| Ma'ya | |
|---|---|
| Spoken in | Indonesia |
| Native speakers | 4000 (date missing) |
| Language family | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | slz |
Ma'ya is an Austronesian language spoken in West Papua by 4000 speakers.[1] It is spoken in coastal villages on the islands Misool, Salawati, and Waigeo in the Raja Ampat islands.[2] It is spoken on the boundary between Austronesian and Papuan languages.[3] It has both tone and stress lexically distinctive.[2][4] That means both the stress and the pitch of a word may affect meaning. The stress and tone are quite independent from one another, in contrast to Swedish and Serbo-Croat.[2] It has three tonemes (high, rising and falling)[2] Out of all the 1236 Austronesian languages, there are only 15 with lexical tone.[2] There are five dialects of the language in total, three dialects on the island Waigeo: Laganyan, Wauyai and Kawe and one each on Misool and Salawati, the prestige dialect being the Salawati one.[2] The Waigeo dialects have /s/ and /ʃ/ where the varieties spoken on Salwati and Misool have /t/ and /c/ respectively.[2]