Teiwa language
language spoken in Indonesia
Teiwa (also referred to as Tewa) is a Papuan language spoken on the Pantar island in eastern Indonesia. The island is the second largest in the Alor archipelago, lying just west of the largest island Alor.
Teiwa is a morphosyntactically simple language with little inflection and is as such described as an isolating language, also known as an analytic language. It is pronounced by a complex pronoun system.
Nomenclature
Teiwa is also known as Bahasa Teiwa (the Teiwa language) in Indonesia. Teiwa itself is a nominal compound and can be translated as tei wa, meaning "tree leaf". The term "Teiwa" derives from the name of the main clan that speaks it. Generally, when Teiwa speakers refer to their own language, especially to differentiate it from the national language Indonesian, they call it "pitarau" (our language).
Classification
Teiwa is often classified as part of the Trans-New Guinea language family, but this is disputed. One reason is little lexical proof as well as the large geographical distance from the main island of New Guinea.
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This entry incorporates text from “Teiwa language” 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.