Wutung language

Wutung
Sangke
Native to	Papua New Guinea
Region	Sandaun Province
Native speakers	900 (2003)[1]
Language family	Skou Vanimo Wutung
Dialects	Wutung Sangke (Nyao)
Language codes
ISO 639-3	wut
Glottolog	wutu1244[2]

Wutung (Udung) is a Skou language of Papua New Guinea which is spoken in the villages of Wutung and Sangke. The two varieties are sometimes considered separate languages.

Location

The village is in Sandaun Province, on the northern coast and adjacent to the border with Indonesia. There are about 500 living in Wutung village, most of whom speak Wutung.

The nearby villages of Musu (12 km east on the coast) and Nyao Kono (about 12 km due south) have closely related languages which are named after their villages (Musu and Nyao). These three speech varieties are very closely related and are mutually intelligible.

Phonology

Wutung has fifteen consonants and seven vowels, six of which have nasal variants. This gives a total of 28 phonemes. Wutung also makes suprasegmental distinctions in tone.

Consonants

		Bilabial	Labiodental	Alveolar	Palatal	Glottal
Plosive	voiceless	p		t	t͡ʃ	ʔ
	voiced	b		d	d͡ʒ
Nasal		m		n	ɲ
Fricative			f	s		h
Approximant	central	w
	lateral			l

Vowels

Wutung has thirteen vowels, which includes seven oral and six nasal vowels. The table below shows the oral vowels. Each of these vowels, apart from the close-mid vowel ur /ɵ/, has an equivalent nasal vowel. The nasal vowels are indicated using the same symbol as the equivalent oral, but with a following ng, e.g. ca, 'pig' vs. cang 'blossom', the latter having the nasal vowel.

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i /i/		u /u/
Mid	ey /e/	ur /u/	o /o/
Open	e /ɛ/		a /a/

Pronouns

Wutung has a simple system of personal pronouns with three persons (1st, 2nd and 3rd), two numbers (singular and plural) and gender in the third person singular pronouns. The same set of pronouns are used for object and subject.

I	nie	we	netu
thou	me	you	etu
he	qey	they	tetu
she	cey

References

• Marmion, Doug (2010). Topics in the Phonology and Morphology of Wutung. Canberra: Australian National University.

1. Wutung at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
2. Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Wutung". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.