Karkar language


The Karkar language, also known as Yuri, is the sole Eastern Pauwasi language of Papua New Guinea. There are about a thousand speakers along the Indonesian border spoken in Green River Rural LLG, Sandaun Province.

Dialects

Dialects are:
Karkar-Yuri is not related to any other language in Papua New Guinea, and was therefore long thought to be a language isolate. This is the position of Wurm, Foley, and Ross. However, Timothy Usher noticed that it is transparently related to the Pauwasi languages across the border in Indonesia. Indeed, it may even form a dialect continuum with the Eastern Pauwasi language Emem. This was foreshadowed in non-linguistic literature: a 1940 map shows the 'Enam' –speaking area as including the Karkar territory in PNG, and the anthropologist Hanns Peter knew that the Karkar dialect continuum continued across the border into Emem territory.

Pauwasi cognates

Cognates between Karkar-Yuri and the Pauwasi family listed by Foley :

Pronouns

Pronouns listed by Ross :
Object forms take -an, sometimes replacing the -o: onan, amoan, man, yinan, námoan, yumoan. Mao is a demonstrative 'that one, those'; it contrasts with nko, nkoan 'the other one'.
Pronouns listed by Foley are:

Phonology

The Karkar inventory is as follows.
Stress assignment is complex, but not phonemic within morphemes. Syllable structure is CVC, assuming nasal–plosive sequences are analyzed as prenasalized consonants.

Vowels

Karkar has a vowel inventory consisting of 11 vowels, which is considered very high for a Papuan language.
iɨu
e ə o
ɛ ə ɔ
ɛɐɔ
ɐɑ

There is also one diphthong, ao. Vowels are written á, é, ae, o, ou, ɨ.
Foley lists the 11 Karkar-Yuri vowels as:
Some vowel height contrasts in Karkar-Yuri :
There are four contrasting central vowel heights:
The rhotics and glottal consonants do not appear initially in a word, and plain, the approximants, and the labialized consonants do not occur finally. Glottal stop only occurs finally. Final k spirantizes to. Plosives are voiced intervocalically. Intervocalic f and p neutralize to , and intervocalic k is voiced to. Phonemic labialized stops only occur in two words, apwar 'weeds, to weed' and ankwap 'another'. Otherwise consonants are labialized between a rounded and a front vowel, as in pok-ea 'going up'. In some words, the plosive of a final NC is silent unless suffixed: onomp 'my', onompono 'it's mine'.
Prenasalized and labialized consonant contrasts:
Plain and preglottalized sonorants contrasts, which only occur in word finals:
Below are some basic vocabulary words in Karkar-Yuri.