Biak language
Biak, also known as Biak-Numfor, Noefoor, Mafoor, Mefoor, Nufoor, Mafoorsch, Myfoorsch and Noefoorsch, is an Austronesian language of the South Halmahera-West New Guinea subgroup of the Eastern Malayo-Polynesian languages.
It is spoken by about 30,000 people in Biak and Numfor and numerous small islands in the Schouten Islands archipelago, located in Papua province of Western New Guinea, northeastern Indonesia.
Sociolinguistic situation
There are a number of different dialects of Biak spoken on various different islands, the most well-known being Biak-Numfoor, spoken on the island of Numfoor. These dialect differences are minor and mostly limited to slight regular sound changes. The vast majority of Biak speakers are also fluent in the local variety of Malay, but not all of them are proficient in standard Indonesian.Despite the comparatively high number of speakers compared to some other Austronesian languages, Biak is still in danger of extinction. Within the main towns, the generation of speakers aged between 20 and 50 have only passive knowledge of the language and rarely use the language actively, instead preferring to use Malay. Younger generations do not even generally have passive knowledge of the language. Biak is only actively used as a spoken language by members of the community over 50 years of age or so and even they regularly code switch into Malay. However, within the villages further from town there are still children who are fluent in Biak. Songs in Biak are also very popular throughout the Islands.
There is a strong initiative to promote the use of the Biak language, with translations of various books and teaching manuals as well as a radio station and a number of church services throughout the year being conducted solely in Biak. Since 2002, there has also been an initiative to introduce Biak being taught formerly in schools on the islands.
Phonology
Biak has a phoneme inventory consisting of 13 consonants and 5 vowels, in which vowel length is phonemic. In the orthography long vowels are written with an acute accent. The phoneme is very infrequent in its use and some older speakers still realise it as in loanwords.| Bilabial | Labiodental | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | |
| Stop | |||||
| Nasal | |||||
| Fricative | |||||
| Lateral | |||||
| Trill | |||||
| Approximant |
| Front | Central | Back | |
| Close | |||
| Mid | |||
| Open |
The vowel /u/ is the only rounded vowel in Biak; the other four are unrounded.
Morphology
Pronouns and person markers
In Biak pronouns and articles are morphologically related, with both situating a given participant by indicating their relative discourse or spatial status. This is not uncommon for Austronesian Languages. Pronouns in Biak are marked for number and clusivity.Free personal pronouns in Biak share their main distributional properties with nouns; however, they are somewhat more restricted. They can be used as a complement of a predicate or preposition but they cannot be used as subjects. In the example below we can see the use of the 1st person personal pronoun aya to complement a verb while the second example shows how a free personal pronoun, in this clause 3rd person i cannot be used as a subject:
Pronominal affixes
In Biak, pronominal affixes can combine with verbs in three possible inflection patterns, which are partly phonologically conditioned.| Set 1 | Set 2 | Set 3 | |
| 1SG | ya- | y- | ya- |
| 2SG | wa- | w- | |
| 3SG | i- | d- | |
| 1DU.I | ku- | ku- | ku- |
| 1DU.E | nu- | nu- | nu- |
| 2DU | mu- | mu- | mu- |
| 3DU | su- | su- | su- |
| 3PC | sko- | sk- | sko- |
| 1PL.I | ko- | k- | ko- |
| 1PL.E | nko- | nk- | nko- |
| 2PL | mko- | mk- | mko- |
| 3PL.AN | si- | s- | s- |
| 3PL.INAN | na- | n- | n- |
Due to the person marking nature of these affixes, the need for the presence of a core noun phrase in the same clause is negated. Thus the following sentence is still grammatical without NP Rusa nanine, as the verb has a pronominal affix that gives the same information.
These pronominal markers are person markers and are found in the final position of the noun phrase they determine. They attach to verbs along with a specifier that attaches after the pronominal affix; due to their distribution properties these markers should be considered clitics.
There are two specificity markers, -ya and –i, where –ya can be used in all positions and -i is restricted to positions before pauses. In the example below the article attaches to the verb vebaya, rather than the verb ifrúr because it is the final verb in the noun phrase headed by for.
Nonspecificity, which refers to entities that do not yet exist in this world, or is used to question or deny the existence of an entity, is marked with the articles –o for singular and –no for plural noun phrases. This is shown in the examples below:
Non-specific
Specific
Possession
Similar to other Austronesian languages, Biak makes a grammatical distinction between alienable and inalienable for possession.Alienable possession
In alienable possession, a possessive pronominal is formed with the possessive marker ‘ve’ to signify the person, number and gender of the possessor, and is followed by a pronominal article marking the gender and number of the possessed. The pronominal article contains the specificity markers ‘-i’ and ‘-ya’, with ‘-i’ being used only in pre-pausal positions. The following table illustrates the possessive pronominal construction.Typically, Biak follows a possessor-possessum structure for alienable possessive construction, with the possessive pronominal in the adnominal position:
However, alienable possession can also be formed in the
order of possessum-possessor, though this is much less frequent:
Inalienable possession
Inalienable possessive construction differs from alienable in that there is no system of pronominal possessives, only a set of affixes located on the possessum. In contrast to alienable possession, inalienable possession can only take the order of possessor-possessum. Biak contains three subsets of inalienability: body parts, Kinship, and locational.Body parts
Not all body parts are considered inalienable. Those that are form the stem words from which to derive other body parts through the method of compounding. For example, the alienable ‘knee’ is formed through the inalienable stem ‘we’ and the compounding ‘pur’ to form ‘wepur’. Possessive construction for alienable body parts follows the same pattern as other alienable terms. The inflectional system for inalienable body parts is as follows:Unusual for Austronesian languages of the area, Biak contains a partial prefix system for inflecting inalienable body parts. For the plural forms, suffix ‘-s’ reflects plurality and animateness of possessor and suffix ‘na’ expresses plurality and inaninameteness of the possessum. As stated above, inalienable possession is formed via a possessor-possessum structure:
Kinship terms
Similarly to body parts, not all kinship terms are inalienable. The alienable kinship terms are formed through the same compounding method as alienable body parts, and follow the same possessive construction rules as other alienable terms. This table illustrates the inflectional system for inalienable kinship words:All nouns that follow the table's procedure have an
idiosyncratic form for the first person, using a shorter term for the second
and third person. Here is an example of the usage of inalienable
kinship inflection:
Locational nouns
Locational nouns are the last distinction of inalienability found in Biak. Locational nouns refer to locations that are ‘inherently connected to an entity’. For example, a tree in biak is referred to as having an ‘upper part’ and a ‘lower part’, and a canoe a ‘front’, a ‘middle’ and a ‘back’. The following table exhibits the inflectional system for inalienable locational nouns:The suffix ‘-n’ expresses the plurality and inanimateness of
the possessum. The locational noun possessive structure is illustrated in this example:
Negation
Biak distinguishes between factual and imperative negation. The marker for factual negation is va. For prohibitive it is awer.Factual negation: ''va''
The negator va occurs clause-finally in intransitive and transitive clauses.Intransitive
Transitive
In clauses with non-core arguments, va follows directly the argument it negates.
Va is also used to negate nominal clauses.
Factual negation in complex clauses
In complex clauses with fa, a conjunction expressing result, it seems that the negator va always occurs last in the sentence. In the corpus of spontaneous speech collected by van den Heuvel, there are no examples with va appearing at the end of the first clause.In other complex clauses the negator may follow the first or final clause.
with ''bukan''
Bukan is a loan from Malay/Indonesian. In Indonesian, the use of bukan, outside its function of negating noun phrases, expresses emphasis. The use of bukan, in Biak also appears to express emphasis – in the examples given by van den Heuvel, it use occurs when a contrast is given. Bukan is used in combination with va. Bukan precedes the first verb and va is in its usual place at the end of the clause.Imperative negation: ''awer''
The prohibitive marker awer is used to negate arguments in 1st, 2nd and 3rd person.1stperson
2nd person
3rd person