Yimas language

The Yimas language is spoken by the Yimas people, who populate the Sepik River Basin region of Papua New Guinea. It is spoken primarily in Yimas village (4°40′50″S 143°32′56″E / 4.680562°S 143.548847°E / -4.680562; 143.548847 (Yimas 1)), Karawari Rural LLG, East Sepik Province. It is a member of the Lower-Sepik language family.^: 1 All 250-300 speakers of Yimas live in two villages along the lower reaches of the Arafundi River, which stems from a tributary of the Sepik River known as the Karawari River.^: 7

Yimas is a polysynthetic language with (somewhat) free word order, and is an ergative-absolutive language morphologically but not syntactically, although it has several other case-like relations encoded on its verbs. It has ten main noun classes (genders), and a unique number system. Four of the noun classes are semantically determined (male humans, female humans, higher animals, plants and plantmaterial) whereas the rest are assigned on phonological bases.^: 119

It is an endangered language, being widely replaced by Tok Pisin, and to a lesser extent, English. It is unclear if any children are native Yimas speakers. However, a Yimas pidgin was once used as a contact language with speakers of Alamblak and Arafundi. Although it is still used in face-to-face conversation, it is considered a threatened language on the Ethnologue endangerment scale, with a rating of 6b.^: 4–5