Maybrat is a Papuan language spoken in the central parts of the Bird's Head Peninsula in the Indonesian province of Southwest Papua.

There is an elaborate system of demonstratives (words like "this" or "that"), with encoding for distance from the speaker, specificity, and syntactic function.

[3] They have traditionally lived in scattered homesteads, with the organisation into villages (kampongs) initiated by the efforts of the Dutch administration between the 1930s and the 1950s.

For example, the establishment of the settlement of Ayawasi in 1953 brought together scattered local groups where each family had spoken a slightly different "family dialect", resulting in a "melting pot" where these small dialectal differences are levelled in the speech of the younger generations.

The two papers by Brown (1990, 1991) are on noun phrases and phonology and they are based on the Maymaru dialect as spoken in the village of Kambuaya.

Closed syllables are not uncommon, but most types of consonant clusters are broken up with the insertion of a schwa vowel.

A schwa is also optionally inserted before the initial consonant in a small number of short words: [ti] ~ [əˈti] 'night'.

The alveolar stop /t/ is always voiceless, and in word-final position [t] is in free variation with the aspirated [tʰ] and the unreleased [t̚]: /poiit/ 'food' → ['pɔiːt] ~ [ˈpɔiːtʰ] [ˈpɔiːt̚].

The velar fricative /x/, which in the practical orthography is written as h, can be either voiceless [x] or voiced [ɣ]: /xren/ 'they sit' → [xəˈrɛn] ~ [ɣəˈrɛn].

At the phonemic level, consonant clusters do occur, either at the start or in the middle of the word, but they are invariably broken up by the insertion of the epenthetic vowel schwa [ə].

[30] In her study of the Mayhapeh dialect of Ayawasi, Dol notes that such pairs, though perceived by the native speakers as distinct, are acoustically indistinguishable, thus "they" and "fence" are both /ˈana/.

[33] At the end of a sentence, many older speakers blow a puff of air through their nose, which appears to be a common phenomenon in the languages of the Bird's Head Peninsula.

(Dol 2007, p. 103)The specific demonstratives mentioned earlier, refo, reto, and rono, can also be used without the re- prefix – as fo, to and no – without a significant change of meaning.

Mi-yo is used adverbially, while wo-yo and to-yo are normally used to question the locational object of verbs, with the distinguishing feature between these two being the degree of specificity:[47] kuchildmi-yopresentative-INTku mi-yochild presentative-INT'Where is the child?

Counting ends at the little toe, with the word for 'twenty' rae sait yhai literally meaning 'one man is gone'.

The masculine prefix y- contrasts with m-, which is used for female humans, inanimate nouns, and in the plural (regardless of gender).

[53] Nouns can be derived from verbs using the prefix po- (which can be a standalone word meaning "thing"): -iit 'eat' -> poiit 'food', hren 'sit' -> pohren 'chair', -kah 'burn' -> pokah 'garden', kom 'write' -> pokom 'pen'.

[55] In common with most languages of the peninsula,[56] Maybrat expresses possession differently depending on whether it is alienable or inalienable.

[58] An inalienably possessed construction can itself be embedded in another possessed construction: tfomachetero-YanPOSS-Yany-atia3M-fathertfo ro-Yan y-atiamachete POSS-Yan 3M-father'Yan's father's knife' (Dol 2007, p. 136)The order of constituents in a noun phrase generally follows the pattern: The so-called 'adjectival verbs' (see below) are verbs that serve the function of what in English would have been an adjective.

[63] Because verbs take obligatory person prefixes, there is no need for a subject to be explicitly given if it is readily identifiable from the context.

The object then has an intonation contour of its own and it is separated from the rest of the clause by a pause: ayawaterfóthis//t-ata1S-drinkfeNEGaya fó / t-ata fewater this / 1S-drink NEG'This water, I won't drink it.'

Yes/No questions are formed by the addition of a at the end of the clause:[65] PetrusPetrusy-ama3M-comeohalreadyaINTPetrus y-ama oh aPetrus 3M-come already INT'Has Petrus already come?'

(Dol 2007, p. 180)A notable feature of Maybrat is the extensive use that it makes of sequences of verbs without any overt marking of their relation.

Such verb sequences are typified in a number of different constructions, which might be superficially similar, but show upon closer inspection to be syntactically distinct.

[66] The various types of verb sequences described in the rest of this section can be contrasted to coordinated constructions in which each verb forms a separate clause: m-wian3U-scoopayawaterm-ko3S-burntafohfiresarukcookpoiitfoodm-wian aya m-ko tafoh saruk poiit3U-scoop water 3S-burn fire cook food'She scoops water, burns a fire and cooks food.'

(Dol 2007, p. 198) If a pause is inserted after y-awe 'he says', then the second clause will be interpreted as direct speech: 'He says: "You stab a pig.

(Dol 1996, p. 25)A similar construction involving the verbs -o 'take' and -e 'give' is available to express the meaning of 'giving something to someone'; such a construction is necessary because verbs in Maybrat can only take two arguments (a subject and an object) and so -e 'give' on its own cannot take arguments for both the object given and the person who received it: n-o2-taketapaktobaccon-e2-giveait3Mn-o tapak n-e ait2-take tobacco 2-give 3M'Take the tobacco and give it to him.

(Dol 2007, p. 218)Apart from the more or less tightly integrated verb sequences from the previous section, there also exist a number of ways of combining full clauses into complex sentences.

For example, a number of conjunctions can be used for joining clauses referring to events in a sequence: mati, na, mnan, or o: naand thenm-kuk3U-pullintaperopeoENUMm-kuk3U-pullaratreeoENUMna m-kuk intape o m-kuk ara o{and then} 3U-pull rope ENUM 3U-pull tree ENUM'Then she pulled a rope and she pulled at a tree.'

The marker for locative adverbial clauses can be one of wo, wo-yo or wo-re, without an apparent difference in meaning.