Corylus

The Mussau-Emira language is spoken on the islands of Mussau and Emirau in the St Matthias Islands in the Bismarck Archipelago.

Phonology

Phonemes

Consonants

Mussau-Emira distinguishes the following consonants.

	Bilabial	Alveolar	Velar
Nasal	m	n	ŋ
Plosive	p	t	k
Fricative	β	s	ɣ
Liquid		l ɾ

Fricative sounds /β, ɣ/ may also be heard as voiced stop sounds [b, ɡ] in word-initial position and when geminated.

Vowels

	Front	Central	Back
High	i		u
Mid	ɛ		ɔ
Low		a

Stress

In most words the primary stress falls on the penultimate vowel and secondary stresses fall on every second syllable preceding that. This is true of suffixed forms as well, as in níma 'hand', nimá-gi 'my hand'; níu 'coconut', niúna 'its coconut'.

Morphology

Pronouns and person markers

Free pronouns

Person	Singular	Plural	Dual	Trial	Paucal
1st person inclusive		ita	italua	itatolu	itaata
1st person exclusive	agi	ami	aŋalua	aŋatolu	aŋaata
2nd person	io	am	amalua	amatolu	amaata
3rd person	ia	ila	ilalua	ilotolu	ilaata

Subject prefixes

Prefixes mark the subjects of each verb:

(agi) a-namanama 'I'm eating'
(io) u-namanama 'you're (sing.) eating'
(ia) e-namanama 'he's/she's eating'

Sample vocabulary

Numbers

kateva
galua
kotolu
gaata
galima
gaonomo
gaitu
gaoalu
kasio
kasaŋaulu

References

^ Mussau-Emira at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)

External links

Kaipuleohone has archived a word list of Mussau language
Materials on Mussau-Emira are included in the open access Arthur Capell (AC1) and Malcolm Ross (MR1) collections held by Paradisec.

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