CENTRAL ASMAT LANGUAGE

Central Asmat
Central Asmat
Native to	Indonesia
Region	Asmat Regency, South Papua
Ethnicity	Asmat people
Native speakers	(7,000 cited 1972); 2,000 Yaosakor (1991), perhaps counted above
Language family	Trans–New Guinea Asmat–Kamoro Asmat Central Asmat; ; ;
Language codes
ISO 639-3	cns – inclusive code; Individual code:; asy – Yaosakor Asmat
Glottolog	cent2247

Central Asmat is a Papuan language of West New Guinea, spoken by the Asmat people.

Dialects

Central Asmat has a number of dialects, which are:^[2]

Yaosakor Asmat, assigned its own ISO code, is a variety of Central Asmat, not a distinct language.

	Labial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar
Nasal	m	n
Plosive	p	t	tʃ	k
Fricative	f	s	ʝ
Rhotic		r
Approximant	w

/p/ can be heard as a fricative [ ɸ] when in intervocalic positions, as [ pʷ] in the speech of older speakers when preceding /e/.
/tʃ/ can be heard as a palatalized [ tʲ] when in word-final positions following /i/.
/k/ can be heard as a fricative [ x] when following a vowel and preceding a consonant.
/s/ can be heard as fricatives [ θ] or [ ʃ] among some older speakers.
/r/ can be heard as a flap [ ɾ] in word-medial and word-final positions.
/ʝ/ can be heard as [ dʒ] or [ j] in word-initial positions.
Nasals /m, n/ may fluctuate to voiced stops [ b, d] in word-initial positions, and as prenasal stops [ ᵐb, ⁿd] when in syllable-initial positions.^[3]

^ Central Asmat at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
Yaosakor Asmat at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
^ Usher, Timothy; Suter, Edgar (2020). "The Asmat-Muli Languages of Southwestern New Guinea" (PDF). Language & Linguistics in Melanesia. 38. Port Moresby: Journal of the Linguistic Society of Papua New Guinea. ISSN 0023-1959.
^ Voorhoeve, Clemens L. (1965). The Flamingo Bay Dialect of the Asmat Language. The Hague: M.Nijhoff.