Airoran

Timothy Usher, Santa Fe Institute

Situation

The language known as Airoran is spoken by between 700 and 1,000 people (2002) living in and in hamlets around three main villages along the Apauwar river east of Lake Rombebai in Indonesia's Papua province. Airoran, or Motobiak, is the name of one of these villages, the others being Subu, located on the coast at the mouth of the river, and Kapeso Apawer between the two. Subu was established in recent times. There are only minor differences between the language varieties spoken in these villages (Clouse, Donohue and Ma 2002: 5, 14-15, cf. Voorhoeve 1975: 37.)

Sources

Anonymous (1913) comparative vocabulary of Apauwar printed in Stokhof ed. (1983: 47-50)

Smits and Voorhoeve (1998: 22-233) comparative vocabulary of Airoran after van der Leeden

Clouse, Donohue and Ma (2002: 8-9) phonemic inventory and pronouns for Airoran of Subu village

Donohue (n.d.) survey vocabulary of Airoran of Iripiri provided in comparative spreadsheet form by Paul Whitehouse via the Summer Institute of Linguistics

Erickson (n.d.) survey vocabulary of Airoran of Nivau provided in comparative spreadsheet form by Paul Whitehouse via the Summer Institute of Linguistics

Hurd (n.d.) survey vocabulary of Airoran of Motorbiak provided in comparative spreadsheet form by Paul Whitehouse via the Summer Institute of Linguistics

de Vries (n.d.) survey vocabulary of Airoran of Motorbiak provided in comparative spreadsheet form by Paul Whitehouse via the Summer Institute of Linguistics

Phonology

[under construction]

Pronouns

Clouse, Donohue and Ma (2002: 9) give free pronouns for Airoran of Subu as follows:

1 sg.atʃa
2 sg.ama
3 sg.aupa
1 pl.ena
2 pl.?
3 pl.awaap
1 dl.ɪnɪɪna

Verbal morphology

Nothing is known about Airoran verbal morphology.