Iatmul language

Iatmul is the language of the Iatmul people, spoken around the Sepik River in the East Sepik Province, northern Papua New Guinea. The Iatmul, however, do not refer to their language by the term Iatmul, but call it gepmakudi ("village language", from gepma = "village" and kudi "speech"; pronounced as [ŋɡɛpmaɡundi]).

There are about 8,400 Iatmul traditionally organized in villages, whereas a total amount of 46,000 speakers is estimated. The inhabitants of the villages are trilingual, being fluent with Tok Pisin, good with Iatmul and having some knowledge of English. Tok Pisin is also the first language of the youngest children, despite efforts to reverse this trend.

An extensive grammar of Iatmul has been recently written by Gerd Jendraschek as a postdoctoral thesis.

Iatmul is part of the Ndu language family, which consists of at least six languages in which ndu is the word for 'man'. Together with Manambu it is the southernmost language of the Ndu family, spoken along the Sepik River. Iatmul is perhaps the best known Ndu language of them all.

Iatmul is a moderately agglutinative and nearly isolating language. Flexion is predominantly suffixed and very regular, whereas the phonological processes are the most complex ones within the language. Stems often change their form while multiple-morpheme structures can become so coalescent that they are difficult to segment.

Iatmul has masculine and feminine gender marking as well as singular, dual and plural numbers. Nouns and verbs are the only two major classes in Iatmul with only little derivation across them. Also, there is not a strong distinction between modifiers and nouns as many roots can be used as nouns, adjectives or adverbs. Smaller word classes include personal pronouns, demonstratives, postpositions, quantifiers, interrogatives as well as proclauses (yes, no), while there are no clause-linking conjunctions.

The phonological system of Iatmul is a matter of controversy among scholars. There is no consensus about how many vowels Iatmul has and about which realisations are to be considered as phonemes or allophones. There were attempts of analysing the language as consisting of only 1-3 vowels by Staalsen (1966) and Laycock (1991). Jendraschek (2012) in contrast describes 12 phonemic monophthongs and 7 phonemic diphthongs.

In Iatmul, the contrast between the fortis, lenis, and prenasalized stops exists only intervocalically. The fully oral stops can be voiced (to /b/, /d/, /g/), and as such they have voiced allophones in certain contexts. The latter also tend to be more open than the fortis stops, which means that they can become taps, fricatives, or approximants in post-sonorant position. Prenasalized stops are inherently voiced. As such, the distinctive feature between the fortis and oral series is not voicing, but rather voiceability.