Qaqet is spoken by some 15,000 people in the Gazelle Peninsula in the East New Britain Province of Papua New Guinea.
Historically, the Qaqet used to lead highly mobile lives, subsisting of horticulture and hunting.
Kamanakam, by contrast, has seen an influx of settlers from adjacent ethnic groups, making inter-ethnic marriages common.
[2] Qaqet belongs to the small Baining family, hence being a so-called Papuan language.
The other members of the Baining family are Mali, Qairaq, Simbali, Ura, and possibly Makolkol.
However, despite attempts at establishing East Papuan as a genetic unit,[4] the grouping remains purely geographical.
Attempts at establishing relationships with neighbouring Papuan languages, such as Taulil or Butam, have so far not been successful.
Also, loanwords don't undergo the lenition process: akar 'cars' (from Tok Pisin kar).
The phoneme /ə/ is much shorter than the other vowels, especially in the vicinity of sonorants, where it is frequently elided, particularly in rapid speech.
The vowel /i/ generally does not have a long counterpart, but is realized as [eː]: [meː] ~ [miː] 'most'.
[2] Word classes in Qaqet include nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, and particles.
As in many Indo-European languages, adjectives share many properties with nouns, but they are still different enough to be considered their own word class.
Both nominal classification as well as the singular-dual-plural distinction are common in East Papuan Languages.
There is also a dedicated class of particles, which are never obligatory but convey important discourse information.
This fact, along with the use of prepositions, is rather unusual, since Papuan languages tend to be verb-final and postpositional.
Within the noun phrase, determiners (including possessor indexes, articles, indefinite pronouns and demonstratives) usually precede the head noun, while modifiers (adjectives, numerals, quantifiers, prepositional phrases, directionals) tend to follow it, although there are exceptions.
Nouns are almost always preceded by some determining element: an article, a possessor index, a demonstrative or an indefinite pronoun, or combinations of these.
The articles ama and ma can occur even with proper names, and they have a more specific meaning than the general noun marker a.
In practice, Qaqet speakers generally switch to Tok Pisin for numerals above 10.