Wamesa is an Austronesian language of Indonesian New Guinea, spoken across the neck of the Doberai Peninsula or Bird's Head. There are currently 5,000–8,000 speakers. While it was historically used as a lingua franca, it is currently considered an under-documented, endangered language. This means that fewer and fewer children have an active command of Wamesa. Instead, Papuan Malay has become increasingly dominant in the area.
Name
The language is often called Wandamen in the literature; however, several speakers of the Windesi dialect have stated that Wandamen and Wondama refer to a dialect spoken around the Wondama Bay, studied by early missionaries and linguists from SIL. They affirm that the language as a whole is called Wamesa, the dialects of which are Windesi, Bintuni, and Wandamen. While Wamesa is spoken in West Papua, Wamesa is not a Papuan language but rather a South Halmahera–West New Guinea (SHWNG) language.
Distribution
Locations:
Teluk Bintuni Regency
Teluk Wondama Regency
Windesi District: Windesi, Wamesa Tengah, Sombokoro, Wamesa Timur (Yopmeos), and Sandey villages Sougb Jaya District: Kaprus village
Phonology
Vowels
There are five contrastive vowels in Wamesa, as is typical of Austronesian languages. These vowels are shown in the tables below.
Five diphthongs appear in Wamesa: , , , , and . Two-vowel and three-vowel clusters are also common in Wamesa. Almost all VV-clusters contain at least one high vowel, and no two non-high vowels may be adjacent in larger clusters.
Consonants
There are 14 consonants in Wamesa, three of which are marginal (shown in parentheses in the table below).
Labial, coronal and velar places of articulation are contrastive in Wamesa. Coronal plosives sound relatively dental and may therefore be referred to as alveolar or alveo-dental until palatography can be executed to corroborate this. Lateral and affricate appear only in loanwords, while all other sounds occur in native Wamesa words. The voiced velar fricative is a marginal phoneme because it only appears following .
The coronal tap and trill are in free variation, though the trill tends to occur more in word-initial or word-final position and in careful speech.
Place and manner contrasts as described above are supported by the minimal and near-minimal pairs found in the following table. Where possible, Wamesa words have been selected to show native (non-loan) phonemes in the environment /C[labial]a_a/.
Phonotactics
Velar plosive only appears following , and can only appear without a following if it is stem-initial.
Glide Phonotactics
There are no underlying glides in Wamesa; and are allophones of the vowel phonemes and . This phonetic alternation is obligatory, permitted, or prohibited, depending upon the environment.
High vowels must become glides word-initially preceding a vowel or intervocalically. They may optionally become glides when adjacent to a single vowel. Finally, high vowels never become glides between two consonants, depriving the syllable of a nucleus. Nor do glides appear word-initially preceding a consonant or word-finally following a consonant, in which case the syllable structure would be at odds with the Sonority Sequencing Principle.
Consonant cluster reduction
Complex onsets and codas are not permitted in Wamesa, and consonant clusters across syllable boundaries are usually reduced, such that /C1C2/ surfaces as [C2]. However, there are three exceptions to this; clusters of homorganic nasals and voiced plosives are permitted to surface, as are consonant-glide clusters that form through the morphophonological processes described above. Additionally, an underlying cluster of a consonant followed by or does not reduce but surfaces as a nasal followed by a homorganic voiced plosive, both of which derive their place features from underlying /C2/.
Data from related languages of the Yapen and Biakic groups suggests that historically, and were and in Proto-Eastern Malayo-Polynesian. In this case, these phones would have formed a natural class of voiced plosives to which phonological rules could uniformly apply.