced	b	bʷ ⟨bw⟩	d	dʷ ⟨dw⟩	dʒ ⟨j⟩	dʒʷ ⟨jw⟩	g	gʷ ⟨gw⟩
Fricative		f	fʷ ⟨fw⟩	s	sʷ ⟨sw⟩
Flap				ɾ ⟨r⟩

Abawiri has seven vowels, including three high front vowels: /i/, /y/, and /i̝/.

Abawiri vowels

	Front	Back
Extra-high	i̝ ⟨yi⟩
High	i y ⟨yu⟩	u
Mid	ɛ ⟨e⟩
Low	a	ɒ ⟨o⟩

References

1. Abawiri at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
2. Clouse, Duane (1997). "Toward a reconstruction and reclassification of the Lakes Plain languages of Irian Jaya". Papers in Papuan Linguistics. 2: 133–236.
3. Voorhoeve, Clemens L. (1975). Languages of Irian Jaya: checklist, preliminary classification, language maps, wordlists. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics Series B-31.
4. Yoder, Brendon (2018). "The Abawiri tone system in typological perspective". Language (Phonological Analysis). 94 (4): e266–e292. doi:10.1353/lan.2018.0067. S2CID 150242777 – via Project MUSE.
5. Yoder, Brendon (2020). A grammar of Abawiri, a Lakes Plain language of Papua, Indonesia (PhD dissertation thesis). University of California Santa Barbara.