Awiakay (Arafundi)

The Awiakay language is spoken by about 400 people in East Sepik Province of PNG. It belongs to a small Arafundi family. Awiakay has twelve consonants and twelve vowels, primary stress occurs on the first syllable. Verbs are inflected for person and number of subject and object arguments, as well as TAM. Nouns take case marking and may be marked for possession. Adjectives do not take the same inflections as nouns and verbs. Awiakay has both verbal and verbless clauses which display the same predicate-final structure and show the same grammatical encoding of negation. Verbal clauses have a number of specialised constructions to encode complex predicates, involuntary experiences and sequentionality. Awiakay has both co-ordinate and subordinate complex sentences. Discourse-structuring devices include tail-head linkage constructions, structures for reporting the speech of others and a clausal clitic to indicate speaker stance. This language cameo includes a video example of Awiakay in use.

Keywords: Awiakay language, Arafundi, Papuan languages, Sketch grammar