| Oksapmin | |
|---|---|
| Oksap | |
| nuxule meŋ 'our language' | |
| Native to | Papua New Guinea |
| Region | Oksapmin Rural LLG,Telefomin District,Sandaun |
Native speakers | 12,000 (2005)[1] |
Trans–New Guinea
| |
| Dialects |
|
| Latin | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | opm |
| Glottolog | oksa1245 |
| ELP | Oksapmin |
 Map: The Oksapmin language of New Guinea The Oksapmin language Other Trans–New Guinea languages Other Papuan languages Austronesian languages Uninhabited | |
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Oksapmin is aTrans–New Guinea language spoken inOksapmin Rural LLG,Telefomin District,Sandaun,Papua New Guinea. The two principal dialects are distinct enough to cause some problems with mutual intelligibility.
Oksapmin hasdyadic kinship terms[2] and a body-part counting system that goes up to 27.[3] Notable ethnographic research byGeoffrey B. Saxe at UC Berkeley has documented the encounter between pre-contact uses of number and its cultural evolution under conditions of monetization and exposure to schooling and the formal economy among the Oksapmin.[4]
Oksapmin has been influenced by theMountain Ok languages (the name "Oksapmin" is fromTelefol), and the similarities with those languages were attributed to borrowing in the classifications of bothStephen Wurm (1975) andMalcolm Ross (2005), where Oksapmin was placed as an independent branch of Trans–New Guinea. Loughnane (2009)[5] and Loughnane and Fedden (2011)[6] conclude that it is related to the Ok languages, though those languages share innovative features not found in Oksapmin. Usher finds Oksapmin is not related to the Ok languages specifically, though it is related at some level to the southwestern branches of Trans–New Guinea.
There are sixmonophthongs,/ieəaou/, and onediphthong,/ai/.
| Bilabial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| unrounded | rounded | |||||
| Nasal | m | n | ŋ | |||
| Stop | voiceless | t | k | kʷ | ||
| prenasal | ᵐb | ⁿd | ᵑɡ | ᵑɡʷ | ||
| Fricative | ɸ | s | x | xʷ | ||
| Lateral | l | |||||
| Semivowel | j | w | ||||
| Phoneme | Allophone |
|---|---|
| /t/ | [t],[tʰ] |
| /k/ | [k],[kʰ] |
| /ᵐb/ | [ᵐb],[m] |
| /ⁿd/ | [ⁿd],[n] |
| /ᵑɡ/ | [ᵑɡ],[ŋ] |
| /ɸ/ | [ɸ],[β],[p],[pɸ~pʰ] |
| /s/ | [s],[z] |
| /x/ | [x],[ɣ],[ç],[ʝ] |
Oksapmin contrasts twotones: high and low.
