I’saka is the language spoken by the people of the villages of Krisa

Krisa

Krisa is a village in Sandaun Province, Papua New Guinea, 20 kilometers south of the provincial capital of Vanimo. In the local language, the village, its people and the local language itself are all known as I'saka....

 and Pasi

Pasi

Pasi is a settlement near the coast of Sandaun Province, Papua New Guinea, to the west of the province capital of Vanimo. It is four hours walk from the village of Krisa, of which it is an offshoot. Pasi is the largest I'saka-speaking settlement outside of Krisa....

 in Sandaun Province, Papua New Guinea

Papua New Guinea

Papua New Guinea , officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea, is a country in Oceania, occupying the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and numerous offshore islands...

. It has also been referred to as Krisa, after the village, although this name is not actually a possible word in the language itself. The sole published source for the language is Donohue and San Roque (2004) (see references), although the authors of this have also Identified I’saka material in Donald Laycock

Donald Laycock

Dr Donald Laycock was an Australian linguist and anthropologist. He is best remembered for his work on the languages of Papua New Guinea.-Biography:...

's unpublished fieldnotes.

Phonology

Apart from segmental phonemes, I’saka and also make suprasegmental distinctions in tone

Tone (linguistics)

Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called...

 and nasality

Nasal vowel

A nasal vowel is a vowel that is produced with a lowering of the velum so that air escapes both through nose as well as the mouth. By contrast, oral vowels are ordinary vowels without this nasalisation...

.

Segmental phonemes

There are the following consonants in I’saka:

	Bilabial	Dento-Alveolar	Palatal	Velar Velar consonant Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum)....
Voiceless	(p)	t		k
Voiced	b	d
Fricative	(ɸ)	s
Glide Semivowel In phonetics and phonology, a semivowel is a sound, such as English or , that is phonetically similar to a vowel sound but functions as the syllable boundary rather than as the nucleus of a syllable.-Classification:...	w		j

The segments p, ɸ and occasionally f are heard in non-contrastive free variation, making them reflexes of a single phoneme (transcribed p). Donohue and San Roque (2004) suggest that there was an earlier phonemic or allophonic contrast which is in the process of merging, perhaps under the influence of neighboring languages and Tok Pisin.

There are five vowel phonemes distinguished by most speakers, although older speakers sometimes also distinguish a high central rounded vowel ʉ

	front	central	back
high	i	(ʉ)	u
mid	ɛ		ɔ
low		a

Suprasegmental distinctions

The tone system makes four pitch contrasts on single syllables, High tone, Low tone, Rising tone and Falling tone. On words of more than one syllable, the tonal system is more complex, and adjacent syllables never show the same tone.

Nasality is a feature of the entire syllable. A minimal pair is /bɔw/-R (i.e the segments b, ɔ and w with Rising tone) heart and /bɔw/-RN (the same segments and tone, but with Nasality added to the syllable as well) none. The word heart is realized as [bow]; all segments of the word none are nasalized, so it is realized as [mõŵ]

Grammar

Personal pronouns show morphological variants for number

Grammatical number

In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions ....

 (singular, plural, and a dual in first and second person), gender

Grammatical gender

Grammatical gender is defined linguistically as a system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words, such as adjectives, verbs and others. For a system of noun classes to be a gender system, every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be...

 (masculine or non-masculine, marked on third person singular pronouns only) and case (see below). The semantic basis for the grammatical gender system is as follows. The masculine gender indicates 'animate male entities and items immediately associated with them', and the non-masculine gender indicates anything else, i.e. a generic, default gender.

I’saka has fairly strict Subject-Object-Verb word order for declarative sentences. Personal pronouns have Unmarked, Nominative, Accusative and Possessive case forms. The Nominative case pronouns are used for the subjects of transitive and intransitive verbs, the accusative pronouns for the objects of transitives. Pronouns in oblique roles take the Unmarked case form. The Unmarked case forms can also be used in place of Nominative and Possessive pronouns, but the significance of the choice is not clear. Nouns do not have case marking in core grammatical roles, although there are suffixes for Instrumental, Accompaniment/Location and Predicate possessor.

Verbs have more obligatory morpholological marking than nouns. There are prefixes agreeing with the subject. A subset of transitive verbs mark their objects, either by means of an object suffix, or by suppletion of the verb stem. Most verbs do not have object marking.