ISO 639-3 yap | ISO 639-2 yap Glottolog yape1250 | |
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Native speakers (7,400 cited ca. 1987 census) Native to | ||
Yapese language importance and identity
Yapese is a language spoken by the people on the island of Yap (Federated States of Micronesia). It belongs to the Austronesian languages, more specifically to the Oceanic branch of that family. It has been difficult to classify it further, but Yapese may prove to be one of the Admiralty Islands languages.
Contents
Elder meyer yapese language translation of general conference apr 2013
Orthography
The glottal stop is a leading feature of Yapese. Words beginning with a vowel letter (with a few grammatical exceptions) begin with a glottal stop. Adjacent vowels have the glottal stop between them. There are many word-final glottal stops.
Written Yapese uses Latin script. The Yapese language, prior to orthographic reforms in the 1970s, did not use a specific character to denote the glottal stop. Words ending in a glottal stop were indicated by repeating the final vowel letter, while glottalization of consonants utilized an apostrophe for representation. With the introduction of a new orthography in the 1970s, which employed double vowel letters to signify long vowels, it became necessary to resolve potential ambiguities related to the glottal stop. Consequently, the letter 'q' was adopted to explicitly represent the glottal stop in Yapese spelling. This new orthography using the letter 'q' is not in universal use, but many works and maps about Yap represent place names using the orthography and contain amounts of the letter 'q' that are likely to be puzzling to persons not familiar with the language and the new orthography.
Phonology
Apart from a couple grammatical forms which are V, syllables are CV or CVC.
Consonants
Yapese is one of the relatively few languages in the world with ejective fricatives. The Yapese ejective consonants are /pʼ tʼ kʼ θʼ/. There are also glottalised nasals /mˀ nˀ ŋˀ/ and approximants /jˀ wˀ lˀ/.
In the table below, each phoneme is listed to the left of the grapheme that represents it in Yapese orthography.
/h/ <h> and /j/ <j> only occur in English and Japanese loans (/j/ <y> does occur in native words, however).
Vowels
In the table below, each phoneme is listed to the left of the grapheme that represents it in Yapese orthography.