Documentation of Muyu, a Lowland Ok language of Western New Guinea

 

Language	Muyu (ISO639-3: kti)
Depositor	Alexander Zahrer
Affiliation	University of Münster
Location	Indonesia
Collection ID	0601
Grant ID	IGS0367
Funding Body	ELDP
Collection Status	Collection online
Landing Page Handle	http://hdl.handle.net/2196/da44eaee-10c4-46e1-8a22-6d9a26353321

 

Summary of the collection

This collection documents the Muyu language spoken in the central lowlands of West New Guinea. It includes audio-visual recordings of naturalistic speech as well as elicitations. The recorded texts are from various genres (myths, narratives, biography, history, procedural, songs, conversations) to give a broad picture of the language. A dictionary with all lexemes of the transcriptions is deposited to facilitate the access to the material. An in-depth monographical description of the language’s grammar is also offered. Finally, the collection is complemented with photographs of the Muyu area.

 

Group represented

The Muyu, or Kati, are a Papuan people who live in several villages along the Kao and Muyu Rivers in the central lowlands of Papua, Indonesia. Traditionally, they live as subsistence farmers from cultivating their gardens. Original tree houses are no longer found. The majority are Catholics and attend service every Sunday. Churches exist in every village and play an important role in public life. Each family cultivates their own garden outside the village. Staple foods are sago, banana and yams. As in many Papuan societies, sago has high cultural value. It is eaten daily in form of flat cakes. They also raise chicken and pigs. The latter is also of high ritual importance. For example there is a pig-killing ritual fourty days after a member of the community has died. Additionally, some Muyu families grow cash crops like peanuts or process wood in small sawmills. In the younger generation, some men commute to Mindiptana or Tanah Merah from Monday to Friday and come back to their wives and children only on weekend. Muyu people more or less participate in a modern lifestyle. Motorcycles and cars are common means of transport. Shell money, a once important economic factor in the wider area, is nowadays only found in lexical traces. They also use smart phones and internet access has reached the villages in the southern half already (as of 2023). Besides village life there is considerable migration into cities. Main targets are Tanah Merah, Merauke and Jayapura. Educational level is relatively high and young people often attend Universities in Jayapura or Merauke. Muyu communities in the cities seem to fully immerse in the national Indonesian culture. They use social media, watch TV and listen to mainstream music. All these factors make it less attractive for the younger generation to maintain the language of their ancestors.

 

Language information

Muyu is a Papuan language of New Guinea. It is spoken by estimated 2000 people living alongside the Kao and Muyu Rivers in the Boven-Digoel regency, Papuan Province, Indonesia. It’s classified as Lowland Ok, a subbranch of the Ok language family (Trans New Guinea). There is currently no transmission to the younger generation. Children actively speak the national language Bahasa Indonesia. Muyu speakers are aware of at least ten different dialects. These are from north to south: Nemaya, Kasawut, Are, Ninggrum, Yonggom, Kakaip, Kawip, Kapom, Kamindip, and Okpari. This collection mainly documents the Kawip dialect but also includes recordings from Nemaya and Are. The Kawip dialect is known throughout the area as the most intelligible dialect. This is probably the case because the Kawip dialect is spoken in the relatively central villages Upyetetko and Kanggewot. The term Kawip is analyzable as a contraction from kaduk wip which means ‚men of the middle‘. There is evidence that each dialect consists of subdialects. Kawip speakers like to subdivide the villagers into Komoyan and Medewan based on their expression for ‚What is it?‘ This collection documents Kawip mostly from Medewan speakers although some Komoyan speakers were recorded as well. The latter are labelled separately as Kawip-Komoyan. Where no subdialectal label appears, the respective speaker is Medewan.

Muyu is an SOV language with heavy functional load on verbs. Nominal morphology is largely missing, whereas arguments indexes and TAM features are marked on the clause-final verb (head-marking). Verb stems belong to one of three inflectional classes. Each class has certain complex properties of lexical aspect and Aktionsart. The most salient phenomenon of Muyu grammar is the abundant use of multi verb constructions (MVC). Two or more verbs form a complex predicate to express a complex type of event or a sequence of multiple events. Another important feature is switch reference, i.e. the morphosyntactic marking of subject continuity across clause boundaries. Complex clauses are often repetitively linked with a discourse strategy called tail-head linkage (THL).

Phonologically, Muyu is peculiar for its absence of fricatives. The phoneme system is with 5 vowels and 9 consonants rather simple. Contrary to other languages of the Ok family, tone is absent. Intonation is mainly used for discourse structuring purposes. For example, rising or level pitch at the end of an intonational unit indicates non-finality, wheres falling pitch concludes a larger stretch of discourse.

 

Collection contents

The collection contains over 26 hours of video and audio recordings. The focus of recording was clearly on video, audio-only was made in a few reading task and in several conversations in which one ore more speakers did not feel comfortable with video recording. The recordings stem from 35 different speakers (6 female, 29 male) and vary in length from roughly 2 to 40 minutes.

The collection splits up to the following genres: elicitation, stimuli based narrative, personal narrative, mythology, conversation, procedural, oral history, folk tale, and song. Stimuli based narratives are pear stories and narratives based on picture tasks.

Each recording is supplemented with an ELAN file (.eaf). All ELAN files include segmentations of the utterances. Furthermore, they provide transcriptions and translations for a part of the collection. Transcribed are more than 16,5 hours of the recordings. Translations are either in English or Indonesian (approximately 50:50) but not both. This was a compromise regarding two factors: (1.) The collection should be useful both for linguists (who prefer English) and the Muyu community (who prefer Indonesian), and (2.) most language assistants in the project do not know English and can provide Indonesian translations only. In total, there are 14,5 hours translated.

Lexical information in form of a wordlist is available in bundle muyu074. The entries are from Muyu to English and should not be taken as the exact lexical meanings but rather as approximations to the English translation equivalents. An in-depth description of the Muyu grammar is provided as PDF version of the PhD thesis: “A Grammar of Muyu” submitted in 2023 to the University of Münster by the main investigator Alexander Zahrer (bundle muyu197). Additionally, photographs from the villages Upyetetko, Kanggewot and Woropko are provided in three bundles (muyu071-073).

 

Collection history

This collection was recorded during an ELDP-funded project in 2019-2024. The collection contains files from approximately 12 months of fieldwork. These took place in 2019 (4 months), 2022 (6 months) and 2024 (2 months). The long break between 2019 and 2022 was due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. After each field trip the recorded material was archived and updates from earlier material were archived as well.

Transcriptions and translations were mostly created in the field with the help of local language assistants. The time between the field trips was used for grammatical analysis and annotation.

A subcorpus of the ELAR collection will appear in a specially edited collection at the platform Open Text Collections (https://opentextcollections.github.io/). This collection will include further annotation and descriptions of the individual texts.

 

Acknowledgement and citation

To refer to any data from the corpus, please cite the corpus in this way:
Zahrer, Alexander. 2019. Documentation of Muyu, a Lowland Ok language of Western New Guinea. Endangered Languages Archive. http://hdl.handle.net/2196/00-0000-0000-0014-09EA-C. Accessed on [insert date here].

I wish to thank the Muyu people who generously opened their homes, hearts and mouths to document their language. Special thanks to Yakobus “Jack” Wonam – the restless guard and chief expert on his ancestor‘s language.