Gimi, also known as Labogai, is a Papuan language spoken in the Eastern Highlands Province in Papua New Guinea. 23,000 speakers (2000 cited) speak the Gimi language.
Phonology
Gimi has 5 vowels and 12 consonants. It has voiceless and voiced glottal consonants where related languages have and . The voiceless glottal is simply a glottal stop . The voiced consonant behaves phonologically like a glottal stop, but does not have full closure. Phonetically it is a creaky-voiced glottal approximant .
Vowels
Front Back High Mid Low
Consonants
Bilabial Alveolar Glottal Plosive Approximant Nasal Tap/Flap Fricative
Allophony
occurs word initially only in loanwords.
can surface as either or in free variation.
becomes before .
and tend to fluctuate with one another word initially.
Syllables
The syllable structure is (C)V(G), where G is either or .
Tone
The final vowel of a word takes either a level or falling tone. The falling tone is written with an acute accent.
"seed" "armband" "bird" "louse"
Orthography
Gimi uses the Latin script.
Letter Aa Bb Dd Ee Gg Hh IiKk Mm Nn Oo Pp Rr Ss Tt Uu Zz IPA () ()
References