Abawiri

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;^[2] due to the minimal data that was available on the languages at that time.^[3] With more data, the connection looks more secure.

Abawiri
Doa
Abawiri
Native to	Indonesia
Region	Western New Guinea
Native speakers	350 (2010)[1]
Language family	Lakes Plain East Lakes Plain Abawiri
Language codes
ISO 639-3	flh
Glottolog	foau1240
ELP	Foau

Like other Lakes Plain languages, Abawiri is notable for being heavily tonal^[4] and for lacking nasal consonants: there are no nasal or nasalized consonants or vowels, even allophonically.^[5]

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 consonants

		Labial		Alveolar		Alveolo-palatal		Velar
		plain	rounded	plain	rounded	plain	rounded	plain	rounded
Plosive	voiceless			t	tʷ ⟨tw⟩			k	kʷ ⟨kw⟩
	voiced	b	bʷ ⟨bw⟩	d	dʷ ⟨dw⟩	dʒ ⟨j⟩	dʒʷ ⟨jw⟩	g	gʷ ⟨gw⟩
Fricative		f	fʷ ⟨fw⟩	s	sʷ ⟨sw⟩
Flap				ɾ ⟨r⟩

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

Abawiri vowels

	Front	Back
Extra-high	i̝ ⟨yi⟩
High	i y ⟨yu⟩	u
Mid	ɛ ⟨e⟩
Low	a	ɒ ⟨o⟩