| Serui Malay | |
|---|---|
| Region | Yapen Islands Regency,Waropen Regency |
Native speakers | 270,612 (2008)[1] |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | – |
  Serui Malay | |
| Coordinates:2°S136°E / 2°S 136°E /-2; 136 | |
Serui Malay is a variety of thePapuan Malay language native to parts of the Indonesian province ofPapua. It is spoken in the city ofSerui and other places on theYapen Islands, as well as in nearby coastal areas of the New Guinea mainland.
Though it is likely that Malay was used to an extent in previous centuries, its widespread use and its current form date to the 20th century. Serui Malay is generally referred to asBahasa Indonesia by its speakers, but it diverges from StandardIndonesian in a number of ways.[2] It has similarities toAmbon Malay,[3] but Van Velzen considers it to be more closely related toTernate Malay.[4]
A large number of local languages are spoken in the area, and the need for a commonlingua franca has been underlined by the centuries-old traditions of inter-group interaction in the form of slave-hunting, adoption, and intermarriage.[5]It is likely that Malay was first introduced by theBiak, who had contacts with theSultanate of Tidore, and later, in the 19th century, by traders from China andSouth Sulawesi. However, Malay was probably not widespread until the adoption of the language by the Dutch missionaries who arrived in the early 20th century and were then followed in this practice by the Dutch administrators.[6] The spread of Malay into the more distant areas was further facilitated by theOpleiding tot Dorpsonderwijzer ('Education for village teacher') programme; it tended to attract a lot of Waropen men, which has led to the influence of theWaropen language on the local Malay varieties.[2]
People from WestYapen (Woi, Ansus, Pom) neutralise word-final nasals to [ŋ]. Those from other ethnic groups do not have[ŋ] because the phoneme is absent from their native languages. The distinction between /r/ and /l/ is clearer in the speech of educated people. The palatal stops of Indonesian are not often distinguished by uneducated speakers, who substitute/d͡ʒ/ with/di/, and/t͡ʃ/ with/ti/,/si/ or/t/ (Indonesian/ɡəred͡ʒa/ ->/geredia/;t͡ʃəŋkeh ->/sieŋge/ or/sieŋke/).[7] Word-finally, voiceless stops and/h/ are dropped:/sudah/ ->/suda/,/takut/ ->/tako/;/k/ may or may not be dropped:/balik/ ->/bale/,/sibuk/ ->/sibuk/./f/ is consistently distinguished, unlike in many other varieties of Papuan Malay.[8]
Indonesian schwa /ə/ has various realisations, sometimes accompanied by a change in the position of stress: as/i/ (/pərˈɡi/ ->/ˈpiɡi/), as/a/ (/səˈnaŋ/ ->/saˈnaŋ/), as/o/ (/pəlˈuk/ ->/ˈpolo/), as/e/ (/t͡ʃəˈpat/ ->/t͡ʃeˈpat/), or dropped altogether (/təˈrus/ ->/ˈtrus/).[9] Indonesian/ai/ and/au/ correspond to/e/ and/o/ respectively:/pakai/ ->/pake/,/pulau/ ->/pulo/.[10]
The morphology is more limited than in standard Indonesian. For example,passive voice orobject focus are not marked on the verb, and verb bases are generally used withoutaffixes.[11] A smaller number of derivational affixes are used than in Indonesian. The productive verbal prefixes are the following:[12]
Reduplication is also used, with several meanings, both with nouns and with verbs:tatawa 'laugh' ->tatawa-tatawa 'laugh repeatedly',ronda 'stroll' ->ronda-ronda 'stroll around',ana 'child' ->ana-ana 'children',lap 'swab' ->lap-lap 'cleaning rag'.[13]
Most speakers do not distinguish betweeninclusive and exclusive first person (kami andkita in Standard Indonesian), even though this distinction is present in most regional languages of the area.[14]
Possession is expressed usingpunya (or its shortened formpu):[15]
Serui Malay diverges in a number of ways from Indonesian in its vocabulary. There are words that have extended or otherwise changed their meaning in comparison with Indonesian:[16]
There are many words in Serui Malay not found in Standard Indonesian:[17]
Serui Malay has borrowed vocabulary from Dutch, Portuguese, other Malay varieties and regional languages: