Enga is a language of the East New Guinea Highlands spoken by a quarter-million people inEnga Province,Papua New Guinea. It has the largest number of speakers of anyTrans–New Guinea language, as well as any native language in New Guinea, and is second overall afterPapuan Malay.

An Enga-based pidgin is used by speakers ofArafundi languages.

There are currently over 150,000 Enga people occupying the mountainous region ranging fromMount Hagen and westward toPorgera. Enga people are traditionally sedentary gardeners who growsweet potatoes as theirstaple crop, and who keep pigs and fowls. Coffee andpyrethrum are also grown as cash crops in Enga culture. Pigs, pearls, shells, axes, and plumes are items of wealth and signify social occasions when exchanged or circulated. Engaclans have boundaries defining their homesteads across the territory and have been known to fight with each other over land, marriage exchanges, or vengeance. Men and women traditionally occupy different homes because Enga myths postulate that women may be unclean and dangerous to men.^[2] Enga society is not organised around a single chief or headman; rather, it is wealthy men who have political and administrative control.^[3]

Vowel sounds include /i e ɑ o u/.

/k/ is pronounced as fricative [x] between low and back vowels. /t/ is pronounced as [r] intervocalically. /ts/ may also be realised as [s]. All final vowels are devoiced. Alveolar stops /t, ⁿd/ may be realised as retroflex [ʈ, ᶯɖ].^[4][5]

The Enga orthography includes 21 different letters.

Enga nouns co-occur with modifiersdóko andméndé asthe anda, some, or else, which play a role in the noun class system of the language.^[2]

Noun classes in Enga appear to be cued primarily through syntactic patterns. The classes denote animates, inanimates, body parts, locationals, events, colors, inner states, and other minor classes. Nouns may also be inflected for cases such as agentiveAG , instrumentalINST, possessivePOSS, locativeLOC, and temporal. In the chart below it shows the case distribution and the noun classes in relation to one another.^[2]

Animates can occur in different subclasses such as proper names. Some examples of animates can includetakánge (father),endángi (mother),Aluá (a man's name),Pasóne (a woman's name), ormená (pig). All of which would include a determiner being either demonstrative or indefinite and can be with the agentive or possessive cases, but not used instrumentally or locative.

Body parts are in the animate class and can include words likekíngi (arm),pungí (liver), andyanúngí (skin, body). These differ from the previous classes in which they may have a determiner occur either as the instrumental or locative, but not in the agentive or possessive cases.Location nouns are used to determine the place. These words can includekákasa (bush),Wápaka (Wabag- a place), orLakáipa (Lagaipa- a river). This class only uses a determiner in the location case and nothing else.^[2]

The noun morphology of Enga is an exclusivelysuffixing language. These suffixes are generally the last member of the noun phrase, being either the determiner or the adjective. This expresses the inflectional categories of the noun such as tense, aspect, person, number, gender or mood. The suffixes can be broken down into two main groups: case suffixes and others. Case suffixes are exclusively expressed in noun and noun phrases while other suffixes can be on either noun and noun phrases or verb and verb phrases.^[3] Enga differentiates nouns from noun phrases though the case endings. There are seven different cases in which these are formally marked: associative-pa (only two)/-pipa (two or more), agentive-me/-mi, instrumental-me/mi, possessive-nya, locative-nya/-sa/-ka, temporal-sa/-nya/-pa, and vocative-oo.^[3] Other suffixes, besides case suffixes, are broken into six different categories and occur only on nouns. There is the conjunctive suffix-pi meaning 'and' or 'even', two different suffixes-le meaning 'rather' or-yalé 'like' to indicate similarity, two different suffixes-mba 'very' or an argumentative-mba to indicate emphasis or contrast.^[3] These two forms of-mba differ in meaning as well as tone. When it is used in a argumentative sense it is said with a higher tone than previous syllables versus when it is used to emphasize.

Although it includes conjunctive suffixes, Enga does not actually include any conjunction words such as 'and' other thanpánde 'or'. Instead those conjunctive suffixes are used to combine the noun or noun phrase with all the noun phrases and then typically followed by the determiner.^[3]

Enga pronouns stand out morphosyntactically but can vary from dialects:

• nambáI
• émbayou
• baáhe, she, it
• nalímbawe two
• nyalámboyou two
• dolápothey two
• náimawe plural
• nyakámayou plural
• dúpathey plural

These pronouns are similar to animates in that determiners may occur in agentive, and possessive cases, but not used instrumentally or locative.

Enga verbs play a central role in thesyntax of the language, showing highly complexmorphology.^[3] Enga is a mostly suffixing language. The basic word order isSOV.

Enga verbs convey ideas suchsubordination or coordination which inIndo-European languages are often cued via syntactic means (conjunctions such as ‘and’, or ‘because’, etc.). Enga verbs also express different types ofmodality, such as ability, possibility, or need, as well as interrogation viasuffixes (i.e.-pe/-pi):

Enga verbs inflect forperson, number, andtense-aspect. There are five different tense-aspect categories and threegrammatical numbers in Enga. Tense-aspects include a future tense, a present tense, and three different past tenses. The numbers are singular, plural, anddual (expressed via the prefixna-).

The immediate past refers to actions that occurred within the day. The near past refers to actions that occurred the previous day, a time in which the speaker does not recall, or a time before the previous day but is intending on comparing it to other events in the past. Finally, the far past refers to actions that occurred before the previous day.^[3] I

The suffix i-la indicates consecutiveness between sentences with the same subject. Finally, the-pa marker conjoins sentences with different subjects but still contain consecutiveness.

In sentences that express two different subjects or two different actions collectively, so that a sentence such as ‘he went and worked’ would be expressed in Enga via a coordinating suffix (-o) on the first verb:

The suffix-o (allophone -u in verbs with high vowels) also expresses actions originating, existing, or happening during the same period of time.

There are two differentcausal suffixes-pa and-sa. When the verb ends in a suffixed vowel regarding the past, these two suffixes are added together to fully conjugate the verb.

Enga also includesconditional suffixes. These help distinguish what is considered 'real' conditions and 'irreal' conditions. A real condition is one in which real consequences can occur versus an irreal condition which denies the reality of the actions that are expressed as well as their consequences. To express a real conditional clause in the future tense the suffix-mo/-no are added to the verb with the addition ofkandao dóko followed immediately after. For example, when connecting the following two sentences:

and

Together, as a conditional clause, it would form:

• Phonology of Enga
• A collection ofopen access recordings of Enga archived withKaipuleohone.

• Engan languages
• Languages of Enga Province
• Languages of Papua New Guinea

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• Language articles citing Ethnologue 18
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• Language articles with old Ethnologue 18 speaker data
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