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The Abawiri language is a Lakes Plain language of Papua, Indonesia. It is spoken in the village of Fuau, located along the Dijai River, a tributary to the Mamberamo River. Clouse tentatively included Abawiri and neighboring Taburta (Taworta) in an East Lakes Plain subgroup of the Lakes Plain family; due to the minimal data that was available on the languages at that time. With more data, the connection looks more secure.

Like other Lakes Plain languages, Abawiri is notable for being heavily tonal and for lacking nasal consonants: there are no nasal or nasalized consonants or vowels, even allophonically.

Phonology

Abawiri has sixteen obstruent consonants (eight plain and eight labialized), as well as one sonorant consonant /ɾ/. The consonant and vowel charts below show the phonemes, followed by their representations in the community orthography (in <brackets>) where that representation is different from the phoneme symbol.

Abawiri has seven vowels, including three high front vowels: /i/, /y/, and /i̝/.

References

1. Abawiri at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
2. Clouse, Duane (1997). "Toward a reconstruction and reclassification of the Lakes Plain languages of Irian Jaya". Papers in Papuan Linguistics. 2: 133–236.
3. Voorhoeve, Clemens L. (1975). Languages of Irian Jaya: checklist, preliminary classification, language maps, wordlists. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics Series B-31.
4. Yoder, Brendon (2018). "The Abawiri tone system in typological perspective". Language (Phonological Analysis). 94 (4): e266–e292. doi:10.1353/lan.2018.0067. S2CID 150242777 – via Project MUSE.
5. Yoder, Brendon (2020). A grammar of Abawiri, a Lakes Plain language of Papua, Indonesia (PhD dissertation thesis). University of California Santa Barbara.

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