Piame language

Piame, or Biami, is a Sepik language, which in 1988 was spoken in the village of Piame in northwestern Papua New Guinea.

Relationship to other languages

Piame is closely related to Niksek, with cognate percentages ranging from 44% to 53% for the different Niksek dialects.

Sociolinguistics

In 1988, it was spoken by less than a hundred people, in the single village of Piame. The village was primarily monolingual. Two or three men had begun to learn Tok Pisin, the lingua franca of Papua New Guinea.

The language is today described as moribund.

Vocabulary

The table below is a sample of words in Piame:

References

Uses material from the Wikipedia article Piame language, released under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.