Gimi, also known as Labogai, is a Papuan language spoken in the Eastern Highlands Province in Papua New Guinea. 23,000 speakers (2000 cited) speak the Gimi language.
Gimi has 5 vowels and 12 consonants. It has voiceless and voiced glottal consonants where related languages have and . The voiceless glottal is simply a glottal stop . The voiced consonant behaves phonologically like a glottal stop, but does not have full closure. Phonetically it is a creaky-voiced glottal approximant .
occurs word initially only in loanwords.
can surface as either or in free variation.
becomes before .
and tend to fluctuate with one another word initially.
The syllable structure is (C)V(G), where G is either or .
The final vowel of a word takes either a level or falling tone. The falling tone is written with an acute accent.
Gimi uses the Latin script.