Ghayavi, or Boianaki, is an Austronesian language of the eastern Papua New Guinean mainland.
Phonology
The phonology of Ghayavi is typical of most Oceanic languages in that its phoneme inventory is characterised by a small number of phonemes and few complex articulations. Ghayavi has sixteen consonant phonemes, and thirteen vowel phonemes (including five diphthongs). Stress by default occurs on the penultimate syllable, although there are some examples of contrastive stress to encode semantic difference. One such minimal pair includes /kɑˈwam/ 'your mouth' and /ˈkɑwam/ 'your spouse'.
External links
- Materials on Ghayavi are included in the open access Arthur Capell collections (AC2) held by Paradisec.
References
