Ma'ya language


Ma'ya is an Austronesian language spoken in West Papua by 6,000 people. It is spoken in coastal villages on the islands Misool, Salawati, and Waigeo in the Raja Ampat islands. It is spoken on the boundary between Austronesian and Papuan languages.

Dialects

Ma'ya has five dialects, three on the island of Waigeo, one on Salawati, and one on Batanta. The prestige dialect is the one on Salawati. The Waigeo dialects have /s/ and /ʃ/, where the varieties spoken on Salawati and Misool have /t/ and /c/ respectively. Batanta, now extinct, was evidently unintelligible with its neighbours.
On Waigeo Island, there are three dialects:
Both its tone and stress are lexically distinctive. That means both the stress and the pitch of a word may affect meaning. The stress and tone are quite independent from one another, in contrast to their occurrence in Swedish and Serbo-Croatian. It has three tonemes. Out of over a thousand Austronesian languages, there are only a dozen with lexical tone; in this case it appears to be a remnant of shift from Papuan languages.
Lexical tone is found only in final syllables.