Yapunda language

Yapunda, or Yeri, is a Torricelli language of Papua New Guinea.

Yeri is a language estimated to be spoken by 100-150 people. The speakers with the most proficiency are generally 40 years of age or older. The speakers who make up the younger demographics tend to either speak a more simplified version of the language or favor the use of Tok Pisin, which is universal language used with neighboring villages.

The village of Yeri is made up of a variety of hamlets along the Om river. Located in the Torricelli mountains, the village was originally deeper in the forest. Most village members decided to relocate nearer to the river, while a few stayed behind and continued habitation in the forest.

The Yeri village is structured as a patrilineal clan system. As of 2012, there were seven clans within the village. There is a history of bride exchange between villages and clans, with patrilocal residence following marriage.^[2]

The Yeri language is consider moribund, or severely endangered. Yeri is not being passed down to younger generations and the existing speakers are declining at a rapid rate.^[3]

It is estimated by UNESCO that 10-99 speakers remain.

The Yeri language has five vowel phonemes, all shown in the chart below. Two of these phonemes, /i/ and /u/, have both glide and vowel allophones. When vowels are unstressed, they are shorted usually to the point of complete deletion.

Yeri has 13 consonants in addition to the five vowels already in its phoneme inventory. There are three plosives, one fricative, three nasals, and three approximates.

Two of approximants that are in parenthesis, [j] and [w], are analyzed as allophones of their corresponsig vowels /i/ and /u/. While they are shown in the table, they are not considered consonant phonemes because of their distribution in vocalic position.^[2]

Yeri exhibits the basic word order of SVO (Subject, Verb, Object). In text, OV is more common.

Overt number marking usually occurs through suffixation, which means that a morpheme is attached to the end of a root. In this case, it attaches to the noun.

The Yeri language only has lexical items for the numerals "one" and "two." All other numbers are made by counting hands and feet, where one hand corresponds to "five," two hands to "ten," two hands one foot to "fifteen," and so on. The numerals can also be strung together to create numbers that are between intervals of five.^[2]

In Yeri, gender is only marked on third person nouns. Yeri distinguishes three genders, masculine, feminine, and inanimate. Gender is almost never distinguished in the plural.^[2]

There is no passive voice construction in the language. Yeri does have an applicative construction for benefactives and locatives which uses object infixes as opposed to the object prefixes which are used in the basic voice construction.

• Wilson, Jennifer (2017). A Grammar of Yeri: A Torricelli language of Papua New Guinea (Ph.D. thesis). State University of New York at Buffalo. ProQuest 1878004238 – via ProQuest.