Major General James G. Blunt

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^[2] 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'.

Ghayavi Consonant Inventory
		Bilabial	Alveolar	Palatal	Labiodental	Velar
Plosive	Voice	b	d			k kw
	Voiceless	p	t ɾ			g gw
Fricative	Voice	v			v	ɣ
	Voiceless	f	s
Nasal		m	n
Approximant		w		j

Ghayavi Vowel Inventory
	Front	Central	Back
Close	i		u
Mid		e	o
Open	a

External links

Materials on Ghayavi are included in the open access Arthur Capell collections (AC2) held by Paradisec.

References

^ Ghayavi at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
^ Lynch, John, Malcolm Ross, and Terry Crowley. 2011. The Oceanic Languages. Abingdon: Routledge.

[e18-1] Ghayavi at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)

[2] Lynch, John, Malcolm Ross, and Terry Crowley. 2011. The Oceanic Languages. Abingdon: Routledge.

[2]