Wamesa is a member of the under-studied South Halmahera-West New Guinea subgroup of the Austronesian language family, with roughly 5000 speakers in West Papua, Indonesia. It has a number of typologically rare morphological and syntactic features, such as infixation and Noun-Adj-Det-Num word order. This course will investigate the major phonological, morphological, and syntactic structures of the language using both primary data and published sources. We will also look at the history of the language and its cultural/political context.

LING 045  plus either LING 001  or LING 050.