May River Iwam, often simply referred to as Iwam, is a language of East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea.
It is spoken in Iyomempwi (), Mowi (), and Premai villages of Tunap/Hunstein Rural LLG in East Sepik Province, and other villages on the May River.
In non-final positions, , , and are , , and , respectively. appears only in nonfinal syllables. When adjacent to nasal consonants, vowels are nasalized; nasalization may also occur when adjacent to word boundaries.
and are voiced fricatives ( and ) respectively) when intervocalic and unreleased when final ( is also unreleased when final). is a nasal flap () word-initially and between vowels. is initially and may otherwise be palatalized . Sequences of any consonant and are neutralized before where an offglide is always heard.
Bilabial and velar consonants and may be followed by when initial. Other initial clusters include , , , , and and final clusters are or followed by any consonant except for or .
May River Iwam pronouns:
Like the Wogamus languages, May River Iwam has five noun classes:
As shown by the example above for ana âÂÂhandâÂÂ, a noun can take on different classes depending on the physical characteristics being emphasized.
May river Iwam has four periodic tense suffixes: matutinal -yok, diurnal -harok, postmeridial -tep and nocturnal -wae.
The following basic vocabulary words of Iwam are from Foley (2005) and Laycock (1968), as cited in the Trans-New Guinea database: