Ethnicity Eipo people | Region West Papua, Eipo River Native speakers (3,000 cited 1987) | |
Language family Trans–New GuineaMekEasternEipo | ||
Eipo (Eipomek), or Lik, is a Mek language of the eastern highlands of West Papua. It spoken by the Eipo people who live along the Eipo River. A large percentage of its vocabulary is shared with Una and Tanime, and they form one dialect area.
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Classification
Eipo belongs to the Eastern branch of Mek languages, which is a family of closely related languages belonging to the larger grouping of Trans-New Guinea languages.
Geographic distribution
The Eipo language is spoken by about 3,000 people along the Eipo River in the valley of Eipomek, which is situated in the eastern highlands of West Papua.
Consonants
Eipo exhibits the following 16 phonemic consonants:
Vowels
Eipo has five phonemic vowels:
Diphthongs are not regarded as separate phonemes.
Morphology
Eipo is generally isolating language, but exhibits an elaborate system of agglutination in verb formation.
Syntax
The usual word order of Eipo is subject-object-verb (SOV).
Writing system
Eipo is not historically a written language, but in recent decades a Latin alphabet has been devised for it. The letter values are mostly those of the IPA letters given above, with the exceptions of /β/ ⟨w⟩, /ŋ/ ⟨ng⟩, /ɾ/ ⟨r⟩, and /j/ ⟨y⟩.