Enga is a language of the East New Guinea Highlands spoken by a quarter-million people in Enga Province, Papua New Guinea. It has the largest number of speakers of any Trans–New Guinea language, as well as any native language in New Guinea, and is second over all after Papuan Malay.
An Enga-based pidgin is used by speakers of Arafundi languages.
History
The Enga contain more than 150,000 people that occupy the mountainous region ranging from Mount Hagen and westward to Porgera. Enga people are known to be sedentary gardeners that grow sweet potatoes as their staple crop. Coffee and pyrethrum are also grown as cash crops in their culture and they also keep pigs, cattle, and fowls. Pigs, pearls, shells, axes, and plumes are items of wealth and signify social occasions when exchanged or circulated. Enga clans have definite boundaries defining their homesteads across the territory and have been known to fight with each other over land, women, and vengeance. Men and women traditionally occupy different homes because it is believed that women are unclean and can be dangerous to men. The Enga culture does not include a chief or headman, but instead the wealthy men have the political and administrative control.
Phonology
Vowel sounds include /i e ɑ o u/.
A /k/ can range to sounding like a fricative between low and back vowels. /t/ is pronounced as an /r/ sound intervocalically. /ts/ may also be realised as [s] . All final vowels are devoiced. Alveolar stops /t, ⁿd/ may be realised as retroflex sounds /ʈ, ᶯɖ/.
The Enga alphabet includes 21 different letters, only two of which not being in the English alphabet.
Grammar
Nouns
Similarly to the English language, Enga nouns use the determiners dóko and méndé as the and a, some, or else respectively.
Noun classes in Enga have not been studied in great detail just yet, but they have been shown to be based primarily on syntactic features. These classes include animates, pronouns, body parts, inanimates, locationals, events, colors, inner states, and minor classes. Nouns may also be inflected for cases such as agentive AG , instrumental INST, possessive POSS, locative LOC, and temporal. In the chart below it shows the case distribution and the noun classes in relation to one another.
Animates can occur in different subclasses such as proper names. Some examples of animates can include takánge (father), endángi (mother), Aluá (a man's name), Pasóne (a woman's name), or mená (pig). All of which would include a determiner being either demonstrative or indefinite and can be with the agentive or possessive cases, but not used instrumentally or locative. Pronouns in the Enga language can easily be identified and can vary from dialects:
nambá I
émba you
baá he, she, it
nalímba we two
nyalámbo you two
dolápo they two
náima we plural
nyakáma you plural
dúpa they plural
These pronouns are similar to animates in that determiners may occur in agentive, and possessive cases, but not used instrumentally or locative. Body parts are in the animate class and can include words like kíngi (arm), pungí (liver), and yanúngí (skin, body). These differ from the previous classes in which they may have a determiner occur either instrumentally or locative, but not in the agentive or possessive cases. Location nouns are used to determine the place. These words can include kákasa (bush), Wápaka (Wabag- a place), or Lakáipa (Lagaipa- a river). This class only uses a determiner in the location case and nothing else.