Abom

Timothy Usher, Santa Fe Institute

Abom is spoken in several villages south of the head of the Fly River delta in Papua New Guinea's Western Province. The original Abom village was located northeast of Tewara village, but the community disbanded, reportedly due to sorcery, and moved to Tewara, Lewada and Mutam villages, in which the Biruti, Makayam and Wipi languages are spoken respectively. Only the older generations speak Abom, middle generations understand but do not use it and children don't understand it at all. Jore and Alemán predict that Abom is likely to be in the very near future as the remnants of its community are absorbed into those of their new homes (Jore and Alemán 2002: 12.)

Jore (2002) survey vocabulary of Abom including some example sentences

Jore and Alemán (2002: 43-48) 161 comparative terms for Abom

There is no published phonology of Abom and the materials available to us are insufficient to propose one.

Jore and Alemán (2002: 48) give pronouns for Abom as follows:

No information about Abom verbal morphology is available to us besides a handful of example sentences given in Jore (2002, Jore and Alemán 2002.)