Warembori is a moribund language spoken by about 600 people in river mouths on the north coast of Papua

Papua (Indonesian province)

Papua comprises most of the western half of the island of New Guinea and nearby islands. Its capital is Jayapura. It's the largest and easternmost province of Indonesia. The province originally covered the entire western half of New Guinea...

, Indonesia

Indonesia

Indonesia , officially the Republic of Indonesia , is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania. Indonesia is an archipelago comprising approximately 13,000 islands. It has 33 provinces with over 238 million people, and is the world's fourth most populous country. Indonesia is a republic, with an...

.

Classification

Classification is in dispute. Mark Donohue thinks it is related to Yoke

Yoke language

Yoke is a poorly documented language spoken by about 200 people in the north of Papua, Indonesia. The name is also spelled Yoki, Yauke, Jauke, and it is also known as Bitovondo. It was spoken in a single village in the interior until the government relocated a third of the population to a new...

, forming together the Lower Mamberamo family. On a 200 word list, they share 33%. Also there are some grammar similarities. According to Donohue, Warembori is heavily influenced by Austronesian languages to the west, in both vocabulary and grammar, Yoke is less influenced by them. Malcolm Ross thinks Warembori is a papuanised Austronesian language. He leaves Yoke unclassified due to lack of data, apparently referring to the fact that Donohue did not publish independent pronouns in Yoke. He did publish subject prefixes on verbs, which are very similar to Warembori, and the singular prefixes are also remarkably similar to two Kwerba family languages, namely Kauwera and Airoran, suggesting either borrowing or a distant relationship to Kwerba, though the Kwerba family shares almost no vocabulary with the Lower Mamberamo family. The Lower Mamberamo plural prefixes are similar to Austronesian, as are the plural object suffixes and, at least in Warembori, plural independent pronouns.

Vowels

	Front Front vowel A front vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a front vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far in front as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Front vowels are sometimes also...	Back Back vowel A back vowel is a type of vowel sound used in spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a back vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far back as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Back vowels are sometimes also called dark...
High	i	u
Mid Mid vowel A mid vowel is a vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned mid-way between an open vowel and a close vowel...	e	o
Low	a

Consonants

Bilabial Bilabial consonant In phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a consonant articulated with both lips. The bilabial consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:...	Alveolar Alveolar consonant Alveolar consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli of the superior teeth...	Palatal Palatal consonant Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate...	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)....
Stop Stop consonant In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or an oral stop, is a stop consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be done with the tongue , lips , and &...	Voiceless	p	t		k
	Voiced	b	d
	“Heavy”	ˀb	ˀd
Nasal Nasal consonant A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :...	Voiced	m	n
	“Heavy”	ˀm	ˀn
Fricative Fricative consonant Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate, in the case of German , the final consonant of Bach; or...	Voiceless		s
Semivowel 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:...	Voiced	w		j

The sequence /nk/ is realized as [ŋɡ].

The light voiced stops /b d/ lenite

Lenition

In linguistics, lenition is a kind of sound change that alters consonants, making them "weaker" in some way. The word lenition itself means "softening" or "weakening" . Lenition can happen both synchronically and diachronically...

 to [β r] between vowels within a word. The heavy stops do not lenite.

When a nasal is followed by a heavy plosive, it is lengthened, i.e. /mˀb/ [mːb] /nˀd/ [nːd]. When not followed by a stop, heavy nasals are long and preceded by a glottal closure

Glottal stop

The glottal stop, or more fully, the voiceless glottal plosive, is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. In English, the feature is represented, for example, by the hyphen in uh-oh! and by the apostrophe or [[ʻokina]] in Hawaii among those using a preservative pronunciation of...

, i.e. /ˀm/ [ʔmː] /ˀn/ [ʔnː]. Heavy consonants also attract stress (see below).

Grammar

The independent pronouns are:

	sg. Singular A grammatical number denoting a unit quantity Singular may also refer to:* Gravitational singularity, a location where the quantities that are used to measure the gravitational field become infinite...	du. Dual number In linear algebra, the dual numbers extend the real numbers by adjoining one new element ε with the property ε2 = 0 . The collection of dual numbers forms a particular two-dimensional commutative unital associative algebra over the real numbers. Every dual number has the form z = a + bε with a and...	pl. Plural In linguistics, plurality or [a] plural is a concept of quantity representing a value of more-than-one. Typically applied to nouns, a plural word or marker is used to distinguish a value other than the default quantity of a noun, which is typically one...
Incl.	iwi	amui	ami
Excl.		kui	ki
2	awi	mui	mi
3	yi	tui	ti

The dual pronouns are derived from the plural via the infix

Infix

An infix is an affix inserted inside a word stem . It contrasts with adfix, a rare term for an affix attached to the end of a stem, such as a prefix or suffix.-Indonesian:...

 ⟨u⟩. This parallels the nearby Austronesian Cenderawasih languages, which derive the dual from the plural with du or ru, from *Dua 'two'. The plural pronouns ami, ki, mi, ti, in turn, appear to be Austronesian in origin, from *kami, *kita, *kamiu, *siDa (the latter via **tira). Although 3sg yi might also derive from Austronesian *ia, 1sg iwi and 2sc awi, the most basic pronouns, have no parallel in Austronesian. However, the basic pronouns iwi, awi, yi, ki, mi, ti resemble Yoke eβu, aβu iβu, kiβu, miβu, siβu, illustrating the strong Austronesian influence on both languages.

Possessive prefixes on nouns are nearly identical to subject prefixes on verbs. The object suffixes are also similar; the paradigm is very close to that of Yoke, apart from an inclusive-exclusive distinction which is not completely grammaticalized in the case of possessives.

	Possessive	Subject	Object
1sg	e-	i-, e-, ja-
2sg	a-	u-, wa-, a-
3sg	i-, ∅-	i-, ja- ∅-
1ex	ami	ami-, ama-, ame-
1in	ki-, ke-	ki-, ka-, ke-
2pl	mi-, me-	mi-, ma-, me-
3pl	ti-, te-	ti-, ta-, te-

The singular prefixes of Warembori and Yoke are nearly identical to the 1sg e-, 2sg a-, 3sg i- of the Kwerba languages Kauwera and Airoran. However, Kwerba has no more basic vocabulary in common with the Lower Mamberamo family than what is expected by chance.

Writing system

Warembori is written in the Latin alphabet

Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...

, with a spelling system based on Indonesian

Indonesian language

Indonesian is the official language of Indonesia. Indonesian is a normative form of the Riau Islands dialect of Malay, an Austronesian language which has been used as a lingua franca in the Indonesian archipelago for centuries....

. It represents phonetic, rather than phonemic, distinctions. In particular: is written v is written r is written ngg

External links

• Donohue, 1998, 'Warembori, and the Lower Mamberamo family'