Abawiri
language
The Abawiri language is a Lakes Plain language of Papua, Indonesia. It is spoken in the village of Fuau, located along the Dijai River, a tributary to the Mamberamo River. Clouse tentatively included Abawiri and neighboring Taburta (Taworta) in an East Lakes Plain subgroup of the Lakes Plain family; due to the minimal data that was available on the languages at that time. With more data, the connection looks more secure.
Like other Lakes Plain languages, Abawiri is notable for being heavily tonal and for lacking nasal consonants: there are no nasal or nasalized consonants or vowels, even allophonically.
Phonology
Abawiri has sixteen obstruent consonants (eight plain and eight labialized), as well as one sonorant consonant /ɾ/. The consonant and vowel charts below show the phonemes, followed by their representations in the community orthography (in brackets) where that representation is different from the phoneme symbol.
Abawiri has seven vowels, including three high front vowels: /i/, /y/, and /i̝/.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Abawiri” is language. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Abawiri and language, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “language” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5463819. Authority coordinates are -3.232, 138.970. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Abawiri” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.