Wamesa is an Austronesian language of Indonesian New Guinea, spoken across the neck of the Doberai Peninsula or Bird's Head.

[citation needed] While it was historically used as a lingua franca, it is currently considered an under-documented, endangered language.

Cluster Word(s) Gloss There are 14 consonants in Wamesa, three of which are marginal (shown in parentheses in the table below).

Coronal plosives sound relatively dental and may therefore be referred to as alveolar or alveo-dental until palatography can be executed to corroborate this.

[2][4] Lateral /l/ and affricate /d͡ʒ/ appear only in loanwords, while all other sounds occur in native Wamesa words.

Place and manner contrasts as described above are supported by the minimal and near-minimal pairs found in the following table.

Where possible, Wamesa words have been selected to show native (non-loan) phonemes in the environment /C[labial]a_a/.

Complex onsets and codas are not permitted in Wamesa, and consonant clusters across syllable boundaries are usually reduced, such that /C1C2/ surfaces as [C2].

Data from related languages of the Yapen and Biakic groups suggests that historically, /β/ /r/ and /k/ were *b *d and *g in Proto-Eastern Malayo-Polynesian.

In this case, these phones would have formed a natural class of voiced plosives to which phonological rules could uniformly apply.

However, the distribution is not even; in a random sampling test of 105 audio clips, 66 tokens had primary stress on the penultimate syllable.

Additionally, lapse is evaluated at the level of the Pword, meaning that stress in the following word never shifts to compensate.

This orthography diverges from IPA notation in the following cases: Wamesa includes the following parts of speech: noun, pronoun, verb, adverb, adjective, determiner, preposition, complementizer, conjunction, numeral, interrogative, imperative, locative, demonstrative, particle, interjection, and adposition.

Wamesa has NADQ (noun, adjective, demonstrative, quantifier) order, which is rare in the world's languages.

[5] When a sentence involves an applicative, the word order is as follows: (subject) instrument verb (object), with the items in parentheses as optional.

With regard to verbs, phrases must adhere to the following rules: There are only two manner adverbs in Wamesa: saira 'quickly' and nanaria 'slowly.'

However, when the subject is omitted and the object is moved to the beginning of the sentence and topicalized, a sort of passive construction results.

Wamesa's clitics include the topicalizer =ma, focus =ya, =ye, =e; and the proximal (=ne), default/medial (=pa), and distal (=wa) definite determiners.

Usually, infixation is used to improve syllable structure by making a word CVCV (consonant vowel alternation).

The essive ve- functions as a verbalizer, ordinal, relativizer, or indicator of inherent properties, depending on the context in which it appears.

[7] However, as a result of Indonesian influence, over time, Wamesa has lost and collapsed distinctions such as mother's vs. father's side, sex, and parallel vs. cross-cousins.

In general, Wamesa community members are very proud of their language and view it as a gift to be shared with everyone.

Thus, they promote research, encourage the publication and sharing of results, and request that the linguistic data be freely accessible.

Additionally, community members believe that the spreading of knowledge of the Wamesa language can bring them social prestige and spiritual benefits.