Abau is a Papuan language spoken in southern Sandaun Province of Papua New Guinea, primarily along the border with Indonesia.
Abau has the simplest phonemic inventory in the Sepik language family.
Also, the third-person gender distinction exists only for the singular, but not the dual or plural forms.
The same object can be classified as either masculine or feminine, depending on the physical characteristics intended for emphasis.
Example:[3] Abau had three periodic tense suffixes: diurnal -kok, postmeridial -ropay and nocturnal -nayr[4] The following basic vocabulary words are from Foley (2005)[5] and Laycock (1968),[6] as cited in the Trans-New Guinea database:[7]