3. Phonetics and Phonology of Ngkolmpu

Abstract

This paper describes the phonetics and phonology of segments in Ngkolmpu, a language spoken in the Merauke region of Indonesian Papua. The language is a member of the the Tonda-Kanum branch of the Yam family and displays a fairly typical segmental inventory for a Yam language with some notable exceptions. There are sixteen phonemic consonantal segments. As commonly found in Papuan languages, the primary manner distinction of stops is between voiceless oral stops and prenasalised stops. Rather unusually, both the plain oral stops and the prenasalised stops are voiceless for the oral period of the articulation. There are seven phonemic vowels and one epenthetic vowel whose distribution is phonotactically determined.