| Vanimo | |
| States: | Papua New Guinea |
| Region: | Sandaun Province |
| Ethnicity: | Dumo people, Dusur |
| Date: | 2000 census |
| Ref: | e18 |
| Familycolor: | Papuan |
| Fam1: | Skou |
| Fam2: | Western |
| Iso3: | vam |
| Glotto: | vani1248 |
| Glottorefname: | Vanimo |
| Dia1: | Dusur (Duso) |
| Dia2: | Dumo (Vanimo) |
Vanimo (Wanimo, Manimo) is a Skou language of Papua New Guinea which extends from Leitre to Wutung on the Papua New Guinea - Indonesian border.
The Duso dialect of Vanimo is unusual in not having any phonemic velar consonants, though it does have phonetic pronounced as /[ŋ]/.[1]
The vowels (Dumo dialect) are,
| Close | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Close-mid | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ |
| Open-mid | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |
| Open | pronounced as /link/ | ||
All occur nasalized, varying phonetically between a nasal vowel and a vowel followed by consonantal pronounced as /[ŋ]/. Nasal /u/ may be realized as a syllabic pronounced as /[ŋ̍]/.
In Dumo, there are no velar consonants apart from this pronounced as /[ŋ]/ (and also as noted below). The other consonants are,
| Bilabial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | ||
| Stop | pronounced as /link/ pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ pronounced as /link/ | ||||
| Fricative | pronounced as /link/ pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||
| Approximant | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | ||||
| Lateral Approximant | pronounced as /link/ |
Consonant clusters are /pl, bl, ml, ɲv, hv, hm, hn, hɲ, hj/ (hv and hm may be allophones). /ɲv/ is pronounced pronounced as /[ŋβ]/. There are no coda consonants apart from pronounced as /[ŋ]/.
pronounced as //k, ɡ, ŋ// do occur in Dusö dialect. They correspond to pronounced as //ɦ// or zero in Dumo.
Dumo syllables may have either a 'high' or a 'long' tone. There is strict syllable timing, a 'long'-toned syllable takes the entire time allotted for a syllable, whereas with a high-tone or atonic syllable, there is a slight gap between it and the following syllable. Ross writes high tone with a grave accent, and long tone with an acute accent. A syllable with a nasal vowel / coda pronounced as /[ŋ]/ is not necessarily long, it may have any of the three tones.
The majority of Vanimo words contain either one, two, three, or four syllables.
The pronoun system in Vanimo accommodates its grammatical gender system. The "masculine" and "feminine" 2nd and 3rd person pronouns, along with their primary uses for referring to people, can also be used for non-animate nouns or common nouns in correspondance with their grammatical gender. An example of this would be the pronoun ébu, which can be used both to mean you (in which all three members of the group being referred to as you are female), or to mean you (in which the group being referred to as you, is made up of three common nouns that are all grammatically female). In the table below ? is used to represent unknown or undocumented words.
| 1st exc. | né | nimi | nihò | ni |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1st inc. | ? | nimivo | nihò | nivo |
| 2nd (masc.) | mi | ? | éhò | é/évo |
| 2nd (fem.) | mi | ? | ébu | é/évo |
| 3rd (masc.) | hé | déhé | déhò | dé |
| 3rd (fem.) | bé | débé | débu | dé |