Maʼya language

Maʼya
Maʼya
Native to	Indonesia
Region	Raja Ampat Islands
Ethnicity	Ma'ya
Native speakers	(5,000 cited 2000–2001)
Language family	Austronesian Malayo-Polynesian Central–Eastern Malayo-Polynesian Eastern Malayo-Polynesian South Halmahera–West New Guinea Raja Ampat–South Halmahera Raja Ampat Nuclear Raja Ampat Ma'ya–Salawati Maʼya; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;
Dialects	Biga; Ma'ya; Kawe; Legenyem; Wauyai;
Language codes
ISO 639-3	Variously:; slz – Ma'ya; kgb – Kawe; lcc – Legenyem; wuy – Wauyai
Glottolog	raja1258
ELP	Legenyem
	Location within Southeast Asia
	Coordinates: 0°52′S 130°39′E / 0.86°S 130.65°E

Maʼya is an Austronesian language of the Raja Ampat islands in Southwest Papua, Indonesia. It is part of the South Halmahera–West New Guinea (SHWNG) subgroup and is spoken by about 6,000 people in coastal villages on the islands of Batanta, Misool, Salawati, and Waigeo, on the boundary between Austronesian and Papuan languages.

Dialects

Maʼya has five dialects: three on the island of Waigeo (Legenyem, Wauyai, and Kawe), one on Salawati and part of Batanta, and one on Misool. The prestige dialect is the one on Salawati.^{[citation needed]} The varieties spoken on Salawati and Misool are characterized by the occurrence of /s/ and /ʃ/ in some words, where the Waigeo dialects (and other related SHWNG languages) have /t/ and /c/ respectively.

On Waigeo Island, the three dialects are^: 6

The Kawe dialect in Selpele and Salyo villages in the northwest part of the island.
The Laganyan (Legenyem) dialect is spoken in Araway, Beo, and Lopintol villages on the Mayalibit Bay coast.
The Wauyai (Wawiyai) dialect is spoken in Wawiyai village on the Kabui Bay coast.

In Glottolog 5.2 (2025), which is based on Laura Arnold's most recent classification, the Ma'ya dialects are classified as follows:

Misool-Salawati Ma'ya
- Banlol
- Batanta Ma'ya
- Nuclear Ma'ya
Waigeo Maya
- Biga
- Kawe
- Legenyem
- Wauyai

Phonology

Consonants

		Labial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Plosive	voiceless	p	t		k	(ʔ)
Plosive	voiced	b	d		ɡ
Nasal		m	n		(ŋ)
Fricative		f	s
Tap			ɾ
Lateral			l
Approximant		w		j

Twelve consonants may also be heard as palatalized /pʲ, bʲ, tʲ, dʲ, kʲ, ɡʲ/; /fʲ, sʲ/; /mʲ, nʲ, lʲ, wʲ/.
When in word-final position, six plosives can occur as unreleased [p̚, b̚, t̚, d̚, k̚, ɡ̚], as well as nasals [m̚, n̚, ŋ̚].
/l/ can be heard as retroflex [ɭ] in word-final positions, and when preceded by a back vowel.
/s/ can be pronounced as [ʃ] when between two /i/ vowel sounds.
/ɾ/ can also be heard as a trill [r], when in word-final positions.
/n/ can be heard as a velar [ŋ], when preceding velar stops. [ŋ] may also be a loan phoneme.
The glottal stop [ʔ] is heard mostly phonetically, in word-initial position before initial vowels.
Other sounds /ɦ, x, z/ may also occur as a result of Arabic and Indonesian loanwords.

Vowels

	Front	Back
Close	i	u
Mid	e	ɔ
Open	a

Phoneme	Allophones
/e/	[e], [e̝], [ɛ]
/a/	[a], [ä]
/ɔ/	[ɔ], [ɔ̞], [o]

Other sounds /ɪ, ʊ/ are considered archiphonemes, and can also phonetically occur as a result of /i, u/ within vowel clusters.

Tone

In Maʼya, both tone and stress are lexically distinctive. This means both the stress and the pitch of a word may affect its meaning. The stress and tone are quite independent from one another, in contrast to their occurrence in Swedish and Serbo-Croatian. The language has three tonemes (high, rising and falling). Out of over a thousand Austronesian languages, there are only a dozen with lexical tone; in this case it appears to be a remnant of shift from Papuan languages.

Lexical tone is found only in final syllables.

References

↑ Ma'ya at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
Kawe at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
Legenyem at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
Wauyai at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
1 2 3 Remijsen, Bert (2001). "Dialectal Variation in the Lexical Tone System of Ma'ya". Language and Speech. 44 (4): 473–499. doi:10.1177/00238309010440040301. PMID 12162695.
↑ Remijsen, Bert (November 2003), "New Perspectives in Word-Prosodic Typology" (PDF), IIAS Newsletter #32, p. 29, archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-06-11
↑ Arnold, Laura (2018). "A preliminary archaeology of tone in Raja Ampat". In Antoinette Schapper (ed.). Contact and substrate in the languages of Wallacea, Part 2. NUSA Vol. 64. pp. 7–37.
↑ Arnold, Laura Melissa (2018). Grammar of Ambel, an Austronesian language of Raja Ampat, west New Guinea (PhD). University of Edinburgh. hdl:1842/31120.
↑ Arnold, Laura (2026). "Sketch grammars of Wauyai Maˈya and Batta: Two undocumented Austronesian languages of Raja Ampat, northwest New Guinea". Language Documentation & Conservation. 20. University of Hawaiʻi Press: 1–51. hdl:10125/74842. ISSN 1934-5275.
↑ Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin (eds.). "Ma'ya–Salawati". Glottolog . Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
↑ van der Leeden, Alex C. (1993). Maʼya: a language study. Seri Terbitan LIPI-RUL Jakarta: Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan Indonesia and Rijkuniversiteit te Leiden.
↑ Rivera-Castillo, Yolanda; Pickering, Lucy (2004). "Phonetic Correlates of Stress and Tone in a Mixed System". Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages. 19 (2): 261–284. doi:10.1075/jpcl.19.2.02riv.^{[dead link]}
↑ Arnold, Laura. 2018. 'A preliminary archaeology of tone in Raja Ampat'. In Antoinette Schapper, ed. Contact and substrate in the languages of Wallacea, Part 2. NUSA 64: 7–37. doi:10.5281/zenodo.1450778